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Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?

This quotation occurs close to the end of Chapter Nine, immediately before the final fight between Son and Jadine. The narrator’s words summarize the major tensions between Jadine and Son. Here we see definitively that Jadine and Son have separate and irreconcilable views of the world, specifically of what it means, or should mean, to be black. For Jadine, the future of the black race is more important than its past, and the future is best pursued through exposure to forms of high culture, many of which are associated with Europe and whiteness. Her high regard for European culture helps to explain why she so badly wants Son to go to college: There he would be educated in European subjects and taught European culture. She thinks that the black race needs to be “saved” from ignorance and from an insistence on clinging to the past and to old ways of doing things.

For Son, conversely, the history of the black race, and of the wrongs that its members suffered, is vitally important, and this history neither can nor should ever be erased. For him, “culture” has to do with inheritance and family, rather than with education, and the world will look right to the extent that black people honor the past and try to connect to it. His dismissal of European cultural ideals explains why he refuses to let Jadine take money from Valerian, since he believes that the black race needs to be “saved” from a dependence on the white race and he sees Valerian as a symbol of whiteness and whites’ subordination blacks. The use of words like Mama-spoiled and mature to describe Son reinforces his associations with values of family and fertility, and they stand in sharp contrast to the implication that Jadine gives birth to, or “bears,” culture rather than children.

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