How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Mathu was one of them blue-black Singaleese n*****s. Always bragged about not having no white man's blood in his veins. He looked down on the rest of us who had some, and the more you had, the more he looked down on you. I was brown-skinned—my grandpa white, my grandma Indian and Black, both my parents Black; so he didn't look down on me quite as much as he did some others. (6.2)
Just what's a quote that has so much to do with race doing in this section? Well, take a look at how race works here. It basically sets up a hierarchy that is kind of like a class system. Why do you think that is?
Quote #5
We had got the worst land from the start, and no matter how hard we worked it, the people with the best land was go'n be in front. All you old people know this already. After the plantation was dying out, the Marshalls dosed out the land for sharecropping, giving the best land to the Cajuns, and giving us the worst—the bottomland near the swamps. Here, our own Black people had been working this land a hundred years for the Marshall Plantation, but when it comes to sharecropping, now they give the best land to the Cajuns, who had never set foot on this land before. (9.106)
Since we already know that folks like the Marshalls weren't big fans of the Cajuns, you can bet their decision to give them the best land so they could get ahead didn't have a thing to do with anything but plain and simple racism. Once again, we see race and class working together in a really nasty way here.
Quote #6
Gil turned back to Candy. "You never did like Beau," he said. "You never liked any of us. Looking at us as if we were a breed below you. But we're not, Candy. We're all made of the same bone, the same blood, the same skin. Your folks had a break, mine didn't, that's all.
She looked past him, like he wasn't even there. She looked tired, but other than that she showed no expression.
"My God," Gil said. "My god, my God. Candy, if you only knew how sad, how pathetic you look."
She pretended not to even hear him. And maybe she didn't. (10.107-9)
Whoa. Gil says some pretty heavy stuff here. He's talking about class discrimination, but couldn't what he's saying apply to racial discrimination, too?