3. It was just that they knew, as she knew about them. That they were
transplanted, as they had always been, to a place where they fit like extra
toes on a foot. Where they were trusted by no one, exploited, when possible,
by anyone with political ambitions.
This comment appears in the third “Lynne” chapter and refers to
Lynne’s evolving perceptions of race, religion, ethnic identity, and what it
means to be a minority in the South. Lynne is musing on a Jewish-owned deli
in the town where she lived with Truman and worked for the civil rights
movement. Lynne feels she was given a cold reception each time she shopped
there because she was in an interracial marriage. However, she realizes that
the experience of many southern Jews, subjected to anti-Semitism, was
similar to the racism faced by blacks. Lynne is an outsider in both the
community and the movement because of her color and religious upbringing,
and she feels this separation more pointedly as the novel progresses. In
drawing these conclusions about the Jews she met in her town, Lynne
acknowledges a common history of dislocation, loss of identity, struggle,
and mourning, whether via slavery, segregation, racism, genocide, or
anti-Semitism. One history of abuse is no more tragic than another, yet the
ultimate irony is that Lynne has chosen to align herself with an oppressed
people who fail to acknowledge their essential commonality. She is a figure
forced to the fringes, a wanderer uprooted time and again, with no sense of
belonging.
