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black man and white women
Black man and white women in dark green row boat

The story "Black Man and White Women in Dark Green Rowboat”, written by Russell Banks, is about an interracial relationship on the brink of disaster. The story opens up on an extremely hot day in August at a trailer park that is right next to a lake with a variety of people who live there. I was not immediately aware that the black man and the white woman were the focus of the story, but those characters gradually emerged and that’s when things started to get interesting. It becomes very obvious that white women want to control everything in the relationship and doesn’t view the black man as an equal partner. Before they meet at the beach, the white women walks up in her bikini holding her towel, fashion magazine, and tanning lotion with her blonde hair swinging side to side. I automatically start to view her as an egotistical person. When the white women encounters the black man at the beach, she helps him push the boat to the water, but instead of helping him push the boat all the way from shore, she hops in it before her feet had even got wet. He was left to not only push the boat himself, rolling his pant legs up, but also pushing her in it as well. While he is rowing the boat he realizes he didn’t bring a hat and he is sweating. He wraps his shirt around his head and she explains to him that he looks like a sheik and a galley slave. To me this shows how she thinks of him as her own romanticized slave that she can control. She even reassures him that she was not kidding by saying “no really. Honestly”. (68). The man continues to row and she says she’s starting to put on weight and then she tells the man that she told her mother about them and their situation, but she never looked at him when she was talking to him. Her eyes were closed and directed toward the sun. She isn’t treating him like she cares; she is just caring on with her sun bathing. Then she tells him that she is going to

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