The Second Face In Toni Morrison's Beloved

This second face seems to have manifested itself, albeit due to differing circumstances, in the black schoolchildren who taunted the main the character in Weldon’s book. They seemed to have had an internalized prejudiced against the narrator, even though he had not wronged them in any way. This second face also seems to have manifested itself in the African American population in another book, “Beloved.” In Beloved, Lady Jones, a light-skinned black woman who despises her blond hair, is convinced that all the other black residents around her despise her for being mixed raced. “Lady Jones was mixed, with blond wooly hair, and grey eyes, every strand of which she hated...She believed in her heart that except for her husband, the whole world
Although this story is fiction in genre, this particular part of the book speaks to the volume of the newly developed “second face” that some darker skinned blacks had shown to some lighter skinned blacks. In the novel, Lady Jones was described as “indiscriminately polite, and very well mannered,” and she was still treated terribly by the seemingly only people she could even come close to call her “allies.” While Lady Jones tried her best to assimilate into black culture, the main character in “The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man” seemingly tried to integrate himself into white culture. Weldon knew that in order to become a successful musician in the United States, he had to act as if he was a white man, and his first time witnessing a lynching only solidified that fact. As the ex-colored man began to write his own music in the South, he bore witness to a horrible and gruesome act of torture upon a young black
His choice to pass as white, to not be identified as “black,” or as of a race that is lower class directly stems from the preferences towards fairer-skinned slaves, and the cruelty of darker-skinned slaves of the slave masters during the slavery period. Africans who had no more value than a common animal, have been divided amongst each other via colorism for over 200 years. The lasting impact of the whites preferences during slavery has caused a plethora of biases on skin color, and other european features to separate the African American community indefinitely. While it may seem a trivial and hyperbolized facet of history, the impact that the prejudices held by slave masters towards Africans during slavery, may have permanently caused a rift to develop between the varying complexions and social statuses of the African American community