Research Writing – Tattooed Professor

Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

A Norton Critical Edition Trans. Paul De Man New York 1965

I can tell I read this book long ago because my reading note style has changed significantly since then. There were no end-of-chapter summaries which I incorporate now. The best bits were marked in highlighter which I find fades over the years. I caught up with plot twists by writing in pencil in very small lettering in the margins. Now I write in pen as long as the ink doesn’t seep through to the other side. I didn’t even write my name inside the front cover which I do now along with the season and year in which I completed the read. I wasn’t sure there would be enough material to share, but some of these lines are wonderful. I know I read this during the time before I’d read the intro or preface thinking it unnecessary and boring; it is not. I also did not read any of the critical reflections on the work afterward. If I were doing a serious college paper on Madame Bovary I would read all the critical works provided in the back of the book. Madame Bovary was first printed in 1857 and was originally written in French. At the time it was seen as scandalous and in need of censors.

“He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it almost interesting” (7).

“For him the universe did not extend beyond the silky circumference of her petticoat” (24).

“This nature, positive in the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for the passions it excites, rebelled against the mysteries of faith as it had rebelled against discipline, as something alien to her constitution” (28).

“Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to some one. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, changing as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her and, by the same token, the opportunity, the courage” (29).

About the baby: “Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was perhaps impaired from the start” (63).

Because he is not the jealous type, Charles thinks nothing of Leon spending time with Emma. “Wasn’t the husband also a part of her after all” (71)?

Emma is praising Charles to Leon…out of nervousness? Charles is late and is due any minute. This irritates Leon.

Charles becomes the representation of her unfulfilled dreams: “What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to be aware of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy looked to her a stupid insult, and his self-assurance of this point sheer ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all happiness, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that buckled her in all sides” (77)?

Emma meets Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger who wants her, but only for an affair: “‘I think he is very stupid. She must be tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn’t shaven for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there mending socks. How bored she gets! How she’d want to be in the city and go dancing every night! Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp on the kitchen table after water. Three gallant words and she’d adore me, I’m sure of it. She’d be tender, charming. Yes; but how get rid of her afterwards’ (93)? He plans his strategy to use her.

By page 117, Emma and Rodolphe do the nasty.

The first thing Rodolphe does to slow things down: “‘What is wrong?’ she said. ‘Are you ill? Tell me!’

“He ended up declaring earnestly that her visits were too dangerous and that she was compromising herself” (118).

There is regret and more regret.

When Charles was at his lowest Emma rejected him. She hates his existence.

Uh-oh! Now the shop man knows Emma is having an affair! Emma begins to change and become more bold.

The shop man now knows she is planning to run away. The closer they get to their escape, the more Rodolphe understands this will be a mistake.

Although he was a womanizer, Emma regrets not being a man.

Another regret: “All her attempts at critical detachment were swept away by the poetic power of the acting, and, drawn to the man by the illusion of the part, she tried to imagine his life–extraordinary, magnificent, notorious, the life that could have been hers if fate had willed it. If only they had met! He would have loved her, they would have travelled together through all the kingdoms of Europe from capital to capital, sharing in his success and in his hardships, picking up the flowers thrown to him, mending his clothes” (163).

They see Leon at the opera. She is so easily swayed by the moment that it is pathetic!

Charles is absolutely oblivious to the motives of other men.

Charles puts even his grief for his own father’s death behind him for Emma.

Emma wants power of attorney in order to manage Charles’s inheritance.

Emma stays out all night…BRAZEN!

“One must not touch one’s idols, a little of the gilt always comes off on one’s fingers” (205).

“Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, every pleasure its own disgust, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight” (206).

Since Leon does not show with the money, Emma, at the last minute, thinks of Rodolphe.

You will have to read the novel to find how it ends!

The Norton Edition includes:

Earlier Versions of Madame Bovary

“Structures of Imagery in Madame Bovary” by D. L. Demorest

“On Rereading Madame Bovary” by Albert Beguin

Biographical Sources:

“The Real Source of Madame Bovary” by Rene Dumesnil

“Flaubert and Madame Bovary: Outline of a New Method” by Jean-Paul Sartre

“Letters about Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert

Essays in Criticism:

Contemporary Reactions:

By Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

By Charles Baudelaire

Stylistic Studies:

“Style and Morality in Madame Bovary” by Henry James

“The Craft of Fiction in Madame Bovary” by Percy Lubbock

“Flaubert’s Language” by W. Von Wartburg

Thematic Studies:

“On the ‘Inner Environment’ in the Work of Flaubert” by Charles Du Bos

“Madame Bovary” by Albert Thibaudet

“The Realism of Flaubert” by Erich Auerback

“The Circle and the Center: Reality and Madame Bovary” by Georges Poulet

“Madame Bovary: the Cathedral and the Hospital” by Harry Levin

“Love and Memory in Madame Bovary” by Jean Pierre Richard

“Madame Bovary: Flaubert’s Anti-Novel” by Jean Rousset

Selected Bibliography

Gwendolyn Brooks

1917-2000

[Study Notes]

Brooks wanted to write poems that called to all black people. Poems to teach, entertain and illuminate. She used elegant spare rhythms. Through activism, she showed her passionate commitment to making her work available to black people everywhere believing poetry was not the sole province of the privileged, educated few.
Born in Kansas and moved to Chicago where she spent most of her life. Published her first poem at thirteen in American Child magazine. Graduated from high school and was a regular contributor to the weekly variety column of the Chicago Defender. Attended Wilson Junior College and joined Chicago’s NAACP Youth Council. Got married.
Brooks had a child and met a pivotal teacher.
Won the Midwestern Writers’ Conference poetry award in 1943. Approached by Emily Morison of Knopf for a book of poems. A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945. Followed by Annie Allen (1949), winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize. Maud Martha (1953); and The Bean Eaters (1960). Brooks’s poetry of this period is solidly based in the stuff of everyday life.
1967 was the year of the Second Black Writers’ conference at Nashville’s Fisk University. Brooks was exposed to cultural activists and artists who would fashion the outline of a new black cultural nationalism. Much of Brooks’s subsequent activity was inspired by her experience at Fisk, including the creative writing class that she conducted with some of Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, a teenage gang. In 1968, she published In the Mecca, with its brilliant closing pieces: the “sermons” on the Warpland.
Brooks’s poetry has several distinctive traits: a stunning juxtaposition of disparate objects and words, masterful control of rhyme and meters, sophisticated use of formal and thematic irony, translation of public events into memorable poetic detail. A poet’s primary concern–to hammer out a portrait of and for African Americans–remained unaltered.
Fiction Maud Martha: a female subject’s ruminations before, during, and after World War II. One of the few works by a black woman writer written between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. Not marked by the ideological debates or ugliness of racism, classism, and sexism. Narrates the most difficult, or unspeakable, of human failings–those that occur on the level of intimacy. Generous, sensitive, and tough.

“the mother” relates the inner thoughts of a woman who has experienced abortion.

“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”: Federal intervention was necessary to implement school desegregation in Little Rock. The poem opens with a picture of domestic life in the suburbs. People going to church and performing their after-church rituals. Little Rock at Christmas, in summer, outdoor concerts, romance. The expected norms. Phone calls, polite manners. I got to Little Rock to find the news of school desegregation…but it’s so normal here. Then: the spitting, the throwing of rocks, garbage, and fruit. Girls and boys alike were engaged in this behavior. One of the little brown boys was bleeding. So did Christ.

“We Real Cool”: Running with the bad crowd at the pool hall. Drop out, stay out late, sing, drink, dance and die.

Realism, Naturalism, Modernism

1940-1960

[Study Notes]

Literary historians arbitrarily carve out the decades between 1940 to 1960 as “realism, naturalism and modernism” as an extraordinarily fertile moment in the development of African American writing. This era produced a rich and complex collection of writings and many diverse pieces for literary and cultural magazines although standard literary histories tend to obscure those writers.
The era produced serious novels, detective stories, pulp (or escapist) fiction, popular novels. There was also a confrontation of modern existence: atomic explosions, fascism, social revolution, the crumbling of colonialism, the death throwes of Jim Crow.
Authors and critics often engaged in bitter disagreements over the form and functions of African American expression, over the obligations of black writers to their reading publics, and even over how such publics were to be identified. The situation was no better overseas.
Realism refers broadly to a faithful representation of material “reality. Naturalism is a franker, harsher treatment of the power of the social environment cum jungle on individual psychology. Modernism is a break with the familiar functions of language and conventions of form.

