A black maid enters.
Cowed, inarticulate,
she makes obeisance to her mistress,
our erstwhile heroine.
She is given a menial task
in a perfunctory fashion,
and you thrill at this splash
of historical colour.
But her mistress's command
is irrelevant. She is fully engaged
with two vital functions
with which I have entrusted her.
The first: she has bathed our heroes
in moral ambiguity -
she is a shortcut to complexity,
rendering the important characters
doubly fascinating,
bathing them in pathos.
The second: she has pleased you
as you recognise your own outrage:
"Why must she be black?
Why can't they treat her better?
Don't we live in finer times, you and I?"
And a happy reader
is a reader who will proceed,
enlivened, vindicated, affirmed.
And thus freshly enslaved,
she returns
to the sculleries of my imagination
as we press nobly on.
Jan 18, 2015
Jan 18, 2015 at 5:39 AM UTC
A black maid enters.
Cowed, inarticulate,
she makes obeisance to her mistress,
our erstwhile heroine.
She is given a menial task
in a perfunctory fashion,
and you thrill at this splash
of historical colour.
But her mistress's command
is irrelevant. She is fully engaged
with two vital functions
with which I have entrusted her.
The first: she has bathed our heroes
in moral ambiguity -
she is a shortcut to complexity,
rendering the important characters
doubly fascinating,
bathing them in pathos.
The second: she has pleased you
as you recognise your own outrage:
"Why must she be black?
Why can't they treat her better?
Don't we live in finer times, you and I?"
And a happy reader
is a reader who will proceed,
enlivened, vindicated, affirmed.
And thus freshly enslaved,
she returns
to the sculleries of my imagination
as we press nobly on.
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