Choose either the poem “Not my cross to bear,” (p. 34), or “I have Dreams Too, I have Dreams” (P.83) or any other poems from the book, “It’s hard to be a Black Man in America and other African American Poems,” By Elroy Alister Esdaille, and connect it to one of the themes from a to k, or one of the quotations from 1-34 from pages 94-131 from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” and discuss how they relate or connect to each other. You should use at least one or more lines from the poem. (At least 250 words).
Themes:
- The purpose or roles of singings and songs in the lives of the character.
- Getting ruined
- Beauty and fright
- Beauty vs. virtue
- Dreams die
- Wanting to belong
- Domestic abuse
- Children being raised by someone else
- A cross to bear
- Missing that rainbow
- She gets no respect except when representing her Master
Quotations:
- “My mother singing something about trains in Arkansas. … I sat down on the floor to listen to the song’s story, and noticed how strangely she was behaving” (Morrison, p. 98).
- “… Mr. Buford came running out with his gun, and Mama told him to go somewhere and sit down, and Daddy said no, give him the gun, and Mr. Buford did, and Mama screamed, and Mr. Henry shut up and started running, and Daddy shot at him and Mr. Henry jumped out of his shoes and kept running in his socks. Then Rosemary came out and said that Daddy was going to jail, and I hit her. ” (Morrison, p. 100).
- “‘But why are you crying?’ I don’t want to be ruined” (Morrison, p. 101)!
- “Laughter at once beautiful and frightening” (Morrison, p. 104).
- “Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white well-behaved children and parents who play there. … Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams” (Morrison, p. 105).
- “You lying. You don’t have no pretty dresses” (Morrison, p. 107).
- “Another door opened, and in walked a little girl, smaller and younger than all of us. She wore a pink sunback dress and pink fluffy bedroom slippers with two bunny ears pointed up from the tips. Her hair was corn yellow and bound in a thick ribbon. When she saw us, fear danced across her face for a second” (Morrison, p. 108).
- “Crazy fool … my floor, mess … look what you … work …get on out …now that … crazy … my floor, my floor … my floor” (Morrison, p. 109).
- “But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer” (Morrison, p. 110).
- “She never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace” (Morrison, p. 111).
- “The songs caressed her, and while she tried to hold her mind on the wages of sin, her body trembled for redemption, salvation, a mysterious re-birth that would simply happen” (Morrison, p. 113).
- “A kind of city-street music where laughter belies anxiety, and joy is as short and straight as the blade of a pocketknife” (Morrison, p. 114-115).
- “She had not known there was so much laughter in the world” (Morrison, p. 116).
- “The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way” (Morrison, p. 118).
- “You’d think with a pretty house like that and all the money they could holt on to, they would enjoy one another” (Morrison, p. 119).
- “Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can’t like folks just ’ cause they has the same mama” (Morrison, p. 119).
- “She said she would let me stay if I left him. I thought about that. But later on it didn’t seem none too bright for a black woman to leave a black man for a white woman” (Morrison, p. 120).
- I seen she didn’t understand that all I needed from her was my eleven dollars to pay the gas man so I could cook” (Morrison, p. 121).
- “…And say out one side of her mouth she’s thinking of your future but won’t give you your own money so you can buy something besides baloney to eat” (Morrison, p. 121).
- “There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams” (Morrison, p. 122).
- “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” (Morrison, p. 122).
- “In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. (Morrison, p. 122).
- “she was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen” (Morrison, p. 122).
- “White women taking such good care of their women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet” (Morrison, p. 123).
- “There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly” (Morrison, p. 123).
- “When he got to me he said now these here women you don’t have trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses” (Morrison, p. 125).
- “Why say they don’t have pain? Just cause ’ she don’t cry? ’Cause she can’t say it, they think it ain’t there” (Morrison, p. 125).
- “Holding Cholly as a model of sin and failure, she bore him like a crown of thorns, and her children like a cross” (Morrison, pp. 126-127).
- “She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all her needs” (Morrison, p. 127
- “The thing she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style, and were absorbed by the dingy storefront” (Morrison, p. 127).
- “The creditors and service people who humiliated her when she went to them on her own behalf respected her, were even intimidated by her, when she spoke for the Fishers” “She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all her needs” (Morrison, p. 128).
- “All the meaninglessness of her life was in her work” “She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all her needs” (Morrison, p. 128).
- “Them she bent toward respectability, and in so doing taught them fear” “She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all her needs” (Morrison, p. 128).
- “Only thing I miss sometimes is that rainbow, but Like I say, I don’t recollect it much anymore” (Morrison, p. 131)
NB*
You are required to respond to at least one student’s post. (At least 50 words).
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