War, Migration, Desegregation, and Social Revolution
We use World War II as the outer boundary of this period, during the second wave of the Great Migration. Many African Americans headed for economic opportunity in the major war industries or went abroad to fight. Truman created the Commission on Civil Rights in 1947. In 1954 there was Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education which desegregated public schools. In 1955 Alabama saw the Bus Boycott which began the “nonviolent protest movement.”
African American literary production from the 1940s to the 1960s is emphatically northern, urban, and set mainly in the black American culture capitals: Chicago, Boston, and Harlem. White youth copied the zoot suit vogue, along with many elements of bop, or hip talk. This language of hip, or the “new poetry of the proletariat” introduced a distinctly black urban idiom into the American language. Urban sensibility pervades the literature with the signs, sights, and sounds of the city. Setting the tone was Richard Wright’s 1940 publishing sensation Native Son.

Urban Realism
At least in strictly literary terms, Wright’s novel christened the 1940s decade. A book of the Month Club selection, Native Son made Wright the first African American writer to receive both critical acclaim and commercial success simultaneously. After him, other black writers began to be noticed.
Wright is credited with having set the stage for these successes and creating publishing opportunities for many black writers.
Native Son greatly transformed American culture and African American letters of the post-World War II era. Wright, along with Alain Locke and others, set a tone that black writers should no longer care for or serve their white audience. Their work should be focused on true self-expression for their own people about their own issues.
Wright used ingredients from Marxism, social protest, urban and secular ideas. Native Son shaped a radically new agenda and established for African American writing a new center of gravity, one that documented the gritty realities of urban living for black Americans filtered through the lenses of urban sociology and the conventions of naturalism.
Wright began investigating the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, especially its theories about juvenile delinquency and the urban environment. What forces and powers were at play in the social environment? He used his character of Bigger Thomas to show how the environment affects the mind, body, and spirit and this technique was seen as a form of social protest.
Social protest writing did not begin with Wright; it was there in the fugitive slave narrative, the abolitionist orator, poets, essays, pamphlets, letters, and in the novels of racial uplift. With the emergence of Richard Wright, black art and social protest were one and the same. Protest not only blended optimally with the aesthetics of naturalism and the reportorial practices of journalism and urban sociology but worked organically with a range of cultural activity–including grassroots organizing–underpinning a self-styled radical literary and intellectual movement.
Other writers have been associated with the Wright style. William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, Chester Himes’s The Lonely Crusade and If He Hollers Let Him Go, Ann Petry’s The Street.

Ellison and Black Modernist Fiction
There was a burgeoning vision of integration as a social ideal that called for minimizing emphatically racial subject matter with an “integrationist” temper. There was a call for “non-Negro” or nonracial subject matter, especially in the novel. Black characters and black urban setting seemed no longer central. For most critics, though, the turn from urban realism had less to do with integrationist ideals than with the exhaustion of the mode itself.
It took the success of Invisible Man to further liberate those African American writers already chafing under the narrative straitjacket of realism and naturalism and thus breaking free of the pressures to protest injustice. Invisible Man had an experimental attitude and a commitment to social responsibility. It was the novel as artistic form and not primarily concerned with injustice, but with art.
Modernism was being explored before Ellison. There was much debate over his work.
Centering the plots of African American literary history, from 1940 to 1960, on the Wright-Baldwin-Ellison controversy and the paradigm of protest writing has resulted in a brotherhood narrative, which marginalizes women. Women writers were largely ignored.

Poetry
The poetry published between 1940 and 1960 challenges the debates about social protest. There were stanzaic forms and word collages, folk ballads, etc.
A confluence of poetic forms. Gwendolyn Brooks’s “folksy narrative” and conventions of Italian and English sonnet forms. Realism and naturalism. Global realities of war and the spreading shadow of fascism.
Extensive experimentation. The lyric, ballad, and sonnet.
Brooks’s studied attention to form and technical craftsmanship links her with melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden. The three are frequently grouped together as highly technical poets in the tradition of modern experimentalists.
Paragraphs on Melvin B. Tolson, WWII poetry and movement into the Black Arts Movement.

Drama
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun began the longest run on Broadway of any drama written by a black American up to that time, but throughout the 1930s and 1940s, blacks had demonstrated a talent for drama as theatergoers and ensuring sizable financial returns. The establishment of the American Negro Theater (ANT) in 1940 was a milestone in African American theater history.
A Raisin in the Sun won the New York Drama Critics Award and anticipated many of the defining concerns of a soon-to-be black arts movement, which exploded in the 1960s. It took on a pan-Africanist, anticolonialist agenda.
In 1957 writers and intellectuals sought to establish the intricate connections between anti-colonialism and the movements for black civil rights for social and economic justice.

Prophets of a New Day
Malcolm X, the “fire prophet,” and one of the writers who would force social revolution “by any means necessary.” Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), whose signature poem, “Black Art, from his volume Black Magic Poetry, set much of the pace, form, and violent tone of the “new” black literature of the 1960s. Baraka’s had a desire for “killing poems” and “words as weapons” for art in the service of a struggle for human liberation.
The 1940s to 1960s brought forth the first full crop of African American writers. The writers of this period were bolder, more militant. Black readers in particular were summoned to confront new literary realities.

Langston Hughes

1902-1967

[Study notes]

Hughes helped define the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote its finest first person account.
He was born in Joplin, Missouri, but moved around. Hughes came from a distinguished family, but his parents separated not long after his birth and he grew up lonely and near poverty in Lawrence, Kansas.
In Sept. 1921, aided by his father, he arrived in New York ostensibly to attend Columbia, but he really just wanted to see Harlem. The previous June, he had published one of his greatest poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the Crisis, where his talent was immediately spotted by its brilliant literary editor, Jessie Fauset. Hughes lasted only one year at Columbia. He traveled, worked, and wrote poetry. By 1924, his poetry showed the powerful influence of the blues and jazz. In fact, his poem “The Weary Blues” helped launch his career when it won first prize in the poetry section of the 1925 literary contest organized by Opportunity magazine. Aided enthusiastically by Carl Van Vechten, who remained a friend all of Hughes’s life, he won a book contract from Knopf and published The Weary Blues, his first collection of verse, in 1926.
The style of Hughes endeared his work to a wide range of African Americans. His near-worship of black music as the major form of art within the race, was his adaptation of traditional poetic forms first to jazz, then to the blues, sometimes used dialect and radically different from that of earlier writers. His landmark poem “The Weary Blues” was the first by any poet to make use of the basic blues form.
Even more radical experimentation with the blues form led to his next collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). He was fearless in his evocation of elements of lower-class black culture, including its sometimes raw eroticism, never efore treated in serious poetry. Many critics did not appreciate Hughes’s eroticism.
He stuck to his guns in defense of the freedom of the black writer. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” quickly became a manifesto for many of the younger writers who also wished to assert their right to explore and explicit allegedly degraded aspects of black life.
He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929. Charlotte Osgood Mason became his controlling, eccentric patron who later abandoned him.
Hughes’s politics took a sharp left and he published verse and essays in New Masses, a journal controlled by the Communist Party. He even visited the Soviet Union.
There was never a year when Hughes did not produce art in keeping with his sense of himself as a thoroughly professional writer. In 1934, he published his first collection of short stores, The Ways of White Folks. He was involved in theater and wrote a drama of miscegenation and the South called Mulatto (1935), which became the longest running play by an African American on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in the ‘60’s.
In 1940 he produced his autobiographical portrait of the renaissance, The Big Sea. 1942: poetry collection Shakespeare in Harlem. For another project he created one of his most beloved characters, Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, a Harlem everyman. In 1947, as lyricist for the Broadway musical Street Scene, Hughes earned enough money to purchase a house in his beloved Harlem, where he lived for the rest of his life.
1951: book of verse, Montage of a Dream Deferred. He kept up his schedule of prodigious output with versatility and skill. He loved being called the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race.”

Mother to Son [my interpretation]
Son, my life has not been easy. My life has been like a set of stairs with nails and splinters and torn up wood, but I keep climbing. Sometimes there was no light in this long tunnel. Now you can’t give up when the road gets hard. Don’t fall. Keep climbing like me.

The Weary Blues [my interpretation]
Black folks were playing a slow tune the other night in the low light. I heard the Weary Blues. That black man could make the piano moan. The blues were pouring out from this black man’s soul. He sang of being alone, yet still deciding to be happy. The second verse turns and says he can’t be satisfied, so much so that he wished he’d die. He sang far into the night. Once the stars and moon faded, he could sleep like a man who had poured out his troubles.

Harlem [my interpretation using his key words]
When you have to wait on a dream to come true, what happens to it in the interim? Does it dry up? Fester? Stink? Crust? Sag? “Or does it explode?”

