And He Said,

“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked” (19)

The narrator thinks this just before he enters the fight. He says it to a White woman that is there just before the battle scene is unleashed. It is funny how he now that if he looks he will be beat, or blinded, but he looks anyway to the beautiful sight.

It puzzles my mind… I am writing to see if I reach some kind of answer (sorry if it is kinda hard to follow)

Well “blindness” could be saying that the fact that he looks he will lose sight of the atrocity that is about to be unleashed with him involved, so maybe the blindness could be a good thing. The women, shifts his attention away from the pain that he is receiving.

Another reasoning that has come across my head is the fact that the women distracts him, letting him get crushed. Because she is white she lets him get beat, just like the men that encaged them into the fight.

I’m not really sure, but it’s just something that came up.