Felicia McDonnell’s Reviews > Hell of a Book > Status Update

He argues that the past should stay in the past and should not be brought into the situation. Yet, in the same conversation, he hypocritically desires for his own past to count in his favor. He says, “All they want to do is whittle me down to just that one minute. Like I didn’t have a whole life before that. Like I wasn’t somebody’s baby once. Don’t the past matter?” (265). The narrator begins to imagine enslaved people appearing in the field before them, injured and hurting. It is unfair for the officer to use his personal past as a family man to legitimize his humanity while denying the same for Black people. In this scene, the novel critiques how perpetrators of violence seek to cherry pick whose past is worthy and who’s isn’t.

The scene is also a significant turning point for the narrator. Up until this point, he thinks that it is better to erase painful memories and forget the past. His practice of willful ignorance has allowed him to even forget his own Blackness, which we learn is in itself a painful thing to be aware of—as Jack the media trainer states in Chapter 8, “Being Black’s a curse” (107). However, this confrontation shows the narrator that all of the past matters. He explicitly references the Three-Fifths Compromise, a 1787 agreement by the United States that enslaved people would count as three fifths of a person when counting the population for the census. The narrator exposes how the ex-officer unequally estimated the value of his past versus Soot’s. The narrator embraces the past fully in Chapter 26 when he finally remembers the details of his mother’s death.