Example of a reading response paper:

Tiffany Akin
Dr. V. Mitchell
English 7468
31 Aug. 2011

I have a couple of bones to pick with Langston Hughes. While reading his piece entitled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” I either tend to disagree with some of his statements or find ways to argue with others. Hughes bases his piece on something he heard Countee Cullen say about his own work: “I want to be a poet – not a Negro poet.” There is a possibility that Hughes understands the statement to have a different meaning and only twists it to explore his thoughts along another line. The essay is based on Hughes interpreting Cullen’s meaning as “I don’t want to be a black poet, I’d rather be considered on scale with the white poets.” Granted, I was not in the room, but I believe Cullen’s statement could very well be misinterpreted or could otherwise have a different focus than Hughes examines. I take Cullen’s statement to mean: “I wish people would just view and appreciate my art without having to know my color.” How frustrating would it be to be an artist and have people ask, “So, is he/she white or black?” You want the audience to focus on your production, not your race. Basically, you are displacing the importance of the self and placing art on center stage; to consistently discuss the art in terms of the artist’s race takes away from the creation itself. To believe that Cullen wished for an audience to judge his work only on its merit is very different from Hughes’s view that Cullen was striving to perform as a white artist.
Hughes says that “[w]ithout going outside his race… there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work” (41). Yes, agreed, but have you ever tried to tell an artist how to create? Have you ever tried to describe to an artist the boundary lines of his expression? “Yes, I want you to be an artistic self explosion… but do it like this.” It does not work. I ask why paint these boundaries? What if his visions for expression are universal? Of nature? Mechanical? Numerical? What if he does want to express in ways that are stereotypically “white”? Why not? It is the work of the individual artist to make himself a volcano of unique construction and to be true only to his inner vision; I do not believe this type of invention is bound by color. Should all black artists paint black people? Should all black singers sing “black” music? Should all black photographers capture only black life images? No; too limiting! No matter how much observers like Hughes would like to rally the troops in support of black artists doing black art, this vision is much too narrow and would kill much artistic expression if these rules were enforced.
Hughes is making quite a few other points but the one other I would like to debate is the idea of upward mobility. It is a fact that by way of the American media and Eurocentric Zeitgeist that we are all programmed, brainwashed, to think a certain way and believe certain things. As Hughes explains that “…the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtue” (40). I make the connection to American white girls growing up on T.V. and fashion magazines believing that to be tall, skinny and blonde are the ultimate goals. Woe to the girl who is short, chunky and brunette, for she is ridiculed and looked down upon by her more popular and good-looking peers. Hughes says that the American love for all that is white compels some African Americans to become “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” (42), which is a pretty cool term, but within the realm of economics, is upward mobility a drive exclusively white? When Hughes states that the more cultured African American family spends more time “aping… things white” (41) he follows the observation with the line, “The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician” (41). I disagree with Hughes implying that upward mobility comes with some disdain. The phrases he uses gives one the impression that African Americans should not seek to better themselves, drive toward more education and jump upward into a wealthier income bracket. I do not care what color you are or in what country you are raised, everyone wants their life to improve and become more comfortable over time. Just because another race is doing it does not mean you do not have a right to do it too. If I have a problem, even a lifelong problem with say, Philippinos, and I notice that they are excellent in calculus, I am not going to shun or stunt my drive to learn calculus because I do not admire the Philippino; it makes no sense. You hear the same argument taking place in the realm of underground rock bands. Many of their fans want the band to stay unknown so that they can keep the music all to themselves. If the band gains some sort of notoriety the fans will say they “sold out.” Guess what? The guys in the band want to eat decent food, live in a house and have enough money to raise a family, just like everyone else. I do not view it as selling out; I view it as striving for a decent living with decent living conditions which is an innate human desire not bound by color.

Zora Neale Hurston

1891-1960

One of the greatest writers of the century. Mules and Men (1935) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) are beyond question two of the finest achievements in African American literature. She liked to keep the specifics of her life a mystery and she was rather eccentric. Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first black township to be incorporated in the U.S. Being so, there was no racism and people felt free to express themselves. Her father was mayor and helped make the laws.

Her father was constantly cheating on her mother and Hurston’s mother died when Zora was thirteen. Hurston never got along with her stepmother so she took to the road where she helped an actress in a traveling theatrical troupe. Earned high school degree then took sporadic classes at Howard. She came to know some movers and shakers in the literary world who encouraged her to submit work. Migrated to New York.

Hurston then became one of the brightest young talents in Harlem. Her writings caught the attention of people who helped her publish and attend Barnard College.

While a student at Barnard, one of her papers was passed on to Franz Boas, a leading anthropologist, who encouraged her to take graduate courses at Columbia. She was granted money to follow her interests down south.

She produced Mules and Men, generally regarded as the first collection of African American folklore to be compiled and published by an African American. The work opened to mixed reviews. She joined the Works Progress Administration in 1935 and then wrote Tell My Horse (1938). In the second book, she focused less on folktales and more on comparisons between American and Caribbean blacks, much to the dismay of audiences.

During her research in the Caribbean, she completed her second novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her first novel was Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and was well received. The book was loosely based upon the antics of her father. Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates one individual’s triumph over the limitations imposed on her mainly by sexism and poverty. The story explores how romance can blind women to the necessity of seeking emotional and intellectual independence as individuals in a complex world.

During the 1930s Hurston worked intermittently on musical productions. In 1939 she began working as a drama instructor at the North Caroline College for Negroes at Durham. It was during this time she produced her third book, Moses, Man of the Mountain. People couldn’t tell if she were re-telling a biblical tale, or making fun of it.

Her novel Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) was an experiment in which Hurston took on the role of a white woman. She didn’t like the rule that black people couldn’t write about white people.

In 1942 Hurston kept up controversy with her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. She had to take out some material regarding the hypocrisy and racism of whites before it was published. The book won the Anisfield-Wold award for its contribution to the amelioration of race relations. The critics felt Hurston wore rose-colored glasses when discussing the black woman’s role in America. She was being asked to write for many periodicals, but her views were often contradictory.

Even though there was lack of evidence, Hurston was arrested in 1948 for lewd acts with a minor. She was humiliated. For the last twelve years of her life, she never rebounded from this incident. She died poor and her grave went unmarked until the 1970s. Even though critics didn’t know what to make of her at the time, Hurston is still gaining an audience today.

Sweat [short story. Combination Standard English and vernacular]

Delia Jones is a washerwoman. Most of the time she doesn’t know where her husband, Sykes, may be…usually with another woman. Sykes plays a prank on his wife by throwing his riding-whip over her shoulder knowing she will think it is a snake. He laughs when she is scared. He disparages the washing Delia brings home. He focuses on the wash being the clothes of white people rather than the money the washing brings in which they desperately need. He is unwilling to work hard enough for the both of them. Delia reminds him that it is her sweat that keeps them going. Sykes goes off with his other woman.

“She had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given her the first brutal beating.”

“Too late for everything except her little home. She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and flowers there. It was lovely to her, lovely.” Delia believed that someday, Sykes would get his comeuppance.

The town gossips know everything. They say Delia used to be a looker, but she’s been beat down for so long that it shows. Clarke spoke for the first time. “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in ‘im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ‘em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ‘em jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws ‘em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de way.”

Sykes goes around with his mistress. He makes sure Delia sees him buying his lover whatever she wants at the store. Sykes is even paying Bertha’s rent. Bertha will go to Delia’s house to ask if Sykes is around.

To amp up the abuse, Sykes captures a rattlesnake and keeps it in a box by the kitchen door. Delia and Sykes have gotten to the point where they can’t stand each other.

One night Delia finds the snake in her laundry.

[reader’s note: The entire story is setting up for a tragedy. I kept being worried that Sykes and Bertha were going to gang up on Delia, steal her house and bury her in the back yard or something. You gotta read the end! I was cheering and clapping. Just desserts for an evil man!]

The Gilded Six-Bits

[Question: Is there a chinaberry tree in every Hurston story?]

The story opens with a very house-proud description of a black couple’s yard and house. Everything, including Missie May, the woman, is scrubbed to a fine finish. It is a joyful Saturday ritual in which her husband, Joe, throws silver dollars in the open doorway before he hides and she chases him. Joe fills his pockets with fun things for his wife to find: candy, gum, soap, handkerchiefs. They have dinner and Joe says he wants to take Missie May to the new ice cream shop. They discuss Otis D. Slemmons who is a “fancy” man who opened the shop. Joe feels he doesn’t compare to a businessman like that. Slemmons has been telling people how much money and women he has. Joe wants to show off his woman to Slemmons. The ice cream shop owner compliments Joe’s wife.

Joe works the night shift and comes home every morning. They’ve only been married a year, but Joe is ready for children. He arrives home to find Missie May in bed with Slemmons! In the fight to get Slemmons out the door, Joe ends up with Slemmons’s gold watch. Joe, overwhelmed with feelings, put the money in his pocket without thinking and goes to bed.

Joe doesn’t throw her out but loses his fire. They don’t play, joke or touch. He keeps the gold piece he took off Slemmons in his pocket. It works like a void between the couple.

After months, they finally make love and Joe goes to work. Missie May finds the gold piece beneath her pillow. As Missie studied the gold, she found it was not true; it was a gilded half dollar. That is why Slemmons never allowed anyone to touch his “gold.” Did Joe leave the fake money there for her to find just like Slemmons had?

