Second Blog

There are a lot of themes in this book, but two of the biggest ones were racism and abuse. We see sexual, physical and verbal abuse to various characters. First, Heidi is this little five year old black girl who is constantly verbally and physically abused by her step-dad. The story goes that Alicia, Heidi's mother, was in love with this boy by the name of Willis Stack and he got Alicia pregnant and they decided to get married. But then Willis was paralyzed from the neck down and his friends and brothers drove him away one night because he couldn't bare the thought of raising a child in his condition. So Alicia dropped out of school, had her baby and met Rich. Rich told Alicia that "no one would have her *n-word* baby but him" so they got married, changed the baby's name to Heidi because it was the "whitest name" Rich could think of and nine months later had twins. And then came all of the horrible abuse to Heidi. She's this little girl with dark skin who isn't allowed to: touch any food that any other family members might eat or play with her younger brothers' toys. And then Rich comes up with a horrible system to punish Heidi. He gives her "spanks" with his belt for all sorts of pointless things. She gets ten for forgetting to clean her room, five for dropping her dessert on the floor, and ten for not washing out the dog's bowl. But, to make matters even worse and more sad, Rich says Alicia has to deliver the blows to his specifications. This little five-year-old girl is helpless and is born into a world where she is treated like dirt because of her skin color. When we first see Heidi, she tries to "rub the color off of her skin" by scrubbing with water, scrubbing with soap, scrubbing with two soaps, etc. All of this was put into her head by Rich. Towards the end of the book, Alicia, Heidi and the twins are staying with T.J. and his family because they have a restraining order against Rich. But Alicia stupidly decides to let Rich watch the kids for the afternoon. A little later in the story, Heidi walks into the living room and one of her arms is dripping with soap, the other with blood. Heidi claims it worked and that "Daddy Rich" told her to do it and we see that Heidi is holding a Brillo pad that she used to "take the brown off." It really surprises me that it is so easy for Rich to physically, emotionally and mentally abuse this little girl. She's five, for goodness sakes! I can't wrap my mind around it because nobody deserves that. It's really sad that she has to go through that all and all she wants to do is be the best she can be for her "daddy" because she doesn't realize that he doesn't care about her. The other type of abuse is sexual, and we only briefly hear about this. On one of the bus rides, Andy Mott tells the team he was raped by his mother's boyfriend and then just leaves it at that. I think that explains why Andy keeps to himself so much and why I took awhile for him to be able to trust the guys on the team with that information.

Racism is a big theme in Whale Talk. We see it mostly coming from people like Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour who direct it at Heidi and T.J. Of course, Mike Barbour is influenced by Rich Marshall who's like his mentor, and they spend a lot of their free time together so it doesn't surprise me that Mike picks on T.J. for being black. I don't even think it's just that though. It says in the book that T.J. has been asked to play football, basketball, etc. for his school but he doesn't want to because he doesn't like answering to other people. So, I think that Mike takes that anger out on T.J. by putting him down for his race. Rich does the same to Heidi, by making her feel bad because she's black which is just really sad.