“You’re so dumb, you thought Buddhism was about booty.”
It ain’t easy growing up white in a predominantly black culture. At least not for Mishna who could not understand why her sister seemed to fit in with such ease in comparison to her. One path toward acceptance is always assimilation and in that culture in that day a sure path toward assimilation seems to be developing a talent for “cappin” which is basically getting laughs from tossing out insulting one-liners like Don Rickles on steroids. She tries out her talents on her recently converted mother, but it turns out that parents are quite different from other kids. Failure at the top often means successful down the ladder, however.
About a month after I first saw The Exorcist, I was approached on the playground by a girl in my class named Lilith Gardner. She wasn’t the most popular girl in the third grade, but she was the leader of her group. She strode up with Violet, Kirsten, and the rest of her crew, who looked like normal eight-year-olds, but were about four to six years away from becoming the goth kids. They all thought elves were real, and they were a little too interested in the morbid side of science class— constantly buzzing about dissection.
A cinematic quality inhabits this piece of descriptive that is quite effective. One can easily visualize the scene in a way in which lighting, camera angle, editing and music combine to intensify what is really nothing more macabre than a group of little kids walking across a playground into a scene straight out of a horror movie. Which is the whole point, of course. The narrator has at this point just informed the reader about her traumatic introduction to R-rated scary movies. It is a subtle but remarkably effective demonstration of the way that movies manipulate our perception of reality.
The princess who lived in the glass house on the sea was not a princess at all.
Chapter Thirteen is subtitled “What’s the Matter with White People?” and though the title is intended as sardonic humor it is, in some ways, the darkest and most relentlessly disturbing chapter in the entire book. All at the same time, Mishna’s privileged white friends who seem to live absolutely magical lives from the perspective of those living in underprivileged minority circumstances are revealed as living much more complicated circumstances than such an envious perception usually allows. It is a very complicated chapter, psychologically, because the question that is raised in the title is related to material possessions. These are young white girls with Nintendos, and their own bedrooms and large-screen televisions and checks left by parents to pay for pizza and yet they are unhappy. By the end of the chapter, however, one of the girls has been hospitalized with pneumonia after persistently coughing for three weeks that went ignored by her parents while another has been institutionalized most likely because it was discovered she was “cutting.”