Missie May is pregnant. Joe is losing his health, but they are still making a go of it. They have a baby boy. Joe’s mother tells him the baby looks just like him.

Now the couple knows that Slemmons was a fake all along. They work hard, but take the misstep in their stride. Joe takes the fake money one day to the candy store where he hasn’t been in a long time. He shows the candy man the fake money and tells him of the loser he beat up to end up with it. He spends the (proper amount) of money all on candy kisses for his wife and baby. When he gets home he begins tossing silver dollars into the front room.

Summary notes and possible class assignments on

“What White Publishers Won’t Print” by Z. N. Hurston

Whites lack of interest in internal lives/emotions of non-white peoples blocks understanding and increases fear
Lack of lit about the higher emotions of love life and upper class Negroes and the minorities in general
Publishers and producers only put forward those products that will make them money. Shy away from romantic life of Negroes and Jews
Public lack of interest–why?
Answer lies in THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL HISTORY: built on folk belief

All non-whites are simple stereotypes
There are no internal workings
Dedicated to the convenient “typical”

The public willingly accepts the untypical in Nordics, but feels cheated if the untypical is portrayed in others
Urgent to realize minorities do think–and about more than race. Internally like everyone else
Difference = bad. As long as the majority believes non-whites do not feel as they do they will continue the pattern of faulty thinking
We must believe we have something in common.
Evidence of high/complicated emotion ruled out which leads to lack of interest in romance without racial strife
“Reversion to type”: no matter how high we may seem to climb, put us under pressure and we revert to type–to the bush, the jungle
Necessary to know how the average behaves and lives
Literature and art should mirror nature

Possible teaching ideas for this work:

Thinking back on books you have been assigned so far, which cultural voices have you not heard?
Think about authors from other cultures. Choose a culture you know little about. Research authors that are well-known within that culture. Write a bio on this author which includes a picture and a list of their works.
Think about your own society: family, school, work. Who are the people you see frequently but do not know? Write an essay on what you may think of this person with the knowledge that you do not know them personally. We’ll follow by a question/answer session within class on what we think vs. what we know with classmates.
What is an issue that you have explored within yourself that you have never/rarely seen discussed through media?

Claude McKay

1889-1948

Study Notes

“If We Must Die” appeared in the July 1919 issue of the Liberator magazine. The poem, published after a series of race riots in cities across the country, was embraced widely as a call to resist injustice. McKay became one of the major voices of the Harlem Renaissance, producing work that evinced both race and class consciousness. The poems below are pieces from Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953).
Often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, he probably did more than anyone else to shape the trends that would later define that literary movement. Frequently explosive condemnations of bigotry and oppression were written invariably and ironically in traditional poetic forms as the sonnet, McKay’s favorite. His work appealed to traditional poetry readers as well as the new wave. McKay understood the power of race-conscious verse. His forms were traditional but his ideas were new.
McKay was born into the peasant class in Jamaica. McKay’s father instilled in his children a suspicion of white people because his own father had been enslaved. McKay’s childhood also embedded profound respect for community and a skeptical attitude toward religion.
McKay’s mentor, Walter Jekyll, helped him publish two books of dialect poetry: Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. McKay was the first black to receive the medal of the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, which came with a substantial cash award.
His most enduring literary ties were with white publications.
In 1919 McKay found much success in England with I.A. Richards, one of the foremost English literary critics of the century writing that McKay’s work was among “the best work that the present generation is producing.”
McKay returned to the U.S. and in 1922 published his most important collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows, virtually inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance. According to McKay, the book grew out of his urge to place the militant “If We Must Die,” his most famous poem, “inside of a book.” The racial violence that racked America in the summer of 1919 had inspired the sonnet, which later served as one of the unofficial rallying cries of the Allied Forces in WW II, particularly after it was recited by Winston Churchill in a speech against the Nazis. This poem proved to many that a black author had the authority to speak on black issues.
In the early 1920s, McKay gained popularity in Moscow where he traveled and spoke. He lived several years in France where he produced his first novel, Home to Harlem in 1928. The author continued to travel.
Home to Harlem was the first novel by a black writer to become a best-seller. People wanted to know about the nightlife and low life of Harlem. It is a tour of Harlem.
The next book, Banjo, continues the story of Ray and is one of the most extraordinary novels of the era, both for its cynical analysis of the impact of the grand forces of modernity (above all commerce and colonialism) on individual black lives, and for its almost documentary depiction of interactions among a wide range of characters of African descent from the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa. Banjo may also have had the greatest international reach of any novel associated with the renaissance. Translated into French in 1931, it was the single book with the most significant impact on the generation of Caribbean and African students that would later come to be known as the Negritude generation.
McKay’s third novel, Banana Bottom (1933) is often regarded as his finest achievement in fiction.
In 1934 McKay returned to Harlem. He floundered, then joined the New York branch of the Federal Writers’ Project. By 1937 he had completed his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. The last book he was able to publish in his lifetime was a study of black life in New York, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), which remains an important historical document, with well-wrought portraits of aspects of Harlem life in the 1930s (including the “numbers” racket and the religious leader Father Divine). McKay became a Catholic and taught at their Youth Organization.
McKay did not concern himself with what others thought his work should be. He worked for social change and believed that in order to tell the truth and make great art, some feelings are going to get hurt.

If We Must Die
This poem was written following the “Red Summer” of 1919 when antiblack riots broke out in several cities. McKay never said the poem referred to black and white people specifically. The rhyming scheme is A, B, A, B. In my own words:
If we must die, let it not be like penned-in hogs surrounded by barking, mocking dogs.
We need a noble way to die so our deaths mean something. If we die with dignity, even our killers will have to respect us. Even though we are outnumbered, we must take the fight to them. They may deal a thousand blows, but we will have one deathblow. Nothing lies before us but the grave, but we face it like men and we will fight all the way.

Enslaved
The author can’t think of his people without negative emotions. Much of the wording is negative and sad such as long-suffering, weary, despised, oppressed, enslaved, lynched, and disinherited. The author seeks revenge by an otherworldly force. In my own words:
When I think of all the suffering of my people I become sick with hate. I want an avenging angel to come down and utterly smite the white race. Let it be turned to smoke or disappear so that we may take off the yoke.

Outcast
Poem translated into my own words:
My spirit longs for where my ancestors came from. If I went there I would speak repressed thoughts, sing jungle songs. I long to return to peaceful darkness, but this world says I owe it something. I try to oblige. My life spark has darkened. I walk like a lonely ghost apart from others. I was not born in my native land. In this white land, I am out of step.

Harlem Renaissance

1919-1940

Study Notes

The 1920s was a decade of extraordinary creativity in the arts for black Americans called the Harlem Renaissance. Much of that creativity found its focus in the activities of African Americans living in New York City, particularly in the district of Harlem.
These years marked an especially brilliant moment in the history of blacks in America. Publications by African Americans became unprecedented in variety and scope. Poetry, fiction, drama, essays, music, dance, painting, and sculpture. There was a new sense of confidence and purpose; a sense of achievement.
Expressed in various ways, the creativity of black Americans undoubtedly came from a common source–the irresistible impulse of blacks to create boldly expressive art of high quality as a primary response to their social conditions, as an affirmation of their dignity and humanity in the face of poverty and racism. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance began to spread outward.
Serving in the armed forces contributed to a sense of worldliness. Exposure to new technologies and ideas. While Woodrow Wilson spoke of making the world safe for democracy, black people began asking why America was not safe for them. World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917 proved that major change was possible, even in the face of a powerful autocracy and entrenched injustice.
Black writers and intellectuals were now being exposed to international ideas such as socialism and race consciousness. There were debates as to whether one should use direct political action or use the arts for social advancement. Should they work on African problems and develop Africa’s resources?
From its inception, the cultural flowering of the Renaissance was characterized by attempts to “reach out.” There was a Negritude movement among the generation of French Caribbean and African students who arrived in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Renaissance was an international phenomenon due to the prominence of Caribbean writers.
Blacks began to be published by the white establishment.

Migration North
Segregation and poverty continued after emancipation. Migration to the North increasingly seemed an absolute necessity for blacks seeking a better life for themselves and their children.
New York City had better housing and WWI needed workers.
Harlem and New York quickly became the headquarters of many of the most important African American cultural and political national organizations, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, and Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. Newspapers and magazines played a pivotal role in setting the Renaissance in motion. The 1920s saw the pinnacle of periodical circulation. The Northern papers actively promoted the gospel of migration. Major black political organizations used paper media to spread their ideas. A smaller number of publications were associated with the black radical movements in the city. Though each publication had its own focus, each was dedicated to political progress and social uplift for black Americans and to the development of literary and artistic traditions of which the typical readers might be proud. These periodicals had a profound effect on black writings during this period, not only in subject matter but in form. It is a major reason for the preponderance of one-act plays and short stories.

