Free Blood by Lawrence Hill

you are no longer quite human but rather have been likened to a reptile with an entirely different — and distinctly unhuman — blood system. If you have blood on your hands, well, you’ve done something terribly wrong and people have either figured it out or they surely will soon. Blood on the hands pretty well guarantees that people will want to see you brought to justice. We all know that getting money back from the tax collector who was, perhaps, too exuberant in the exercise of his duties is like extracting blood from a stone. If you have a blood brother, you have opened up your flesh to that of a friend who has done the same, and in exchanging bloody skin surfaces you have created a bond that runs as deep as — or perhaps even deeper than — family. If you have bad blood in your family, everybody knows that it would be foolish indeed to marry you, because you obviously fall short of having a respectable moral code. If you are out for blood, you have violent intentions and you should know better. Let’s hope that someone brings you to your senses, and that blood stops pounding in your temples. If you have royal or so-called blue blood, millions of people will look up to you and possibly agree to keep paying taxes to keep you in Buckingham Palace, and in our collective imagination, your corpuscles are indeed of an elevated, unusual, and vaunted quality. If somebody makes your blood boil, you have become so upset that you have temporarily lost your humanity and become another sort of animal entirely, whose blood is allowed to change temperatures radically. If somebody says of you that “blood will out,” you know it is an insult, to the effect that your family characteristics cannot be concealed. In a sonnet called “Blood,” first published in the Nation in 1928, the American poet Robert Frost wrote: “Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.”
    Blood, indeed, filters into every aspect of our language and defines who we are: in our emotional states, in our social ranking, in our state of innocence or moral guilt, and most important of all, in our relationships to each other.
    Blood is truly the stuff of life: a bold and enduring determinant of identity, race, gender, culture, citizenship, belonging, privilege, deprivation, athletic superiority, and nationhood. It is so vital to our sense of ourselves, our abilities, and our possibilities for survival that we have invested money, time, and energy in learning how to manipulate its very composition.

TWO
    WE WANT IT SAFE AND WE WANT IT CLEAN:
BLOOD, TRUTH, AND HONOUR
    I FELT A WAVE OF EMPATHY when I watched Paula Findlay finish last in her triathlon at the 2012 London Olympics. The Canadian crossed the line crying and in obvious discomfort. Findlay is an elite athlete. Prior to the Olympics, she had won numerous international triathlons, been ranked number one in the world, and considered a medal favourite in London. General Mills, the cereal company, was using her image on boxes of Reese’s Puffs. However, on an August day in London’s Hyde Park, Findlay, twenty-three at the time, was the last of fifty-five female competitors to cross the line after a 1.5-kilometre swim, a 43-kilometre bike ride, and a 10-kilometre run. Posting a post-race description on her blog, Findlay mentioned that her swim went poorly and her bike ride even worse, but that she felt wobbly and powerless after running the first of four 2.5-kilometre laps. “I pulled off to our team doctor, crying that there was no way I could physically finish three more. He encouraged me to pull myself together and finish if I could, I’d be more satisfied with crossing the line than not. So I ran three of the most painful, embarrassing laps ever, being lapped by the race that I was supposed to be a contender in, humiliated and screaming at myself inside.”
    Findlay had recently come off a hip injury, but another problem contributed to her poor