RECITATIF

RECITATIF. Okay, first off, what the heck does the title say?  Irregardless, what an amazing story!  For the first time this year I couldn't put down a book no matter how hard I tried.  I like that feeling.  We get so busy we seldom have time to enjoy literature, but this story gave me no choice. Okay.  So we got a white girl and a black girl in an orphanage.  They are different.  They look different, smell different, eat different foods, and their mothers are different.  But they become friends.  They play, they share. They do each other's hair.  It was a lot easier because they didn't know.  They didn't know why their parents didn't want to be introduced.  They just didn't know. 

As we get older, we start to realize things about differences.  Sometimes there are walls there that we didn't even put up.  They have just been there for so long no one can take them down.  No two people anyways.  These walls are so big it would take all of us.  Well, most of us.  But the girls find this out as they get older.  When they meet in the coffee shop, Roberta acts like she is better than Twyla.  But then like 10 years later, they both have money so that means they are the best of friends?  I think it has to do with the times.  When they were little, nothing mattered.  Because nothing like that does when you're a kid.  As teenagers, I'm guessing in the 50's, they weren't suppose to be friends.  But in the 60's, was there more peace among different races?  We will have to discuss this in class because I am bad with history.  I do know that segregation (or the end of it) had them both fighting.  I think that's why they had to change schools.  Because black kids couldn't go to the same schools (or could go now?).  I forget sometimes that that wasn't that long ago that people acted like that.  I would like to think it was hundreds of years ago.  But Roberta is fighting for the right to say which school her kids can go to.  Twyla is fighting just to be mean to Roberta.  She wants to fight for her side, but doesn't even understand what she's fighting for.  She made it personal.  

At the end, they are trying to figure out their memory about Maggie.  Did it matter if she was black or white?  It sure did while they were fighting.  But it doesn't.  Because NO ONE should get kicked like that.  I'm sure today people would see it as a hate crime. I don't like that.  It's like, two people of different color have nothing to fight about except race.  You get in a fight with someone from a different race, people start talking.  When it could just be a regular fight.  But anyway, Maggie got beat up.  And the girls both seen her as a vision of their mothers and wanted to hurt her too.  They never remembered what happened, and as close as they might have gotten after the story was over, there would have always been those walls.  The walls that keep us from understanding how other races FEEL.  Like, I know racism creates a bad feeling.  You get angry, upset, embarrassed maybe.. but I've never had anyone be like that towards me, and so the walls go up.  I honestly don't know HOW that feels.  It will take years for us to bring down these walls. Decades.  Who knows if they will ever come down.  But all we can do is try.

Until next time,

Keri Jo