The New Writers
The first glimmerings of the new day in literature probably came not with the work of a black writer but with that of a white–Three Plays for a Negro Theater, by Ridgely Torrence. James Weldon Johnson called the premiere of these plays in 1917, “the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theatre.” Overturning the tradition of depicting blacks in stereotypical minstrel forms, Torrence’s plays featured black actors representing complex human emotions and yearnings; in this sense, they anticipated not only plays of the 1920s about blacks such as The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1925) by the celebrated dramatist Eugene O’Neill but also the work of African American playwrights, poets, and fiction writers breaking with traditions that diminished and often insulted black humanity. Another landmark came in 1919, a year marked by several national antiblack riots, with the publication of the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay’s militant sonnet “If We Must Die.” Although the poem never alludes to race, to black readers it sounded a note of defiance against racism and racist violence unheard in black literature in many years. Then, in 1921, the musical revue Shuffle Along, written and performed by blacks, brought to the stage novel styles of song, dance, and comedy that captivated blacks and whites alike and underscored the emergence of a new generation of black artistry.
Blues and jazz blew up within the music industry. In the literature of the Renaissance, black music and dance became flash points in larger debates about “primitivism” and propaganda.
In 1922 came James Weldon Johnson’s anthology of verse, the Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson preferred authors who spoke well while also using their own voice. Above all, Johnson set the manipulation of language and other patterns of signification, not the overt assertion of political ideals, as the heart of the African American poetic enterprise. In the preface, Johnson pointed out things created uniquely by African Americans: spirituals, folk tales, the cake walk, and ragtime.
Like most white poets of the age, most black poets were enthralled by traditional forms of verse as established by the major British and American Romantic poets and their admirers. Modernist verse that resembles the work of Pound, for example, would not appear until much later, and then on a highly restricted scale. Unrivaled optimism emphasizing the power of endurance and survival, of love and laughter, as the only efficacious response to the painful circumstances surrounding their lives.
The New Negro (1925) edited by Alain Locke. Merging racial awareness with a desire for literary and artistic excellence, the text exuded a sense of confidence in the black world emerging from generations of repression in the U.S. Fused ethnic pride or nationalism with a desire for a fresh achievement and independence in art, culture, and politics.

Patrons and Friends
There have been questions regarding the impact of white patronage on black arts during the Harlem Renaissance. The movement did need funding. Many saw nothing but benefits in an association between blacks and whites. The two best known white patrons of the Renaissance were Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason. Vechten would have interracial parties. Other entities could be patrons such as grant-awarding philanthropies, publishers, and editors.

Emerging Conflicts
Many within the Harlem Renaissance knew they were out of touch with the rest of the blacks in America. There was also a generational gap characterized by the same issues as all generation gaps.
Most working within the movement saw the Renaissance as freedom and each expressed ideas of freedom in their own way. Some were political (with older artists falling more in this category) while others were anti-political. Sexuality was another way to express freedom although sexual exploits weren’t written about or displayed any more than the general modes of the day.

Drama, Poetry, Fiction
In the theater, a combination of song, dance and humor was popular. Willis Richardson’s best-known play is The Chip Woman’s Fortune (1923), the first serious play by an African American to be staged on Broadway.
In 1926 Du Bois established the Krigwa Little Theatre movement with four basic principles. The plays of a real Negro theatre must be 1) about us; 2) by us; 3) the theatre itself should be for us and 4) near us. Drama was almost certainly one of the weakest areas of achievement in the Harlem Renaissance although there were many great actors and entertainers.
Around 1928 there was a shift away from poetry to fiction.

The Great Depression and the Decline of the Harlem Renaissance
By 1937 the Renaissance was over. It had depended on a special prosperity in the publishing industry, the theater, and the art world. The crash of Wall Street. The Great Depression. Unemployment and the rise of crime damaged the image and the reality of Harlem as an artistic and cultural paradise. Harlem Riot of 1935.
The art of the Harlem Renaissance represents a prodigious achievement for a people hardly more than a half-century removed from slavery and enmeshed in the chains of dehumanizing segregation. The Harlem Renaissance can be understood as a conversation (and at times, a debate) among African American artists and intellectuals about the very meaning of modernity from a black perspective.
In this period, black American artists laid the foundations for the representation of their people in the modern world, with a complexity and a self-knowledge that have proven durable. The Renaissance created a body of art on which future writers and musicians and artists might build and in which the masses of blacks could see their own faces and features accurately and lovingly reflected.

On Reading

[Author’s note: There are all types of reading material and all reading time is well-spent. This information is specifically focused on books and how to study books. Thoughts on reading are never final; I may be adding to and editing this piece until I die.]

Do not undertake the acquisition of a book lightly. In fact, do not even pick up or buy a book that you do not sincerely intend to read. Books not only take up physical space but mental space. Now you are expected to do something with that thing you bought; that money you spent. When you buy or acquire a book, you are making a promise. Think of the book as a living being. You are now committed, at least until the last page of the book, to that being. In the acquisition of a book you are saying, “I may place you on the shelf, but you are there for a good reason. I will see you. Although you must wait your turn, you will have your time to shine. You will be lovingly handled, read, contemplated, marked, discussed, explored. What is inside of you will end up inside of me. I will not make you wait for nothing. You mean something to me.” If you are not going to read the book, why have it around? Ego boosting? One who has a well-curated bookshelf but does not read is only a fake.

Do not short-shrift the reading of the book. The reading of the book is the enactment of the commitment you have made to the book. Don’t attempt to read deeply in noisy or distracting places. Everyone knows you are not absorbing that Shakespearean play in the middle of a Starbucks. You are not contemplating moral philosophy while also watching television. Turn off your music. Turn off the tv. Go to a quiet place. Set yourself up for success by having something to sip within arm’s length. Have a pen or pencil nearby. Chew gum. I prefer the use of a bookmark rather than torturing the book with dog ears; that’s disrespectful. (Remember when I said to treat your book like a living being?) Bookmarks can be any flat material (even that Starbucks napkin), so don’t say you don’t have one. Proper bookmarks that have flat-edged stiffness are good to use for underlining so your annotations look less palsied. Choose active brain time to read as well. Sure, you can read at bedtime, but once you have determined you are falling asleep, you are no longer absorbing the material. Magazines are better suited for this purpose. If you only use reading in order to sleep, then you are not sincerely reading; you are using the text for an off-brand purpose. What you need is chamomile tea, not zombie-like meanderings through books.

Once you begin a book, commit to finishing the book. Don’t punk out. You can view the book as a challenge: You won’t best me! I have endurance! If the book evokes your fighting spirit, all the better. Don’t allow even the longest of books to intimidate you. YOU intimidate the book! If you are not on a timeline, who cares how long it takes you to complete the book? A page a day is for babies, but even three or six pages a day will eventually lead you to complete that book. Of course, it is best when the book absorbs your mind and you cannot put it down. In this case, you have found your genre and/or author. Find more books of like-kind because now you know this is your jam. The converse may be true. You may be reading a sci-fi paperback and early on you think this crap is really not for me. What are you going to do…give up? No! Finish that book if only to come to learn what you don’t like. It is difficult to argue against something you’ve never tried. When I find myself committed to a book I am not enjoying, I shift into viewing reading as a practice. I am practicing reading. I am practicing mindfulness. I am practicing patience. I am practicing reading aloud. I am expanding my vocabulary and knowledge. I am exploring what I don’t like. It sounds counter-intuitive, but we can’t constantly surround ourselves with only the things we like. We also learn from fully engaging in the things we don’t like. We are learning all the same.

Reading is The Great Escape. Don’t want to twiddle your thumbs in that waiting room? Take a book. Standing in line at the DMV? Take a book. Being told to take a nap but you are wide awake? (I’m thinking of my granddaughter here.) Take a book. Called for jury duty? Take a book. In jail again? (What did you do this time?) Demand your reading material! Reading is a tool to make certain periods of time that would normally be torture, fly by with the greatest of ease. We can’t all travel the world, but most of us can get to a library. We can’t all afford luxurious lives, but we can read about those who can. We can’t all be heroes, but we can find them in books. I know about so many things I’ve never experienced in real life because I’ve read about these things in books. In books, we can travel to far-away places and learn of ancient customs. We can envision people on the other side of the earth or aliens from outer space. We can explore imaginary worlds or knock around the thoughts of a crazy person. Being able to escape our current moment to experience the world through the eyes of others allows us a greater capacity for empathy. Perhaps there is a connection between an ancient sherpa’s quest for home and your own longings for your childhood abode. We can escape by reading more profound thoughts than we could ever think on our own. We can find words that represent images in just such a way to make us burst out laughing or crying. We can come across a set of ideas so achingly beautiful that we tattoo it on our arm…and it came about through words on a page!

