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Rating: It takes little, one generation or two, and an abyss is created.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" described an African American society enslaved and abused, yet strong with hope and religious faith. Now (1938), the children of that Uncle Tom are rebelling. They march for their rights, even kill, albeit involuntarily or under coercion, white people.
The United States is changing and writers like Richard Wright and his contemporaries (Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, to name a few) are telling the world about it. This book opens a window into the black society of those years, halfway between the old idea of submission to whites and the battles of the '50s and '60s for social and political equality. Five stories, five black accounts, five snapshots of death, survival and resistance.
Wright shows us a world that we can only hazily imagine, vivid colors alternating with a sense of black, of gray that pervades these pages, bruises on the skin of a people still considered slaves and inferior. The author tackles heavy themes, sometimes uses a low, popular language, but succeeds in encapsulating the concept of verisimilitude in a bubble of elegance and mastery.
How can we expect to tear down the walls of racism if we do not know others, their history, their culture and literature, their art, if we do not know the other side of the river?
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