Eatonville: a microcosm

Dramatic yet unsurprising changes take place in Eatonville as it grows. For good in-text examples, take page 47. Two details of recent changes are described, the new Starks house and the spitting pots, but along the way a lot more is revealed. Joe's new house, for one, is not just extremely fancy - it's the only large house in the village and it bears an uncanny resemblance to the house of rich white slave-owning landowners from pre-Civil War times. We're provided the spitting pot situation as an example of the frivolous luxuries Joe has procured with the wealth he's effectively diverted from the people of the town to himself with all his positions of power - Mayor, postmaster, landlord, and storekeeper. Essentially, it's clear as day that Joe is exploiting the people of Eatonville and is very corrupt.

What gets the people in the town in particular, though, is that Joe Starks is black. As explained on p. 48, "It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder." It's strange to the townspeople that someone who should have shared their struggles of being black in a society hostile to black people wouldn't support and lift up the members of the community he wanted to govern. It's a perplexing and difficult passage to read, and it cements Joe's power-hungry and somewhat tyrannical nature in place.

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The way Joe Starks controls Eatonville reminds me of authoritarian or corrupt regimes governing nations in post-colonial regions. The thread of similarity goes like this: 

a) in the past of Eatonville and formerly colonized regions is a harsh and cruel history of oppression by an outgroup;

b) after the departure of that outgroup the formerly colonized or enslaved peoples are left with poor economic circumstances and the traumatic collective memory of their suffering;

c) the group sets up a system of governance that turns out to be manipulable by an individual or small elite class out for their individual interests;

d) and the majority of the group is thus left in similarly poor economic circumstances, raising uncomfortable comparisons to the colonialism/slavery that had once caused the same group suffering.

Part of this phenomenon isn't too surprising - most young governments are unstable, and it only takes a few relatively powerful, bad-minded people (or for Eatonville, one person) for the power balance to then spiral out of control. But what strikes me as more interesting about this comparison is how in both cases, those from the inside and the outside could see the situation quite differently. Citizens of developed, wealthy countries might dismiss nations in formerly colonized regions as irresponsible or poorly managing themselves, when the people of those nations may in fact have had no chance to set up governance and infrastructure that would uplift themselves. And when we get an inside view into how Joe Starks profits at the expense of the people during Eatonville's self-governance journey, we see how the townspeople had a similarly negligible chance.

P.S. A couple of people commented when the stuff below the dashed line was not uploaded to the blog, so their comments may not engage with the whole of the post.