Coping with an unspoken, suppressed avoidance of male emotions and ridiculed for his unconscious display of feminine traits, he becomes a target for predation by older males. Blow himself would struggle with revenge and the “just in case gun.” It was his molestation by an older cousin and the attempted molestation of him by an uncle that broke his spirit and his heart, leaving him a damaged, guilt-ridden child forced to grow up before his mind is capable to come to terms with it all. In rural Southern communities gunplay is a big sport with sometimes regrettable consequences. It was a casual quickness, not flat-out running, that pushed him across the field, something in him that knew that something in her wouldn’t do it. His father flees through the back door, half-dressed, clutching his pants with his belt dangling under a hail of his mother’s gunfire:īut there was something in his gait that did not suggest a man whose life was in danger, but rather a rascally boy who’d been caught being devilish. There were other incidents involving the “just in case gun.” According to the Blow, like his mother’s brass knuckles stashed in a glove compartment of the car, her gun was ever present, often “tucked in her purse nestled amongst the peppermints and pencils.” He shares an incident he witnessed from his bedroom window. She realizes the effect her actions have on her son and abandons the chase. Young Blow is so caught up in the revenge that his mother pauses for a moment of reflection. Infuriated, Blow’s mother instructs him to get her gun, and he does, and then mother and son hop into the family car to chase down the mistress. The consequences of Blow’s father’s philandering are relayed in stark detail, after a Thanksgiving dinner, when the father’s mistress makes an anonymous call to Blow’s home, hangs up, and then cruises by the Blow household in her car. Blow’s mother never drank or danced in her life but readily admitted to favoring the man “who had a pinch of the devil in him.” And he had the smile of a scoundrel-the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.īlow’s father is not an ideal, but the author understands and accepts him.
#REVIEWS OF SHUT IN SKIN#
He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet looking curls, black as oil. My father was short for a man, with a child’s plaything for a name-Spinner. She used only a stroke of lipstick, dark like a fig, and a little powder to cover the acne that still popped up under the balls of the cheeks that sat high on her face. She was plain-faced with honest eyes-no black grease by the lash line, no blue power on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin. My mother was a stout woman with a man’s name-Billie.
#REVIEWS OF SHUT IN SERIAL#
My father was a construction worker by trade, a pool shark by habit, and a serial philanderer by compulsion. He was the last of five boys and his mother, throughout his childhood, was the steadfast object of his affection while he viewed his father with suspicion:īy the time I came along, my mother was a dutiful wife growing dead-ass tired of working on a dead-end marriage and a dead-end job. Blow’s begins by introducing his extended family and community, relating tales of a philandering father and an armed mother who shared a capacity for love. The art of the memoir is to engage the reader in a stroll back in time. Blow spent his formative years in Gibsland, Louisiana, and tracks his journey to New York Times columnist from his youthful social struggles.
On a mural-sized canvas with deft brush strokes, Blow’s memoir paints a picture of complicated sexuality, brilliantly revealing colorful glimpses of black male virility in its various forms: straight, gay, and bisexual.
Fire Shut Up In My Bones is Charles Blow’s memoir about growing up a black male in the American South it depicts a spectrum of rural-life experiences in which coming-of-age involves leaving behind a secret past.
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