Sometimes the things we believe we hear are really just our own shifting needs.
The racists in the novel form a cult that feeds the tragedies they have personally experienced. This quote really speaks to that group, which is led by a man by the name Elohim. Through Elohim’s backstory, we learn that his wife had an affair. He uses this as an excuse for his hate. Oftentimes, we see this personality trait with racists. Elohim is someone who refuses to place the blame on his own self.
When I was growing up in southern Ohio, and attending church for the first time, I noticed how easy it is for people to form ideas about a certain group. My family wasn’t part of the church, and I had signed up because I was friends with a girl who was, so I was the only one from my family to attend. It was a southern Baptist church, and I was told I would have to sit in the back with the other women and girls. Only the men were allowed to sit up front, and only the men were allowed to preach. Of the things they discussed, they preached that the color of skin mattered. That black men, women, and children were just different and didn’t have the same morals white folks had. They freely used racial slurs. I knew my own mother and Papaw would not even be welcome in that church. I did not return to that place of worship. Their beliefs were not reflective of my own.
What I wanted to show in the character of Elohim was how a person can take the bad things that happen in their lives, and not take accountability for those things personally. They place the blame on someone else. And more often than not, they place it on someone who is of a different race, because that then removes even more of the blame from the person really at fault. Elohim placed the fault for his wife’s infidelity on others. Her affair was not what made him a racist. It was his decision to blame an entire race of people for his problems. It was what I witnessed in that church so long ago. Elohim possessed that same hate, venom, and wickedness of using others as a scapegoat for the ills in his own life.
As the quote says, “sometimes the things we believe we hear are really just our own shifting needs.” Elohim believed these things, not because they were the truth, but because he needed to have something to shift responsibility off his own shoulders.
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