Journal 11

"As the Lord Lives, He is One of Our Mother's Children" Pauline E. Hopkins &

Claude McKay assorted poems

The two readings for today were written by African-American authors, but they came from two very different backgrounds. Hopkins was raised by a civil war veteran in the North, whereas McKay was Jamaican. However, both of their writings center on a horrifying issue of the early 1900's, lynching. Racism at its worst, lynching was when whites took the law into their hands and killed blacks who they accused of committing a crime, or sometimes just because they were black. 

In the reading by Hopkins the speaker is a white clergyman who witnesses a lynching of one man and then comes across the man who escaped. The man who escaped, "Stone," or "Gentleman Jim" is a mulatto, but he appears so white that Rev. Stevens has to ask him later on, "are you a negro?" I can't help but wonder what kind of moral ground the lynchers stood on if they couldn't even tell that the man was negro when he became sexton of the church. Stone eventually leaves the parsonage and moves to a New England town, but he is forever haunted by the treatment he received once leaving Wilmington, where he had a family until his house was burned to the ground, his wife and children still inside. When Rev. Stevens and his son, Flip, come to visit their train is almost ran off the tracks by a fallen tree, but Stone manages to push the tree off the tracks, unfortunately however Stone is hit by the train in the process. After Stone's death it comes about that he didn't kill a man when he worked in the mines, and the community feels repentant. The Reverend speaks at Stones well attended funeral, and one hopes that at last Stone is at peace. This story ends in a death, and yet it still feels like a happy ending, like Uncle Tom's Cabin for Tom, it saddens me to think about how life in America was so horrible that death was preferable for African Americans. Race Relations aren't perfect today, but at least we have moved from lynchings in this past 100 years.

McKay addresses lynching as well, from his outsider perspective, McKay grew up in Jamaica which had its share of problems as well, but he remarked on being horrified at the "implacable hatred of my race" (704). In his poem, "The Lynching" he says, "hung pitifully o'er the swinging char" (708 line 8). As an American I have pride in my country, but when I look back to the past I find there is little to be proud of. These race riots that prompted McKay to write took place only 100 years ago, it seems like a long time, but its really not, 100 years can be one person's lifetime. In the grand scheme of things, such horrible things happening only 100 years ago is barely a blink of an eye. I was most struck by his poem, "America." when he writes, "And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the tough of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand." (708) and how the poem on the next page "Africa"seem to be in answer to one another. 

Journal #10 The Aha! Moment

I had an "aha!" moment while reading Charles W. Chestnutt's "The Wife of His Youth." It is a story about a well-to-do Mulatto man, Mr. Ryder twenty-five years after the war who plans a party in order to win the love of a Mrs. Dixon, but the day of the party an older black woman comes to his door asking after the man she was married to during slavery. She shows him a picture of Sam Walker, the man she is searching for. Then he tells her he will let her know if he hears anything and she leaves. Mr. Ryder walks up to his room and looks in the mirror for a good while after this meeting. It was here that I first thought Mr. Ryder was Sam Walker. Why else would the author include him staring at himself in the mirror thoughtfully? It wasn't until he began to tell the story of the woman during the party that I knew for sure, I was pleasantly surprised at the end when he recognized her as his wife.

Chestnutt started out the story in a way that made it seem like Mr. Ryder was against marrying a black woman, that he saw white as the goal, especially when Mr. Ryder explains his personal philosophy, "I have no race prejudice," he would say, "but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The one doesn't want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step" (57). This made me doubt that Mr. Ryder would claim "The Wife of His Youth," plus I doubted that a man would want a woman once she is old and they obviously have so little in common from her speech to her profession as a cook.

Whenever I have an Aha! moment I think about learning to read, much like the poem by Frances Harper,  "Learning to Read." I of course was not prohibited from reading, I was encouraged and worked with, but in first grade I hadn't quite mastered it yet. Like the speaker in the poem, I thought I might be incapable, and for a 6 year old that is an extremely stressful experience. Anyway, then one day it just clicked for me, I could read, it was the first Aha! moment in my living memory, and one of the best.

Journal #9

Introduction 1865-1914: Man vs. Machine (Computer)

            When reading the chapter a contemporary comparison that I thought about, was industrialization and the factory mentality compared to today's computer based society. The cartoon above represents Man vs. Computer, and I think of this as a competition between opposites, and this makes me think of back in the late 1800's to early 1900's how people saw themselves in opposition to the machine. The improvements in the early days of the 1900's were mostly in the Newspaper industry, which is a dying industry today. Everyday another Newspaper goes out of business as people get their news from New Media sources or download newspapers for free. A similarity between then and now is how people considered Poetry a dying art form, William Cullen Bryant said, "Poetry may get printed in newspapers, but no man makes money by it for the simple reason that nobody cares a fig for it" (24). Today poetry is still around, but its death may just be a slow one. People just don't care a bout poetry like they did in the early 1800's, print culture has changed. In fact one could argue that print culture is on its way to extinction depending on if you consider the internet to be "print culture" at all. If the internet and virtual sources are indeed print culture then it is actually growing. Nowadays anyone at all can get published simply by writing a blog, as I am doing now. 

           If anything we shouldn't view ourselves in opposition to the computer as people shouldn't have saw the machine as a bad thing, because it is helping to further man kind, can you imagine what life would be like today without the computer or the internet? Of course the transition times are always scary, when the country became more and more unemployed because factory's didn't need as many workers, or skilled workers anyway we experienced a time of unrest, crime rates rose, and people were suffering. Today we have similar unemployment, but the political unrest is actually on a declining trend, at least in the United States, maybe people are learning from history after all...

Journal 8

Lincoln vs. Davis

             The American Civil War was between two factions of the country, the North, and the South. The leaders of which can be considered a representation of the ideals of their region. Abraham Lincoln for the North, or the Union, and Jefferson Davis for the South, or the Confederacy. They can be thought of a two sides of the coin of the Civil War. Both born in Kentucky these two men actually had a lot in common, but they ended up in direct opposition of one another. 

           In his inaugural address Jefferson Davis said, "our present position has been achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations. It illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established" (1360). He is claiming that the Southern states not only had the right to secede from the union, but that it was necessary for them to do so since the government had become, "destructive of the ends for which it was established." Davis is paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, and this is representative of the feelings of many southerner's, they felt that the federal government was trying to restrict their rights, and compared their struggle to that of the American Revolution. Lincoln and the North had different ideas.

          In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said, "this nation, under god, shall have a new birth of freedom-- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" (1373). This is the exact opposite of what Davis said, Lincoln is claiming that we must protect our government, our country. At this time the government of the United States was unique, not only the first democracy of its kind, but the only.