Lucia Lopez
Is the protagonist, Emma Lou- like Irene- unreliable? (Choose 1 or 2 passages as evidence, if so)
In, “The Blacker the Berry,” Emma Lou describes her struggle as a very dark skinned African American woman living in a society where the lighter one’s skin is, the more value they have. However, as the novel progresses, one might begin to wonder whether Emma Lou is a reliable narrator, similar to Irene in the novel “Passing”. Her vision of what it means to have worth and her view of who the “right kind of people” are warped and cause her to have many moments in which she has hypocritical thoughts. In the beginning of the novel, Thurman describes the sorrow that came with being very dark at the time and the multitude of “solutions” Emma and her family would try.
“She wasn’t the only person who regretted her darkness either. It was an acquired family characteristic, this moaning and grieving over the color of her skin. Everything possible had been done to alleviate the unhappy condition, every suggested agent had been employed, but her skin, despite bleachings, scourg-ings, and powderings, had remained black—fast black—as nature had planned and effected.”
From this quote we can see that Emma Lou goes through a lot of misery due to the color of her skin and it is implied that she wishes it wasn’t that way. However, as the novel progresses, we see another more critical side of Emma Lou. When she starts college at the University of South Carolina, she meets another very dark girl named Hazel. Although they go through similar struggles, Hazel is a much more jovial character, causing Emma Lou to reject her. Upon meeting her, Emma Lou reacted as such: “She resented being approached by any one so flagrantly inferior, any one so noticeably a typical southern darky, who had no business obtruding into the more refined scheme of things.”
Emma Lou, despite knowing the grievances that came with having very dark skin in a world where whiteness was worth, rejected Hazel because of her stereotypical behavior as a “southern darky.” Emma Lou had always purposely tried to prove that despite her skin color, she wasn’t really black in the sense that she was uneducated, jovial, etc. This is precisely what makes Emma Lou unreliable- she tries too much to prove herself to be different rather than criticize the stereotypes themselves.
