Re: GR translation: working off whiteman’s penance on his sin

[kelber at mindspring.com]

A white guy tosses Malcolm a dollar (hey, big spender!)instead of the customary two bits, and the vague pangs of guilt he's felt about segregation, discrimination, and that slavery thing back then magically melt away. Now Malcolm feels obligated to work extra hard on the guy's shoes, "working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit ‘n’ Shinola."

Laura



-----Original Message-----

From: Monte Davis 

Sent: Jan 10, 2016 10:38 AM

To: "kelber at mindspring.com" 

Cc: Mike Jing , Pynchon Mailing List 

Subject: Re: GR translation: working off whiteman’s penance on his sin



Syntactically, I don't see any reasonable reading except that it's "shoeshine boy Malcolm" -- not his white customers -- who is working off the penance that they impose.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:02 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
Could the whiteman's penance be the few coins they sling Malcolm as a tip for shining their shoes? Nothing like slipping "the less fortunate" some pocket change to feel absolved of all one's privilege.
LK

Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:

V688.6-19, P701.27-40   Well there’s one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do come together, and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital’s great holocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what that white toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet slappin’ on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit ‘n’ Shinola.

First, I just want to make sure I got the literal meaning right. So the whitemen have done penance for his (Malcolm’s) sin, and now Malcolm is paying them back for it.  Is that correct?

Second, it's obviously sarcasm, but what could the whiteman’s penance possibly be?
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