![]() ![]() ![]() After meeting Gabriel’s grateful parents, Meriwether accepts the offer-to the spitting contempt of Lucas Shaw, the other mechanic, who’s white and rumored to have friends in the Ku Klux Klan. ![]() Betty Babcock, the white woman who nearly kills Gabriel, addresses Meriwether as “boy.” But Gabriel says his parents “taught me differently”-and seeks out Meriwether to offer him a job at his father’s garage out of gratitude. The word also sets the tone of the town’s postwar racial references and bigotry, along with The Negro Motorist Green Book, segregated bathrooms, and the way Mrs. The author’s use of the word “colored” isn’t gratuitous-the book’s setting is Birdsong, South Carolina, in 1946. The book opens with the event, when Meriwether, who’s begging for a job on Main Street, sees Gabriel pedal through a red light and pushes him out of the way of an oncoming car. If Opie Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show wrote a book about Mayberry’s racism, the voice would be that of Gabriel Haberlin, the 12-year-old white boy who is saved from near tragedy by Meriwether Hunter, a “colored” man. ![]()
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