The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad-Book
From a Google Image Search - Paper Literary
Imagine if Martin Luther King never existed, or if the Civil Rights movement came too late to prevent a second Civil War. It's not hard to imagine if you just find old videos of Strom Thurmond on YouTube. In Rae Giana Rashad's book The Blueprint, we meet Solenne and Bastien, who sound like characters in a romance book. But this is no ordinary romance. Bastien is a Councilman headed to become President of the new America known as The Order. Solenne is a young Black woman, fifteen years old, headed to become a 'concubine'. Since a Black woman wrote this book, I will use her words to offer insight into her story. In the Author's Note, Rashad refers to female slaves in real America as "forgotten handmaids," so here is another handmaid’s tale, every bit as chilling as the original, except it explains how Atwood's tale of the handmaids is even more fraught for Black women.
Page 13
"Then he was gone, ballroom lights tunneling the dark, the hush of champagne on my tongue. THE PATH WE WALKED TO BECOME Black women wasn't straight; it was a loop. Starting from nowhere, it brought you back to nowhere. A man at one end, a man at the other, humming the same song. 'It's just a body. Nothing special.' If that were true, why did they want it? Why couldn't it belong to me."
Page 25
"I would never know how it felt to walk boldly because this world wasn't mine...There was no protection for me, a Black girl, no tender touch, no consideration for a delicate exterior. No space to scream."
Page 31
"They bragged about their accomplishments in private, boasted about the difference between them and their brother. But skin quality and quantity of sleeve emblems aside, from neck to ankle, the men were identical."
"Councilmen were the Order's most decorated men. The talented, skilled, brilliant. Engineers, physicians, cryptographers, developers. But fundamentally they were soldiers. Killers.
Page 104
"And still, this country is better than it was when it was the United States. An economy outpaced by the rest of the world, the racial unrest, the increasing crime and abortion rates, no, we couldn't go on with so much death."
Page 133
"From his frame above the fireplace, Thomas Jefferson watched me. What had Sally seen in him? He brought her to France at fourteen, where she worked, lived, and earned money as a freed woman. When he decided to return to America two years later, she didn't stay like the French urged her. She returned to America, where she remained enslaved, and the babies followed like footsteps.”
Page 214
"Seven years of militias, fragmented state governments, and millions of deaths. We're fortunate the Founders of the Order had a vision for the country. Their sacrifice ended the war."
(Solenne's great-grandfather wounded, and in the hospital, talks about that war and the aftermath.)
"In that unseasonably warm January of 1960 in Metairie, Louisiana, he witnessed a military dictatorship seamlessly replace the civil government. Where did these men come from, he asked his nurse. She couldn't have been more than thirteen. Nobody knows, she said. They came from nowhere. But that wasn't true, they were military officers police officers, senators, governors, a World War II veteran like Bastien's grandfather. While my great-grandfather slept, Black and white men stood in offices letting the ink dry on treaties. In those documents women had fewer rights than they did before the war, and Black women caught the worst of it."
[Black men were given the state of Louisiana as a free state, but they had to relocate by 1962 or accept the new Constitution]
Page 249
"They knew that once you get that taste of freedom nothing will keep you in line. Lucas [Bastien's rival] knew it. I'd already seen the sunset over Sanibel Island in pink and orange. Seeing something like that makes you feel like somebody created something just for you. It was like unwrapping a present every time I blinked. I wanted to keep it forever. Not a piece of it. All of it.
Page 277
"Pleading. This was the only system designed for us. We were girls, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. We were our ancestors, forbidden to read or write while lying under the arms of men who drafted legislation."
Page 293 Author's Note
"It was difficult to read these stories of forgotten handmaids and their forced reproduction. Though the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, slaveholders found a way to increase the slave population by exploiting the domestic slave trade. They forced Black women into men's beds, punishing those who didn't have multiple children by their teens and rewarding those who did."
Who wins, Bastien or Solenne? Find out how they both win, and both lose. Clearly this book connects to the America that we live in now, in 2024. There is talk from time to time about the possibility of a second Civil War when discourse heats up or when rights are lost. Women's rights recently experienced a setback in the Supreme Court, a setback that will figure in the upcoming election and could escalate depending on the results of the next election. The fears of Black women, that they might become "concubines" if the right-wing wins must be quite real and harrowing. Throughout Rashad's story of Solenne, she is writing a book about a slave from 100 years ago, Henriette (Kumba), drawing parallels between the two women's lives, reminding us that Black women are not property or sexual objects and warning us about the dangers of allowing racism to rule ever again.
I feel a kinship to Rae Giana Rashad because I wrote a similar book about losing freedoms if America becomes an authoritarian state. She did a better job than I did since she had to create all her characters from scratch, and I used real and fictional people. My attempt in this genre is entitled 2028: The Rebellion. Rashad is offering fair warning everyone. Read the book.
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