Don’t judge yourself regarding the type of reading you prefer. Who cares? Like trashy romance novels? At least you are reading! Into manga or graphic novels? Historical war novels or biographies? Plays or sports writing? Children’s literature or Native American narratives? The topic is up to you; the exercise is the reading. When it comes to reading, there is literally something for everyone. Here is where your local library comes in handy. Walk right up to the closest librarian, plant your feet like Superman and say with all dignity, “I’m into dancing robots who farm but also use technology to learn about humans. Have anything like that?” They’ll come up with something, and it’s free! If some jerk comes along and says, “Ech…why are you reading that?” You could possibly deflect punching them in the nose by asking, “What are you reading?” If they don’t have an answer, you just won. If they do, then maybe you can discuss reading again in the future. You will just as often find people who say, “Oh wow! I love that book!” Instant friend. Books can bind people.

Some people are book borrowers (like those library visitors) while others are book keepers, like me. Both are excellent and most people are probably a combination of the two. People who frequent libraries perhaps seek a wide variety of reading material without having to give up money or space for the luxury of reading. They are discouraged from marking or dog-earring the books; they are merely a temporary keeper of the kingdom. They can start something, dislike the proposed journey and return the book the next day; no harm done. Book keepers are involved in a deeper commitment. They are willing to invest money and concede space to inanimate objects that simultaneously capture their hearts. They mark books. They highlight, underline, circle and write in the margins. They revisit the book and stick nameplates inside the front covers. I write short summaries at the end of each chapter. Lately, I’ve taken to writing not only my name inside the front cover but the season and year in which I read the book. I can picture my son or grandchildren one day inheriting the book and seeing what their grandma (or great-grandma!) marked in a book decades before. If I have enjoyed the book more than normal I make a note to myself to read it again in the future. Conversely, I may get to the end of a book and be so happy it is done! I don’t place a nameplate in those books; I give them away or take them to the Goodwill.

There are many different reading levels. You will hear of a child in third grade who “reads on a ninth grade level.” That means they are able to comprehend material above the normal reading comprehension for their age group. Try to diversify your levels of reading. Some stuff you read might be kind of dumb or just for fun. Some stuff you read is right at your level and you don’t have to spend a lot of time worrying about unfamiliar concepts or words. Every once in a while, try to tackle a reading project that is a bit beyond your normal comfort level. You are pressed to do this in school, but don’t drop the habit just because you’ve graduated. Pressing your reading into territory just beyond your total comprehension stretches and exercises the mind. There may be so many words in a row that you don’t completely understand, but are you comprehending the broad overview? Are you able to understand the overall idea? You may not want to spend time looking up every word you don’t know while in the midst of this exercise because it would prove too time consuming (unless looking up the meaning of unfamiliar words is your new super cool hobby). In this case, read slowly and in smaller chunks. Write notes in the margin when you clearly understand an idea. Spend time simply sounding out the words and reading upper-level sentences out loud. It does feel strange to be exploring a world of words and ideas that seem abstract, but if we practice reading beyond our level every once in a while we become less stressed by the practice. There is no shame in saying, “I don’t understand half of what she is saying, but I’m trying.”

On that note, don’t forget that you can always bring in outside reinforcements if you are not understanding what you are reading, or if you simply want to know more. If there is a concept that is not quite clear, you can always Google it! If you have completed a short story and now you are wondering how a certain theme works within it, you could use Google Scholar and type in something like “the role of domestic violence in the works of Zora Neale Hurston” and see what comes up. You could also use the search word “critique(s)” which will lead you to critics who have analyzed and written about the work. For example, in a Google, library or Google Scholar search box one could type: critiques on “the mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. You may then be bombarded with different points of view pointing out different ideas of that one work. Filter through and see what you are looking for. The text is not simply the text; there are usually texts (or some sort of outside reference) about that text that expand upon and attempt to explain the original work.

Reading for School/Study

Once you have signed up for a literature course (in high school or college) see if you can acquire the syllabus or reading list right then. Ask the teacher or school which books you will need and find a way to get them. If you are reading older material, don’t forget you can find many works in full on the internet or through your school’s library or online resources. Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) has tens of thousands of works-in-full whose copyright has expired. Beginning the reading list and taking notes before the semester begins is a life-saver. We are unable to predict a future in which we may acquire a new job or experience a bump in the road that will throw off our reading schedule. Reading early safeguards against unforeseen misadventures.

Once you have received the syllabus, (a rules and to-do list for the semester) create a reading calendar. The best syllabi will have the reading pages listed for each entry. This will let you know how many pages are required per week/project. If the page numbers are not listed, go inside the book and, using the table of contents, jot down how many pages are involved in each reading. Only you know how much reading time you have per day or on particular days. Break down the number of pages into a per-day goal. If all the readings for the week add up to one hundred pages, you will have to read 14.2 pages per day over the course of seven days. In school, there is no getting around this. If you skip a day of reading, guess what? Instead of fourteen pages tomorrow, you will have to read 29. Now you are under pressure and you are not going to absorb the material as well as if you’d stuck to the reading plan. At the end of each week check to see if you have met your reading schedule. If not, you have to set your alarm earlier or stay up later in order to get the reading done. Mark the readings off in your calendar as they are completed; this will boost feelings of success and accomplishment.

Accept the challenge that while taking a literature course you must do the readings. This is not a sit-in-class-and-I’ll-probably-pick-it-up scenario. Your professor may focus on one work and not the others for the week. They may focus on answering questions rather than deeply exploring the text. They may discuss historical events or the backgrounds of authors rather than the text. In all of these scenarios, you have not gained a deeper understanding of the readings themselves just by being in class. Do not take a reading class unless you sincerely commit to the process of reading deeply.

When reading for school you are always reading for a purpose. If you are not given reading guides or questions to answer along the way, then you are reading in the wilderness out there on your own to decide what is and is not important to note within the text. Whatever situation you are reading for in school, always incorporate your reading tools. You should never just plop down with only the material. You must have a pen or pencil and notebook paper or computer to take notes. With the amount of reading you have to do for school, you are not going to remember everything. As you read, mark what you have critically determined to be the most important elements on the page. Train yourself to think of a page, section, or chapter like this: If a person asked you “What was _ about?” what would you tell them? Would your notes (without the book) sufficiently answer their question? Imagine even more pressure: you are in the classroom and the professor asks you, “So, what takes place on page 375?” Would you be able to answer the question from what you underlined or highlighted on page 375? What would your notes from page 375 reveal? In this particular situation there is a handy trick: as you are writing or typing notes from the reading material, note the number of the page you are on along the left-hand margin of your notes. For each new page of material, update the page number. This trick helps in many ways. Page numbers within your notes help you save time when you are searching for something specific, and the professor can never trip you up in class with the above question. When the professor asks about the plot twist in chapter five, you have noted “Chapter Five” at the top of a page along with the page number. Your notes reveal the unusual twist that happened in this section. Boom! You raise your hand.
You are taking separate notes in addition to your in-text annotations for three reasons: 1) it keeps you on-task while reading. Constantly going back and forth from the page to writing/typing notes keeps your thoughts engaged and your body alert; 2) knowledge of the material goes deeper into your brain if you not only read the material but also put the ideas into your own words by writing or typing reading notes; 3) you will study these notes for quizzes and exams. Once you have read the material and notated the most important information into your own words and notes, you have a way to go over and over the material for whatever may be thrown at you in the future. Many professors allow/encourage open-note quizzes or exams. How smart would you look without your book having taken excellent notes you can now use to pass the test? Score!

When you are reading elevated college material, you may come across various unfamiliar textual practices. Anthologies are collections of writings that are merely pieces of larger texts. For example, instead of the entire novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the anthology you may get chapter one, chapter seven, and bits of chapters thirteen and twenty. The point with anthologies is to give you a broad overview of the best works in a certain genre or area of writing. To read the entire work, you’d have to buy or borrow it separately. Ideally, while reading anthologies you will come across an author or work that resonates with you leading you to go out and seek the entire work to read later on your own. For school purposes, you are merely learning more about the characteristics of certain types of writing performed during a certain time in history (sometimes associated with a particular country or geographical area). Because the works do not appear in full, you will see the word “From”, often in italics, which indicates that what you are about to read is not the entire work but selected pieces. You may also come across a series of asterisks running across a page. This signifies that at this particular juncture, the editors removed material from the original work and we are jumping ahead; something is missing. In addition, you will often find little numbers (in order) scattered throughout a work. These mini-numbers indicate footnotes which can usually be found at the bottom of the same page. Footnotes provide a reader additional information shared by the editors of the anthology or the author of the piece. The information may not flow in the body of the text or the information gives a definition, background, or historical information not needed in the body of the text. I prefer to stop at each footnote to read it right then. Afterwards, I go back and apply that new information to the sentence and context. Others view footnotes at the beginning or end of reading the page.

