Man From the South – The Land Lady
The Man from the South sets the scene early. The little old man uses his dislike for cocky over zealous Americans to make a bet, that to say the least leaves the reader with suspense filled eagerness to find out what the outcome of the bet will be. The setting is one of fun, sun and lazing by the pool however this is in stark contrast to the dark setting of the Landlady. The Man from the South, making a macabre suggestion that if the lighter failed to light ten times the American would lose his left pinky. From the outset this creates the horror of the bet.
The pull of a brand new sleek green Cadillac was too much for the American, weighing up his options – lose his left hand pinky or gain a new car.
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He is not trying to hide the fact he will cut off the American’s finger if his lighter fails. The suspense is only created by, the outcome of the bet. Will the American’s lighter light ten consecutive times in a row? The readers know what to expect if the lighter fails despite it not actually occurring. Unlike the Landlady, with her sweet face, the description of her is deliberately misleading which in tern only heightens the suspense due to the reader’s apprehension about the possible violence to come. The tea tastes funny, bitter almost. Is it poison? Has the fate of the young Man just been sealed? Reading the Landlady you are lead by the writer to join the dots and fill in the blanks, using your imagination. As illustrated by the Landlady telling the young man that, “There was not a blemish on his body.” “His skin was just like a baby’s.” At the same time the young man discovers that the animals he had previously equated to being a good sign of safety, were in fact stuffed and that Landlady had stuffed them and the strange way the Landlady smelt. By the end of the story the reader is in do doubt that the young Man is going to die and be stuffed. All from cleverly created by subtle remarks, unlike the Man from the South who meticulously laid out his plan in front of the American. A woman who knew only too well what the Man from the South was going to do saved the American at the last minute. Unlike the young Man, whose fate was left to the imagination of the
In “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question” James McPherson argues that the North and the South are two very different parts of the country in which have different ideologies, interests, and values. Mcpherson writes this to show the differences between the north and the south. He gives perspectives from other historians to show how the differently the differences were viewed. These differences included the north being more industrialized while the south was more agricultural. He gives evidence to how the differences between the north and south came together as the south produced tobacoo, rice, sugar and cotton, which was then sent to the north to be made into clothing or other fabrics. Mcpherson analyzes the differences
John Shelton Reed says that the South embodies three different regions. Do all of these regions still exist? Or have they become incorporated into what is considered the South today? “The Three Souths,” by Reed, divides the South into three categories: Dixie, Southeast, and Cultural South. Southern agriculture and the growth of cotton established Dixie. The Southeast region is a metropolitan region that relies on commerce and communication to grow. The valued qualities, such as religion, sports, and manners are characteristic ways that set apart the Cultural South. According to Reed, Atlanta is the only place one can be in all three “Souths” at once. The daily life of a person in the South is very similar to the daily life of a person in another part of the country. Each work a normal workday but their use of free time sets them apart (Reed 17-27). The South of the past still exists today through traditional Southern values passed down in families and carried throughout the nation, yet the division of the South no longer exists as a three part entity, but as a growing, changing region.
C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of the Jim Crow laws. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gives a new insight into the history of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement.
The setting of the story helps to magnify its impact on the reader because it is set in a small town similar to the one many of us may know of, and that is symbolic of everything that we consider to be right in America. The story begins on a wonderful summer day in a small town. The author describes the day as very joyful but strikes a contrast between the surroundings of the town and the atmosphere of the people gathered in the square. The atmosphere is sober, where the adults ?stood together, away from the stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather then laughed."(268) This, in just the third paragraph, is a indication through symbolism of the townsfolk?s sober mood that something was amiss. The setting for the lottery also takes place in the same place as the square dances, the teen-age club, and the Halloween program.(268) This unifies our lives with those of the story sense we can relate to those types of events, and is symbolic in showing that even though this dastardly deed happens here that it is still the main place of celebration. Showing how easy it is for us, as human beings, to clean our conscientious by going back to a place that, on June 27, is a place of death and make it a place of delight.
Considering the circumstance of racial inequality during the time of this novel many blacks were the target of crime and hatred. Aside from an incident in his youth, The Ex-Colored Man avoids coming in contact with “brutality and savagery” inflicted on the black race (Johnson 101). Perhaps this is a result of his superficial white appearance as a mulatto. During one of his travels, the narrator observes a Southern lynching in which he describes the sight of “slowly burning t...
