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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Seeped Into Us:
In Chapter 3, time jumps forward to when Richard is about 10 years old. He has become more aware of racism as a force that affects his life. He describes the new perspective that he and his friends hold using a metaphor:
All the frightful descriptions we had heard about each other, all the violent expressions of hate and hostility that had seeped into us from our surroundings, came now to the surface to guide our actions.
Richard describes himself and his friends as soil into which "hate and hostility," like some noxious fluid, can "seep." Now that the boys have grown, all that hate "came now to the surface to guide our actions," described again using this metaphor of soil in fluid. Richard uses the metaphor to describe how he and his friends saw racism all around them, and it affected them subconsciously. Only once they got older did they start reacting to those racist structures. This metaphor also plays off the fact that enslaved people were often thought to be indelibly connected to their land; in 1919, metaphorically characterizing Black men as a sort of "land" certainly contains undertones of the history of enslavement. Perhaps most strikingly, Richard indicates that, as usual, he was precociously observant at a young age, enough to understand his and his friends' worldview and to describe it in specific metaphor.
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