Book Review: Killer Tune by Dreda Say Mitchell

hello, i cant post properly again....

The author, Dreda, herself won the Dagger award for the best crime fiction in 2005 and ultimately when August 23rd came around, I had to buy this book off the shelf. In my personal meeting with Dreda, we have been discussing this particular question that I posed in the article. How deep is your colour?

I mean Melanin is just a layer of cells underneath the epidermal layer (I guess, I am not that good at Biology) just like clouds that hover across the sky. Sunlight makes it go dark so that the internal parts of our skin are not affected by the UV. How ironic that the ones with the least of it try to govern the ones with far much greater than theirs. Let aside religion.

I know nothing about the book .
Colour of the skin is nothing more than question of melanin pigment under you skin .White peaple have the least Black have the most and asians in betwen.
As they say only 'skin deep' to mean superficial so it is .

August 26, 2007
Lives
Endless Summer Job
By CAROLYN FERRELL

In 1982, after my sophomore year of college, an agency arranged a summer job for me: a couple needed someone to assist the cook at their estate in the Hamptons. My friends couldn’t believe I would sink so low — why not stay in the city, they asked, and attend rallies protesting apartheid? But the truth was that I was poor and really needed money for the school year.

That spring I met My Employer, a stately white woman, at her Upper East Side apartment. She served me tea and showed me pictures of her house and garden in Architectural Digest. She explained that hers was no ordinary home, just as this would be, for me, no ordinary opportunity. We agreed vaguely on my responsibilities, more concretely on my wages — $120 per week, with room and board, from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

As my mother drove me out there, she said she was afraid that to these socialites I’d be nothing but the poor brown-skinned girl from the wrong side of Long Island. I was to remind everyone there that I was a student at an exclusive college (Sarah Lawrence, where I was on full scholarship), that I, too, came from a beach community (did Amityville count?) and that above all, I was as good as they were (oh, my poor, deluded mother).

The day I arrived, the maid quit, and I was promoted to her position, consisting of 14-hour days but no pay increase. I was too afraid to protest; this was the right sacrifice, I convinced myself. By way of concurrence, Mother Nature unleashed a massive storm that first night, and I alone bailed water out of the basement with a single plastic bucket. In addition to my many household jobs (which included dusting, vacuuming, mopping, scrubbing, pruning, washing and ironing), I also worked in the kitchen. The cook, who had recently come from the kitchen of a world-renowned classical musician, saw to it that I never sat down.

Although My Employer was frequently gone from the estate, either traveling overseas or giving luncheons in Manhattan, I could feel the polite disdain of her gaze upon me at all times — while ironing her expensive blouses with lavender perfume, for instance. My Employer’s Husband, who began by treating me with fatherly affection, became hostile toward me, yelling at the slightest infraction — scooting a cord with my foot instead of my hand, failing to use quite enough brass polish on all the indoor railings. At one point the couple invited me for a dinner on their yacht and then made me clean up afterward.

After two months I was sick and tired, not only from physical exertion but also from the well-meaning racism of My Employer’s circle of friends (one woman insisted on matching me up with a much older African-American lab technician at a hospital where she’d had tests done) and from overhearing her whisper to dinner guests how little she paid me. Then one night in late July the cook yelled at me for an hour, accusing me of eating most of the baking chocolate in the pantry. (I hadn’t.) The next day, I called my mother and asked her to come and get me. When My Employer saw that I wouldn’t stay for Labor Day, she bade me farewell with what I believe was a regifted bottle of Halston body lotion. I never looked back.

Fast-forward 12 years: I was headed to Montauk for a stay at the Barn, Edward Albee’s artists’ colony. My mother was driving me again. We stopped at a bagel shop in Southampton, and who should walk in but . . . My (Former) Employer?

My mother told me to ignore her but then started over herself, preparing to recite a list of my achievements since 1982. So I rushed to say hello. My Former Employer was dressed in full gardening regalia, spotted with mud. She couldn’t place me, but she was nevertheless cheerful and loud. She ordered the woman with her — “my helper,” she said sweetly — to make sure the plants in the car were out of direct sunlight.

In vain I gave her clues about that summer. (How many of her cooks had worked for world-renowned musicians?) My mother stood behind me, echoing certain of my words, jumping in every now and then with one of my accomplishments. Finally, My Former Employer claimed to remember me. She embraced me and said, “You should really come by the house.”

I looked back at my mother, oddly triumphant. Maybe that summer wasn’t so bad after all. “Please do come by, Carolyn,” she continued. “I could use some extra help in the kitchen.”

I wanted to say something pithy and victorious. Instead I looked into her cheery eyes and stood there helpless and humiliated: the old defeat still lay heavy in my bones. Perhaps, to some, I was always going to be the poor brown-skinned girl from the wrong side of the Island. But I also knew that she was always going to be who, or what, she was. Meanwhile, there was only one thing to do: Pray that the plants had shriveled to death.

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of a story collection, “Don’t Erase Me.” Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies

Thanks for opening this discussion. Academic fields in the US that study "Whiteness" as well as "Ethnic Studies" have in the last ten years argued that race is on one level an artificial construct and on another level signified by how that construct is created. For example, about 15 years ago, Charles Murray posited his now widely discredited theory that specific of color (or brown and black) races were intellectually inferior to European races. Any student of ancient African, Asian and Latino civillizations could easily puncture Murray's notions and criterion. The liberals arts, social and some hard sciences have begun to study "Whiteness" to interrogate what this identity means in the West and globally. Ron Brown remarked at a graduation ceremony at a New England college that science has recently proven that human beings are 99.9 identical. The slightest shadow of "difference" has been disproportionately interpreted by human beings.

On the second level however, race cannot be dismissed when we interrogate the varying economic, political and social realities face by people of "different" races. Institutions, policies, oppportunities, class mobility, etc. is arguably very tied to race construction. This of course is not to overgeneralize-a working class white woman be struggle with most of the same basic daily issues that a working class black woman might-these two individuals might have a great deal more in common than the working class black woman and a middle class black woman, etc. And yet, both working class women may experience varying opportunities, perceptions, etc. because of how they are viewed racially by other people and institutions.

Very interesting question on whether religion can be interpreted as "race".