Somewhere to call home
The Middle of Somewhere stresses the important facts of racism and equal rights among human beings. This interesting and compelling story is about an African family who fought the government for what they believed was right. In the times of segregation, the white people pushed around the blacks. It was the few blacks that chose to stand up for themselves and fight back for what they believed in. “The middle of somewhere”. If spoken aloud, it makes you think. This must be a place where you call home. Somewhere where you feel safe and where everything around you is comfortable.
In the novel, Rebecca and her family always talk about Pofadderkloof. Pofadderkloof is the place where the whites want to move all the black people of the village in order to replace the area with a white suburb. They tell the black people that in Pofadderkloof the houses will be larger and will have a running tap. Also, they will have two bedrooms and a stove. Rebecca’s family was the only family to know that they were telling all lies just to get them to move. When Rebecca’s best friend, Noni and her family move to Pofadderkloof, she is hurt to the point of crying everyday. When a member of Noni’s family actually notices that everything that was told to them were all lies, she goes back to the village on foot for about two days to tell everyone. She refers to Pofadderkloof as “the middle of nowhere”, because of the one-bedroom houses and miles of dry plain with no markets or available jobs. Pretty soon, the whole village comes together and forms a committee to help each other for what is right. They don’t want to go to the middle of nowhere. There want to stay home in the village, in the middle of somewhere.
In the middle of somewhere is home; that’s where everything feels right. The village was the home to many, but it was a key part in Rebecca’s family’s life. To Rebecca, home was everything to her. She loved going home after school to play hopscotch, or jumping rope in front of her house with her friends near the beautiful jacaranda tree. When she heard that bulldozers were coming to tear her house down, she was terrified. She couldn’t sleep at night. It was all she could think about.
...ewhere new. This alliance between them, this community they had created, was more than just and alliance it was a family now. This town, this new Fort Repose was not an isolated town to them it was a place to hang their hearts, it was a place to go home to at night, it was home (Frank).
Kindred by Octavia Butler has been a respected novel since its publication in 1979. In Kindred Butler provides readers with suspense until the last page. It provides readers with two definitions of a home. Home is a place where you feel safe where you have a family to come to when you are having a horrible day at work or at school. Home is a place where you share good and bad times with family and friends. A home is place of stability in your life. A home isn’t a place that you are scared to go to. A home isn’t a place filled with only negative thoughts and hopes. A home is not a place that you endured physical and mental abuse. Dana had a home of stability and a home filled with physical and mental abuse. Dana and her husband Kevin just moved into a new home that they just bought in Los Angeles, California. This is the best birthday gift she could ever receive because before she was living in a congested apartment. This is also the first day she starts to travel back into time to visit her plantation home in the early 1800s in Maryland. The distinctions between Los Angeles and Maryland present the differences in what makes a home.
The setting in this story is significant because, the whole story is about how a young black boy is treated unfairly and sentenced to death because of something he did not do. It also deals with the emotions that this black boy faces because he has been treated unfairly by the white people.
The setting of the story is Chicago’s South Side. This area of Chicago was known as the “capital of black America” (Manning), and according to Andrew Wiese, Chicago used to be known as “the most segregated city in America” (118). These seriously contradictory statements are true. Chicago’s South Side was home to William L. Dawson, who was the most powerful black politician at the time, and Joe Luis, who was a boxing champion and was known as the most popular black man in America (Manning). It was the most popular place for blacks to migrate to during the Great Migration, and the population grew from 278,000 blacks to 813,000 blacks. Most of the neighborhoods located in the South Side were poor and highly segregated from the rich white neighborhoods located just outside the South Side (Pacyga). The housing in these areas was very poor as well. Most of the African Americans at the time lived in a small apartment called a kitchenette. These were cramped with a small kitchen and small rooms (Plotkin). Lorraine Hansberry describes the Youngers house as a worn out, cramped, and very small apartment (23). She also talks about the small kitchen, living room, and bedrooms (24). These apartments were not ideal, but it was all that many African Americans could afford. If African Americans tried to move nicer neighborhoods, whites would perform violent acts on them (Choldin). This violence was recorded in a African American newspaper, known the Chicago Defender (Best).
In the first few pages of the book the contrast of Bottom and the town of Medallion where the white people live is made very apparent. During this time period, white supremacy was at large and slavery and inhumane treatment of black people by white people was very common. The land where the black people of the land live was given to a slave by a white man and is described as: “A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but the part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills. Just a nigger joke”(4). This portrayal of where the black people lived was shown in contrast to how Medallion is described where the white people lived. Medallion was described as looking like the suburbs and rich looking. The very fact that both of these communities live on the same piece of land, yet are divided, shows how prominent segregation was during this time period.
