s not a story to pass on....This is not a story to pass on" (B, pp. 274–75). The shift in the third iteration, from "It" to "This," implicates Morrison's own narrative choices in her novel's anxious engagement with the politics of storytelling. "Pass on," of course, means many things: to transmit; to decline; to die; to walk by (perhaps, even, in the way that someone walks through a crowd while "passing"). The text plays on all of these senses, resisting both the illusion that we can simply walk away from the nation's racial history and the compulsion to repeat that history yet again: Morrison suggests that
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