English 223
Term 2, Week 1
Three Events
Assata Shakur film screening Wednesday Janury 28th,
7pm, room tba
Jack Halberstam Thursday February 5th
Wednesday 18th Class Change
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who
underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white
man, who is their next-door neighbor, I say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service,
and in the professions. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to
freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions
of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn
to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common
occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between
the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No
race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing
a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we
permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign
birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I
would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast
it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity
and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of
your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes
and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and
cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make
possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down
your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on
these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will
buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your
factories.
“Hundreds of students and teachers had been herded into the sun-backed chapel to
listen to the banal, the patronizing, and even the insulting remarks of one of the
renowned white preachers of state […] he had said that if all Negroes would only
take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the
Naxos products, there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew
what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They
knew enough to stay in their places and that, said the preacher, showed good taste.
He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a
time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know
when and where to stop. He hoped, he sincerely hoped, that they wouldn’t become
avaricious and grasping, thinking only of adding to their earthly goods, for that
would be a sin in the sight of Almighty God. And then he had spoken of
contentment, embellishing his words with scriptural quotations and pointing out to
them that it was their duty to be satisfied in the estate to which they had been
called, hewers of wood and drawers of water. And then he had prayed” (3)
What her status as a mixed-race black woman is:
How is she understood?
How is she expected to behave?
What is the promise held out to her in this space and
what fulfillment does this space give her?
What activities does Helga engage in in these spaces?
What ultimately she critiques about it or what isn’t
fulfilled?
How does her Larsen’s representation of this space
intersect with the ideas of racial uplift
The End of Desire
“It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities,
about clothes and books, a out the sweet mingled smell of
Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with
inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless
music. It was so hard to think about a feasible way of retrieving
all these agreeable, desired things. Just then. Later. When she got
up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then afterwards,
she could work out some arrangement. So she dozed and
dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run on.
Away.
And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again
without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes
of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child”
“Larsen stressed the contradictory nature of the search
for a female self by refusing the romance and
structuring the relation of the individual to the social
formation through the interconnection of sexual,
racial, and class identity. The conclusion of the text
offered no imaginary resolutions to the contrdaictions
Larsen raised. As readers, we are left mediating on the
problematic nature of alternative possibilities of a
social self. Consider the metaphor of quicksand; it is a
condition where individual struggle and isolated effort
are doomed to failure” –Hazel Carby
Naxos
“The dean was a woman from one of the ‘first families’ – a great ‘race’
woman; she, Helga Crane, a despised mulatto, but something intuitive,
some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for
gorgeousness told her that bright colours were fitting and that darkcomplexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown,
and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones
lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever
seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress,
which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she
wondered, didn’t someone write A Plea for color?
These people yappled loudly of race, of race consciousness,
of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love
of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous laughter.
Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty
in the race they had marked for destruction” (18)
Harlem
“‘To me,’ asserted Anne Grey, ‘the most wretched Negro prostitute that walks One Hundred
and Thirty-fifth Street is more than any president of these United States, not excepting
Abraham Lincoln.’ But she turned up her finely carved nose at their lusty churches, their
picturesque parades, their naïve clowning on the streets. She would not have desired or even
have been willing to live in any section outside the black belt, and she would have refused
scornfully, had they been tendered any invitation from white folk. She hated white people with a
deep and burning hatred, with the kind of hatred which, finding itself held in sufficiently
numerous groups, was capable some day, on some great provocation, of bursting into
dangerously malignant flames.
But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living. While
proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she yet disliked the songs, the dances,
and the softly blurred speech of the race. Toward these things she showed only a disdainful
contempt, tinged sometimes with a faint amusement. Like the despised people of the white race,
she preferred Pavlova to Florence Mills, John McCormack to Taylor Gordon, Walter Hampden
to Paul Robeson. Theoretically, however, she stood for the immediate advancement of all things
Negroid, and was in revolt against social inequality” (59)
Copenhagen
“Helga Crane was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred for the
cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt ashamed, betrayed, as if these pale pink and
white people among whom she lived had suddenly been invited to look upon
something in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget. And she was
shocked at the avidity at which Olsen beside her drank it in.
But later, when she was alone, it became quite clear to her that all along
they had divined its presence, had known that in her was something, some
characteristic, different from any that they themselves possessed. Else why had they
decked her out as they had? Why subtly indicated that she was different? Any they
hadn’t despised it. No, they had admired it, rated it as a precious thing, a thing to
be enhanced, preserved. Why? She, Helga Crane, didn’t admire it. She suspected
that no Negroes, no Americans, did. Else why their constant slavish imitation of
traits not their own? Why their constant begging to be considered as exact copies of
other people? Even the enlightened, the intelligent ones demanded nothing more”
The South
“So, though with growing yearning she longed for the great ordinary
things of life, hunger, sleep, freedom from pain, she resigned herself to
doing without them. The possibility of alleviating her burdens by a
greater faith became lodged in her mind. She gave herself up to it. It
did help. And the beauty of leaning on the wisdom of God, trusting,
gave to her a queer sort of satisfaction. Faith was really quite easy. The
more weary, the more weak she became, the easier it was. Her religion
to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light
of an unbearable reality.
This utter yielding in faith to what had been sent her found
her favor, too, in the eyes of her neighbors. Her husband’s flock began
to approve and comment this submission and humility to superior
wisdom. The womenfolk spoke more kindly and more affectionately of
the preacher’s Northern wife” (126)