The Story begins with a description of the house. The house in itself is a symbol of isolation women faced in the nineteenth-century. The protagonist describes the house as isolated and miles away from the village, but also described as “the most beautiful place” (Gilman 217). During the nineteenth-century, women were in a sense isolated from society, just like the house. The role of the women was to stay home and tend to the
The general setting of the story is in Bayonne, Louisiana in the 1940s. The setting is imperative to the novel because it takes place right in the midst of southern segregation and Jim Crow laws. The narrator commonly refers to another setting in the novel which is the quarter. This is the neighborhood he live in which is a community of black and white plantation workers. The town of Bayonne is segregated so that all the black facilities are in the back of town, while all the white facilities are in the front of town.
Safety, acceptance, and freedom are three things that every person wants to feel. Where is the place that makes someone feel these things? Bell hooks expands our minds and provides us with an idea of such a place that would provide individuals with a sense of safety, acceptance, and freedom. She calls these hope filled settings “homeplaces.” In hooks piece, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” she describes not only what a homeplace is, but also what the people who were involved in the homeplace endured and overcame. Hooks makes it clear that the hardships black women overcame, and the legacies they left behind are tremendously significant. Because of hooks personal and family’s experiences, her piece focuses on African American women , but clearly her understandings and principles also describe many other minorities as well as women in general. Women of all races, ethnicities, and religions have made leaps and bounds in positively impacting the world, and they will certainly not back down now.
The narrator continues with describing his resentment towards his home life, 'Coming home was not easy anymore. It was never a cinch, but it had become a torture (2).'; This excerpt provides the reader with an understanding of the sorrow that the protagonist feels at the beginning of the novel and throughout the first half. Further narration includes the protagonists feelings of distance from the land and blame that he places upon himself, 'But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me (2).'; Thus, as the reader, we understand that the narrator has removed himself from the land and his culture.
In “Calling Home”, by Jean Brandt and “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard, both girls are confronted with their sense of conscience and of right and wrong. In the process, both girls experience memorable lessons as a consequence of the decisions they make. In “Calling Home”, thirteen year old Jean realizes that her actions not only affect her but more importantly, her loved ones, when she is caught shoplifting and arrested during a Christmas shopping trip with her siblings and grandmother. In “An American Childhood”, seven year old Annie realizes that adults and their feelings are valid and that they can be just as vulnerable and full of tenacity as a child after she and her friend find themselves being chased by a man who is none too amused at being a target of their snowball throwing antics. In both stories, Annie and Jean are smug in their sense of power and control. Both girls exhibit a general lack of respect for authority by justifying their actions and displaying a false sense of entitlement to pursue and attain whatever they wish, as if ordinary rules do not apply to them.
In the beginning of the story the narrator gives the description of his street with "an uninhabited house of two storeys, stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors..." the boy goes on to describe the other houses too as "with brown imperturbable faces" (Joyce 15). The boy describes his home as boring, where nothing interesting happens. The boy feels "detached" from his life and desires adventure.
Physical surroundings (such as a home in the countryside) in works of literary merit such as “Good Country People”, “Everyday Use”, and “Young Goodman Brown” shape psychological and moral traits of the characters, similarly and differently throughout the stories.
The setting of the town is described by the author as that of any normal rural
Due to the fact that Benjamin, a white child, has been discovered living with a black family and has unknowingly adopted their mannerisms. In the beginning although he knew “that he was his parent’s hand-child” (Matthee 8), he is neither bothered by this notion nor is he knowledgeable of the racial differences that manifested severe issues. Benjamin is integrated into daily life in the Kloof, partaking in the Komoeties’ unified chores, which further accentuates his undiluted sense of belonging. The Kloof is depicted as the perfect combination of the novel’s three major settings. Benjamin has a supportive and financially progressive family and access to a water source on which he can sail his boats, which he only realizes after temporarily residing in both the forest and the coastal region. After the peace-breakers’ invasion of Wolwekraal’s tranquillity, Benjamin becomes hungry for knowledge about his lineage and ruthlessly questions Fiela: “Ma, why is a person white or brown?”(Matthee 51), “Why are you all brown and I’m white?”(Matthee 52). Though the Kloof’s landscape is undesirable, the strength of the familial relationships is admirable even when permeated by long periods of doubt and anxiety-filled separation, as when Benjamin is removed to the
After locking her self in the solitude of her bedroom she begins to recognize things that one would not think of after a loved one just passed away. " She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life (paragraph 5)." This is the point at witch she begins to deal with the grieving process, but also starts to realize the beauty of life. She begins to see that ...