Uncovering the Dark Secrets Beneath the Surface in Matthew Morris’s The Tilling
The delicate dance of not knowing how to show up because he can be read as white, can cause Morris to feel like he doesn’t have the right to take up space, especially in places like his graduate Af-Am lit class. Yet with the assurance of his professor and a colleague who tells him he is a Black writer and to “own it,” Morris acknowledges, “the gulf is the problem, not the people.” Systems force us into bubbles and cages we don’t wish to occupy. And the way to take down systems is in community: “Maybe, if I…let this skin just be skin and no more, no less, I could wash the myth and tragedy right off this body—off me, off you, off us.” Morris makes clear that the racial gulf is tragic for all of us, in its presence “everyone’s made less than whole.” This reminded of me of oft-evoked quote by activists and scholars, “none of us are free, until all of us are free,” versions of which are attributed to Fannie Lou Hamer, Maya Angelou, and Emma Lazarus.
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