The Train from Rhodesia and The Gold Cadillac Comparison

How Do The Texts Represent The Theme Of Racial Prejudice?

‘The Train from Rhodesia’ written by Nadine Gordimer and ‘The Gold Cadillac’ written by Mildred Taylor both represent the theme of racial prejudice in their stories. Prejudice is when you prejudge someone before you know that person.

‘The Train from Rhodesia’ is set in South Africa, in the time of Apartheid, as a train full of white citizens comes into a train station and one black man barters to sell his symbolic lion. The man of the young white couple waits until the train starts to go before he decides the price he wants to pay for the lion and then throws the money out of the window and then the young white woman does not want it.

‘The Gold Cadillac’ is about a black man who buys a car, the Gold Cadillac, the family likes it except for the mother, after a while the father wants to go to visit his parents in Mississippi, which is in the south. They get caught by the police and get fined. This is part of the Jim Crow South Laws, which are laws that were implied to segregate the black people from the north of the U.S from the south of the U.S. They were formed between 1876 and 1965.

‘The Train from Rhodesia’

The very first paragraph is about the train coming into the station, the train symbolises the segregation of the white people on the train and the black people outside the train. “The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them”, the word ‘bore’ implies the momentum and power of the train and the people inside towards the black people outside.

The apartheid is shown by the setting of the outside of the train compared to the inside of the train “the stationmaster’s wife barefoot children wandered over” which implies they have little, and also ...

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...tanding of it and I could see a clear message within it. ‘The Train from Rhodesia’ was harder because it took longer for me to understand it well. ‘The Gold Cadillac’ also showed racism and racial prejudice better because the policemen, who were white, giving a fine to the family because they were black and they prejudged them to having stole the car, whereas the ‘The Train From Rhodesia’ had little explicit examples of racism.

In ‘The Train from Rhodesia’ I had some understanding but I had to keep reading it to understand it properly. The only sign of racism it had was “brought up the shilling and sixpence and threw them out” the Gold Cadillac had two explicit examples being the signs saying “WHITE ONLY, COLOURED NOT ALLOWED.”, and the other one being the encounter with the ‘white’ police. Overall I thought that ‘The Gold Cadillac’, by Mildred Taylor, was better.