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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Rabbit's Foot Dangled:
In Chapter 5, Richard, living with his Granny and in the sixth grade, gets a job selling papers, ostensibly to make spare change. In reality, he took the job because he enjoys reading the literary supplement at the back of the newspapers, desperate as always for any kind of reading material. But thinking that the news doesn't apply to him as a young Black man, he never reads the news, only the silly stories in the back. As such he is appalled when an old Black man, to whom Richard tried to sell a paper, informs him that in fact the paper is distributed by the Ku Klux Klan. It contains virulently racist content and caricatures of Black men, such as this one that Richard describes with detailed imagery:
I looked at the picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped on the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white ashes an inch long. In the man's red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe stickpin, glaring conspicuously. [...] A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his watch a rabbit's foot dangled.
This caricature depicts a Black man as president of the United States (as explicitly described after this passage). It was meant to criticize how, in the view of the KKK, Black people were acquiring too much power in American politics. It uses a variety of imagery meant to parody and demean by depicting stereotypes of Black men. The man is unclean, greasy, and sweaty, a gross exaggeration of a continuing stereotype that Black people are unhygienic. He is large, strong, and physically imposing. The man in the cartoon is insubordinate and irreverent, with his feet up on the desk, depicting a stereotype of bad behavior that White people apply to Richard throughout the memoir. Similarly, the man wears bright, exuberant colors and gold jewelry, mocking characteristics of African fashion passed down to African American styles. He also carries a rabbit's foot, often stereotyped as a Black superstition in minstrel songs and other media in the U.S. in the 20th century. Richard is appalled by the political cartoon and tries to understand it. The image, while one of the novel's most frank depictions of White racism, also shows how Richard in his young adolescence is just starting to understand racism and all its effects. Richard says "it all seemed so strange and yet familiar"—the Black man looks recognizable to him, but is warped by racism that he does not yet fully comprehend.
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