N-Word BOOK SUMMARY

Wide Sargasso Sea BY Rhys, Jean

The word appears 12 times.

This book takes place in the Caribbean islands where the races mixed rather freely and the phrase "white nigger" was used to refer to a class of people many looked down on. This book is the supposed prequel to the book Jane Eyre and explains the origin of the insane character in the attic.

NOTE: I did not have an electronic copy of this book to do my research here. I had to do a rapid re-read to find these instances, so I may have missed something.



.... This is where we first hear the term "white nigger" used to describe really poor white folk (white trash)

'I did do it,' I said when I could speak, but she shook her head and I hadn't done it good and besides pennies didn't buy much. Why did I look at her like that?

'Keep them then, you cheating nitter.' I said, for I was tired, and the water I had swallowed made me feel sick. 'I can get more if I want to.'

That's not what she hear, se said. She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish -- no money for fresh fish. That old house so leaky, you run with calabash to catch water when it rain. Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn't look at us, notbody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger.


'They are curious. It's natural enough. You have lived alone far too lone, Annette. You imagine enmity which doesn't exist. Always one extreme or the other. Didn't you fly at me like a little wild cat when I said nigger. Not nigger, nor even negro. Black people I must say'

'You don't like, or even recognize, the good in them.' she said, 'and you won't believe in the other side.'


Somebody yelled, 'But look the black Englishman! Look the white niggers!', and then they were all yelling. 'Look the white niggers! Look the damn white niggers!' A stone just missed Mannie's head, he cursed back at them and they cleared away from the rearing, frightened horses.


'Shut your mouth,' the man said. 'You mash centipede, mash it, leave one little peice and it grow again... What you think police believe, eh? You, or the white nigger?


'It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why I was ver born at all. Will you go now please. I must dress like the Christophine said.'


'He don't refuse to see me; he recieves me very cool and salm and first thing he tell me is I'm always pestering him for money. This because sometimes I ask help to buy a pair of shoes and such. Not to go barefoot like a nigger. Which I am not. He look at me like I was dirt and get very angry too. "I have my rights after all," I tell him and you know what he do? He laugh in my face.


'But you said you were always happy.'

'No, I said I was always happy in the morning, not always in the afternoon and never after sunset, for after sunset the house is haunted, some places are. There there was that day when she saw I was growing up like a white nigger and she was ashamed of me, it was after that day that everything changed.