Lets read books

Nanny describes black women as the "mules" of the world - burdened with a load passed from white men to black men, to them. She hopes to save her granddaughter, Janie, from that fate with a strategic marriage to a well-off black man.  Janie, however, is reluctant - because sitting under a pear tree one day, Janie saw beautiful visions of love and marriage. She' was awestruck, and longed to feel for herself what she saw in the blossom - "to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom!" But her romantic aspirations clash with Nanny's pragmatic socio-economic solution. Nanny and Janie's ideas of womanhood were incompatible. Nanny was focused on the disadvantages of being a black woman, and hoped to help her granddaughter as much as she could. Her viewpoint reflected the harsh realities of the world and of her life, which from the story she told Janie, seemed to be full of mistreatment and hardship. Janie, on the other hand, seems to have had a pretty good life so fa...

The Brotherhood is a strange cultish organization that recruits the narrator after seeing him deliver a scattered but passionate speech. Despite much confusion and many awkward and racist interactions, the narrator climbs the ranks, becomes a community leader, and delivers more of his trademark speeches. The Brotherhood is weird, and at times, I found their goals unclear. They want equality, I think, and pursue various shades of activism, including race and sex-based advocacy.  But the people at the top of the Brotherhood's hierarchy aren't actually affected by those issues, like the rich white people at the parties, and more specifically, Brother Jack. The organization's higher-ups seem to believe in a vague moral idealogy that they awkwardly attempt to translate onto modern issues. But they're not very good at it, and sometimes don't even seem invested in it. For example, plenty of the members are straight-up racist, or at least covertly racist, so it's clear ...