While reading for school pay special attention to the full names of authors, the full titles of the pieces, the year they were published, and from what country or area. For each new text, write the name of the author in large script at the top. Include their birth and death date. Before their works begin, there is often a biographical section that tells us about the author. Begin taking notes here. Where were they born? Did they suffer through unusual hardships? Did they have early success? Were they rich, poor, educated, or not? Was there anything unusual about their families like mental illness or extreme poverty? What writing characteristics did they come to be known for? What are two or three titles of their most famous works? What I search for is any biographical information that may have influenced their writing. What in their background can give us insight to their work?

Once you get to the text itself, note the full title of the piece. It may be long, but thems the breaks. (Yes, I meant to write that.) Pay special attention to lead sentences (the first indented sentence of each paragraph) that announce the topic of the paragraph. You don’t always have to notate them, but each new paragraph should move the story or material forward. Also, pay special attention to the last sentence of the paragraph. Pause at the conclusion of each paragraph. Do you understand what is going on? If not, go back and read it again. If you still do not understand the material, jot down a question (or place a sticky note) next to that page number in your notes. At the end of the paragraph, ask yourself if there is anything important to note. Sometimes a paragraph can result in a one-word note like, “war” and the next paragraph might be “famine” and the next, “farming.” If the author is simply describing an area during a certain time, you will still have noted the broad ideas discussed on that particular page. Not all paragraphs warrant a note.
Look for themes that seem to run throughout the piece. Themes can be many things, but a few examples are man vs. nature, the search for immortality, the downfalls of hubris, gender roles, naming and identity, rituals, social mores, the family, ritual, the domestic sphere, etc. Is there a unifying idea that each part seems to reflect? What is it and how does each part reflect that theme? Is there a recurring symbol such as decay or death? Why do you think this symbol continues to appear? Does something happen more than once like dreams or missed opportunities? Does society place rules and restrictions upon the people? What role does gender play in the story? Is religion playing a role?

Depending on your reading experience, you will encounter words you don’t know. Depending on why you are reading, it may be best to pause, click over to dictionary.com, plug in the word, and note the definition. This technique is needed if you are analyzing or writing about a specific idea or if you are required to know certain vocabulary. Pausing to look up words does not mean you are dumb; it means you are becoming smarter. If, time and again, you simply skip over words you don’t know then you will continue not to know them. How is this learning? An expansion of vocabulary is a byproduct of active reading. Note the definition in the margin of the text or in your notes. You could also set up a vocabulary page that you revisit from time to time just to learn new words. Many words have more than one meaning. You will have to study the context of the word to understand how it is being used. Use clues from the rest of the sentence to choose the best definition. The meanings of words also shift over time and can be used in different ways in different countries.
Slowly sound out unfamiliar words; don’t simply skip them. I like attempting unusual names out loud just to see how close I can get to actually saying it. I may be incorrect, but I’m trying (and no one else is around, so who cares). I became slightly irritated one semester in class while observing students who mumbled their way through the name Dostoyevsky. Not only did it hurt my feelings for one of my favorite authors, but they didn’t take the time to look at the name more closely. The name Dostoyevsky may look intimidating at first glance, but sound it out: Dos-toy-ev-sky. You can say all of those syllables and the name is spelled like it sounds. It is only difficult if you skip over or mumble through it because you didn’t take the time to try.

From time to time, read out loud. It doesn’t matter how slow your progress. Sometimes reading slowly is better if it means you are taking in more of the information. Reading quickly doesn’t make you smarter; comprehending what you read makes you smarter. You may be surprised how difficult it is to smoothly read text out loud. While your mouth is verbalizing the current words, your brain is listening to the information while simultaneously your eyes are scanning ahead for the next bit of information. I often see students attempt to skip ahead of the wording in order to read faster; that is not reading what is on the page. You are “reading” what you imagine is on the page. Take the time to complete each word and try to incorporate inflection and emotion. The more you practice reading out loud the smoother you will become. Sometimes hearing the words out loud helps you make sense of a piece. Sometimes you want to share a particular thought or image with someone else. Sometimes you just want to hear your own beautiful voice. Sometimes you want a challenge. You can’t read all material out loud all day; it tires the voice. You may switch between reading out loud for one page and reading in silence the next just to keep yourself in active reading mode.

As you take notes you are also asking questions of the text. Active reading is like a conversation between the text and the reader. Your mind is doing multiple things at once. You are performing all the tasks mentioned above, yet in addition, you are using the back of your mind (I call it the back burner) to roll around ideas such as: This has happened to me! Can this be true? The same storyline happened in my favorite show this year! I like this writer’s tone or style. I wonder if the author combined events to give us a representation of reality at that time. This female character is taking on the role normally given to men. There is a leap in logic here that I don’t think holds up. This part is ridiculous. This reflects in direct parallel to what is happening today. These behaviors seem to indicate mental illness. Ect. Some of those “back burner” ideas and sparks could later lead to an essay or class discussion. You are reading what is on the page, but you are also connecting what is there to other things in reality.

Along with these critical questions, sometimes you just have flat-out questions. I don’t understand what is going on, or how did the author get from here to there? Not understanding while reading will cause discomfort. That is okay. When we are in a state of not knowing, we feel unmoored, somehow intellectually (and slightly emotionally) out of control. Becoming a reader means accepting a level of discomfort that varies with the material. Sometimes we see the big picture but may get lost in the finer details. Sometimes a piece is just beyond our grasp…above our heads. This is why you have a professor. Write down your questions. Go to office hours. Use email. Google it! Good professors and teaching assistants love to answer questions of students who have read the material, taken notes, and really tried to understand. They see you putting in the effort so they are willing to explain further. Don’t be upset if they tell you that you are concentrating on the wrong stuff. Ask to be re-directed so you don’t waste further time. You can’t get your questions answered if you don’t ask the questions! I remember in one of my grad classes I came upon a piece of philosophy that, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand. It was difficult to even take notes because the ideas were so muddled in my brain. When it came to writing a response paper that week I asked the professor if, instead of writing the regular short response, I could draw what I thought was happening in the form of a diagram or map. He loved the idea and accepted the work. What I found most interesting was that the diagram formed a circle! The point is that I was engaging with the text and trying (albeit in an alternate form) to make sense of it.

Another way of attempting to comprehend the material is pretending that you will have to teach the material. (Sometimes professors actually assign this project.) Pretending that you have to teach the material really shines a bright light on close reading, note taking and comprehension. If you have thirty minutes to teach a short story, would you first give the class a handout? What would be printed there? How much time would you spend on the plot versus various themes or ideas within the text? What issues would lead to relevant class discussion? If you were to give a quiz or test, what questions would you include and how would you answer them? If you were to generate a reading guide what would it include? The teacher’s point of view is a simple yet effective brain trick to hyper-focus your attention.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1872-1906

Best known for his lively and often genial verse in a literary version of African American speech. He could “feel the Negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically.” Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) was the poet’s best selling book. Dunbar is frequently represented as a cautionary example of a black artist co-opted by white media hype which only postponed the bitter realization resonant in his most poignant line: “I know why the caged bird sings.”
Wrote from a regional point of view; folksy, nostalgic celebration of rural life and homey values. Adapted stereotypes towards more socially redemptive roles. Although his was a peculiar literary dialect and not linguistically accurate, it lent an air of apparent authenticity to the stories he told of enslaved individuals who were quaint and amusing, but also loving and courageous. Promoted a myth of benign southern race relations. Wearing the mask let Dunbar “mouth with myriad subtleties” truths that whites refused to confront face to face.
Dunbar’s parents were former Kentucky slaves who gave the writer much valuable material. Born in Ohio. The only black student in his high school but was high achieving and voted senior class president.
In 1893 Dunbar took out a loan to subsidize the printing of his first book, Oak and Ivy, a collection of fifty-six poems. It was popular due to the range of matter and mood and the level of maturity. Dunbar used a double-voiced strategy by switching back and forth between black dialect and Standard English. He tried to find ways to enlighten his readers without alienating them.
His most famous volumes of poetry were Majors and Minors (1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). Reading tours enhanced Dunbar’s popularity. Earned a clerkship in the U.S. Library of Congress. Four books of short stories and four novels. Many stories spoke frankly about racial injustice in the South while others employed fairly stereotyped images of African Americans and drew little upon authentic A. A. culture. But his final book, The Sport of the Gods (1903), is important for addressing a major question for black Amerca at the turn of the century–the advantages and disadvantages of migration from the rural South to the urban North. The concerns behind this grim foray into urban realism also impelled Dunbar to publish “The Fourth of July and Race Outrages” in the New York Times in 1903, a sardonic attack on the myopic indifference of American patriotism to the race riots, lynchings, peonage, and disfranchisement of blacks in the South. By this time, however, Dunbar’s steadily worsening health, brought on by heavy drinking and tuberculosis, together with his harried finances, allowed him little time or energy to undertake serious new departure in his writing.