In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird Atticus Finch is a person who represents Southern Liberalism in his society because he hopes the system will change gradually but doesn’t do anything to push it further.Scholars have debated over this assertion for years. One scholar Monroe Freedman has strong opinions about how hardworking Atticus is in fact he argues, “There may not be many such principles of right and wrong, but the terrorizing of the Levy family, the attempted lynching of Tom Robinson, and the apartheid that Atticus Finch practiced every day of his life-those things are wrong today, and they were wrong in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s,”(477).Atticus’s terrorization of the Levys is universally wrong no matter the time period.Freedman’s
Although the Civil War is celebrated as the time of emancipation, emancipation was not the primary issue at stake. This leads to wondering how the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th amendment actually affected the life of the average black. If emancipation was a side effect or an afterthought, what did it really mean? Truly, although blacks were legally freed after the war, they were in many ways still enslaved to the white man. But although the majority of whites in the South did desire and often succeed in keeping the “freedmen” under their control, some few truly did desire to see blacks succeed in the world. Also, the status of blacks during the war was intriguing; for the North, blacks from the South and Northern blacks were treated the same. And that same was inferior to the whites of the North.
At the smoker, where some of the most important men in town are "quite tipsy", belligerent and out of control. When he gets in the ballroom there is a naked girl dancing. He wants her and at the same time wants her to go away, "to caress her and destroy her". The black boys who were to take part in the battle were humiliated, some passed out, others pleaded to go home. But the white men paid no attention. The white men end up attacking the girl, who is described as having the same terror and fear in her eyes as the black boys.
Racism has jumped to the forefront of conversation politically as well as socially recently. However, many fail to see the full extent of racism and the harmful effects it has had in American history. Post civil war brought a realization to the nation, that although now free, blacks, Indians and mixed descendants or mulatto’s were considered a lower class and Jim Crow Laws help cement them in this class of society. These laws, many referenced post Civil War, have origins dating pre Civil War as well. In 1835, “North Carolina passed a new constitution, which declared that ‘free Negroes, free mulattos, and free persons of mixed blood’ could not vote.” This de facto movement not only affected the lives of African Americans but also immigrants, Catholics, Jews and other groups of people.
The Declaration of Independence stated that, "All men are created equal" but this statement did not have any meaning for white men between 1876- 1965 due to the institution of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865and put an end to slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment granted equal protection under law, and the Fifteenth Amendment gave black people the right to vote. Despite these Amendments, African Americans were still treated differently than whites. According to the law, blacks and whites could not use the same public facilities, ride the same buses, attend the same schools, etc. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws. The documentary focused on Charles Hamilton Houston, also known as “the man who killed Jim Crow.” He was a prominent African American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School, and the director of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He began his fight against segregation between whites and blacks alone but gradually started to encourage other young lawyers to join him in his fight. These young lawyers continu...
Slavery has existed in one form or another for centuries and in some places in the world it still exists today. In most places slavery is a way of life and there is nothing that can be done about it, and in southern America that was the case too for over three hundred years. During that period many people fought against slavery and tried to get it abolished from the country, but little did they know how long and how brutal the fight would be. Even after slavery was abolished by the thirteenth amendment in 1865, the African American and some European people suffered even harder times than they did during the years of slavery. After slavery was abolished a few years later the Jim Crow laws were introduced in the south, making it nearly impossible for African Americans to live a free life, and these laws would eventually shape the race relations in the south for several years to come. The Jim Crow laws made African Americans second class citizens to the white people of the south. Even though slavery was abolished in the south, these laws made sure that African Americans were not able to enjoy their new found freedom. These laws were implemented by white community to make sure that they kept the power that they once had over the African Americans, because they were afraid of what might happen if they gain power. The white people in the south were successful in doing so for almost eighty years.
In 1619 a well-known issue was brought to life that is now known as an American catastrophe. In the book Black Southerners, the author John B. Boles doesn’t just provide background of how slavery began or who started it, and doesn’t just rant about the past and how mistreated the African American race was; he goes on to explain how as slavery and racism boosted the families of these slaves began to grow closer to a community and the efficiency and profitability of slavery. He also shows the perspective of not just the slaves, but the bondsmen as well to show the different perspectives throughout this point in time. As far as my generation goes, we all picture slavery as African American’s picking cotton, or doing chores around the house, going
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
One of the main symbols of the story is the setting. It takes place in a normal small town on a nice summer day. "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full summer day; the flowers were blooming profusely and the grass was richly green." (Jackson 347).This tricks the reader into a disturbingly unaware state,
The novel “The Autobiography of an ex-colored man,” by James Johnson presents a major social issue of racial categorization that is present in today’s society. From a selected passage in the novel, the narrator is in Macon, Georgia seeking to depart to New York. During this time, the narrator is explaining his contemplation about which race, white or black, he will classify himself as for the rest of his life. Through his experiences, he is pushed away from classifying himself as a black male. This passage connects to the general scope of the novel as the narrator is continuously combating his racial position in society, as he is an individual of mixed races. Johnson’s language, use of imagery and metaphor, and emphasis on categorization portrays