It took me a little while to get into the rhythm of this book. But Whitehead has a genius for capturing broad swathes of the underbelly of American racial history and dynamics in a few short strokes of a vignette or a character portrait. His short, pointed chapter on the white character, Ethel, for example, is absolutely, damningly ingenious: "Ever since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light."