An Ante-Bellum Sermon [poem in the vernacular in my own words]
We have gathered to comfort each other.
The Lord sent Moses to talk to the Pharaoh. Tell him to let the people go.
The Pharaoh better listen or I’ll beat his ass
No matter your battles, the Lord will come to help you
The Lord is strong when he dons his armour, but I’m talking about the old days
The Lord loved Israel, but that did not lessen the amount of love he has to give
I judge these people in the bible by their acts
The Pharaoh believed in slavery, but every mother’s son is free
So-called Christians who accept slavery are not reading their bibles correctly
Since the beginning of time, the Lord has said his self-same free should belong
to every man
Our modern-day Moses is coming; I can hear his feet.
Don’t start bragging or getting too big for your britches
When we become free we will praise Jesus.
For now, let us pray.

We Wear the Mask [poem in Standard English put into my own words]
To the public, we wear a mask that hides all our true thoughts and emotions. We lie and smile.
The world doesn’t need to know every little thing about us.
We smile, but inside we are crying.
We sing, but our road is long.
Let the world think what it will. “We wear the mask!”

Sympathy [poem in Standard English in my own words]
I know what a caged bird feels when spring is emerging.
I know why a bird will harm himself and bleed trying to escape his cage.
When the beat-up bird sings it is not for joy; it is a prayer to heaven to let it be free.

Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance 1865-1919

“The Bonds of Peace”
The Civil War had not been fought over abolition, but it had broken slavery’s bonds. African American troops convinced many that Africa’s descendants would give their lives to ensure the survival of the U. S. The first Union soldiers to occupy the captured Confederate capital were from the all-African American 25th Army Corps. One of the first citizens to reclaim Virginia was a former slave.
The Civil War was very complicated, involving the following issues and more: could a country based on equality endure? Power issues between federal and state governments, our economy, immigration, religion, culture, science. Blacks, Europeans, Native Americans.
We hung together, but now could we live up to the Constitution while incorporating new ideas and opportunity? The societal role of the freed slaves was yet to be determined, along with the roles of all women and non-white males.
Gender roles and rights took on a new urgency. The war had forced women to become more independent and they wanted to expand their roles. Women began organizing ways to help people and improve society. They began writing and speaking and making connections between themselves and other marginalized groups. They began to become more accepting of those who were different than themselves.
Even though some were speaking of a coming together, others recognized that the agriculture of the South and the mercantile-based North would involve individualism and imperialistic expansion.
The war did not dismantle the plantation system; it just morphed into sharecropping and tenant farming. First transcontinental railroad, 1869. Three more to follow with the addition of canals. Cities began to form. There was a pressing westward. Between 1860 and 1900 immigration from Europe exploded.
There was a mixing of cultures which did not enhance the lives of Native Americans or where they lived.

A Decade of Reconstruction
Generally seen as between 1865 and 1877, but actually began earlier. The building of refugee centers, hospitals, schools, and other social services. The Reconstruction Act struck down many restrictive codes targeting African Americans. Established the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865-1870) to protect the rights and lives of blacks in the South. Many joined to set up schools, establish cooperatives and train people in citizenship. Some of the schools later became colleges.
The most significant pieces of Reconstruction legislation were three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) provided equal protection to African Americans under the law, and the Fifteenth (1870) granted suffrage to black men. The constitutional amendments were neither uniformly enforced nor even recognized in all parts of the country. Once the troops moved out, vigilante and white supremacist terrorist organizations embarked on a campaign of brutal suppression.

Separate as the Fingers
Within two or three years after Reconstruction, random violence and systematic oppression were supported by Jim Crow laws, which legalized racial segregation in virtually every area of life. The turn of the century saw lynchings and race riots.
Northerners had moved on to issues of suffrage, temperance and pacifism. People argued over issues of equal rights. More and more of the vanguard grew old and died. New generations came up who were not born in slavery; conditions had changed, so the fight had to change.
Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute took a half-step, vocational approach. Become prepared for the privileges to come.
In 1883 the Supreme Court threw out the Civil Rights Act in favor of Jim Crow laws. Black men could not vote and everything became segregated by law.

Lifting as We Climb
The decades just before and after the start of the 20th century was, for African Americans, the Decades of Disappointment. There began the “great migration” from the South to the North. The “talented tenth” or the fortunate few attended colleges, founded theater groups, traveled abroad, edited and published periodicals, and established educations, civic, and political organizations they believed would, in fact, ensure upward mobility. African Americans participated effectively in groups such as the Populist Party, the Knights of Labor, the women’s suffrage movement, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Wealth and power were still far from evenly distributed, yet there were an increasing number of reform movements. Black people were mostly interested in their physical and economic security. The Washington vs. Du Bois debate is mentioned here. [Explore this topic further. It is one of the great debates in African American literature.]
Literacy increased along with the black middle class and even a small but wealthy social elite grew in number and influence. A. A. institutions prospered. Churches, academic education, day-care centers, employment bureaus, housing projects and orphanages. Discrimination in education and in job opportunities increased. Lynchings.
More freedom in the urban North, yet even there they were subject to intimidation and exploitation. When men left for World War I, America needed workers and put people of color to work.

Writing Things Right
The years between the Civil War and World War I saw A. A. authors record the world in parallel to, intersecting with, and diverging from the methods of other American writers. The most popular literature in the U.S. taught and affirmed social mores. Yet increasingly the artist’s obligation to instruct was accompanied by the desire that it be done both pleasingly and also in a manner that showed off the writer’s familiarity with the literary canon. Thus 19th-century American literature tried not merely to delight and instruct but also to highlight intellectual achievement and aesthetic sophistication. African American writing was primarily a means of instructing themselves and others and of correcting the historical record. Disparagement of their intellectual and creative capacities. Exoticization and marginalization of A. A. culture and aspirations.
Thus A. A. literature in the mid-nineteenth and early 20th centuries was used to confirm and to manifest creativity and genius while also documenting and shaping social, political, and spiritual aspirations and conditions.

Activist Autobiographies
Slave narratives had been critical to the abolitionist effort. In the Reconstruction period, African Americans relied heavily on personal testimony. Generally using their slave past as prelude, warning, and resource, postbellum slave narrators recast the sin and suffering of slavery as trials and tribulations from which they and fellow former slaves, like other survivors of the Civil War or any past trauma, emerged wiser and stronger.
During Reconstruction especially, narrators concentrated on the lessons learned from slavery and the progress made after emancipation that would entitle African Americans to full participation in the building and maintaining of a new and improved version of the “City upon a Hill.”
Biographies, memoirs, life stories ranged in focus. There were stories about religious leaders, community activists, domestic servants, explorers and travelers. They presented their experiences in overcoming adversity as models for the present and as blueprints for a better future. “Progress report autobiographies” became a subgenre. Stories of those who had endured trials but experienced triumph. These autobiographical texts served also to instruct other blacks that they could and should buy into the American Dream.

Literacy as Liberation
Black writers aimed to inspire students; they wanted more A. A. writers! They needed accurate and relevant texts. Need for books that adequately expressed the history, position, and aspirations of African Americans. A. A. authored books showed white Americans how blacks had contributed to the rebuilding of America and instructed the new generation regarding how to have a more satisfying future. As the century advanced the projects became more grand and diverse. All these texts hoped to enlighten and inspire.

Publishing for the People
Even though these works were created by African Americans, they were meant for all to read. Black writers followed major literary trends. Some black character types and situations were re-written to portray African Americans more positively or accurately.
Black authors often had trouble finding publishers. Sometimes a writer’s connections helped them get published, or they wrote about a focused topic promoted by a certain printer or outlet. Sometimes a black author’s work could be promoted as part of a series shared by white writers as well. The African American press promoted many black authors while being ignored by literary scholars.

The African American Press
A diverse group of black individuals and institutions who wanted to promote black authors to black audiences and wanted to promote uplifting, positive and forward-thinking messages. There was advertising and contests. By 1896 more than 150 newspapers and magazines had been founded. Most were poorly funded, local and short-lived. Others merged with larger papers and had a significant impact on national and international perspectives. The art was political and quality was more important than quantity.
The African American press included publications by special-interest groups such as churches, labor unions, sororities, and fraternities. The motto was “lifting as we climb.” Those who were leading turned back to lend a hand to those coming up behind them.
The period between 1890 and 1910 was known as “the women’s era.” Women used fiction, essays, autobiographies and investigative reporting to voice their perspectives and record their activities.
The A. A. press was created by and strongly dependent on A. A. church leaders. A press could provide a church with disciplines, hymnals and records as well as educational materials for church literacy programs. This led to bookstores, distribution systems and literary magazines. Examples are the AME Book Concern and the National Baptist Publishing Company. Songs, poems, autobiographies, histories, fiction championing abolition, temperance, suffrage, education and economic development.