Things

–I wrote this post full of nerdy delight over at Pith all about May Town and who owns what.

–My brother is coming today! The Butcher may take him to a hog killing tomorrow. Once I learned that a hog killing didn’t involve 43 angry Cheatham county residents leaping on the hog and killing it with their bare hands in some kind of gruesome ritual left over from pagan times, I lost interest. Feel free to invite me to the hog eating, though.

–I once again have too many books out from the library. But none of them seem too big. I just also need to get this baby blanket done. So, something’s going to suffer, I’m sure. Ha ha ha.

–The Sue Allen thing goes okay. Poking along. I feel like I’m not exactly doing a good job of getting at just how the racism white people engaged in kept them from fully understanding what was going on in any given situation–like for instance my bad guy thinks that Sue must be the greatest medium ever, because she’s managed to call forth this Thing, and it’s not that she’s not very talented, but she wasn’t working alone and, in fact, she’d not be able to do anything like that again without the help of the woman she was working with. But I also don’t quite think that the bad guy is completely oblivious to this, since he has every intention of using Sue’s talents and passing them off as his own publicly (since she would not be able to). I’m trying to walk this line between “I don’t know what I’m doing” and “I know what I’m doing, but I think it’s the natural order” with this character. And then, also in this part, Sue’s sister has to go get the Macons and they aren’t home, so she brings their neighbor woman, as if you can just swap one person for another. And, yes, on the one hand, it’s totally racist of her. But later, she marries her dead husband’s brother, who is marrying his dead wife’s sister. So, it’s not just a view of black people she has. It just is so obviously egregious in this context.

It’s funny, really. Every step of the way, I’m like “Wow, I wonder all the ways I’m going through life doot-doo-doo missing the whole picture because of my preconceived notions?” Probably a lot. Forgive me, people of the future. I tried to be better than I was, but this is as good as I got. Well, hopefully, this is half as good as I got, but you know what I mean.