some mess over sb, aka sunday night

Margaret Story
Mr. Ehret
AP Lang
March 16, 2008

Spring Break Assignment

“How It Feels To Be Colored Me”

Analysis

Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” from The World Tomorrow reflects on Hurston as a young girl and both her realization and acceptance of being colored and the confidence and peace that came with it. Hurston remembers “becoming” negro and living in a negro town in Florida, a town where Northern tourists were ostracized but observed and mocked. Although most of the townspeople’s favorite place was their front porch, meant for observing those passing, Hurston was partial to the theatre gate post where she would greet automobiles welcoming them in southern tongue to the state of Florida. Hurston was bewildered as a child when whites would pay her small silver for dancing and singing, the blacks did not do this, and she enjoyed performing and would do so without pay. When Hurston moved to a school in Jacksonville she no longer felt like her townspeople’s “Zora” and felt even more like a colored girl. With the realization that she was a colored girl came a new found independence and confidence. Zora did not lament slavery, weep at her ancestors past, Hurston was not “tragically colored,” what happened had happened and she was moving on, as a colored girl. Zora came to realize that the only times she truly felt colored was when she was in a sea of whites, and then the differences were apparent. The same could be said of the white in the sea of blacks at a jazz show Zora attended, he sat motionless while Zora moved to the music letting her “colored-ness” show. When Zora’s true character emerges she is race – less, she belongs to no sect, no people, just Zora. Even racial gestures and discrimination were looked at in a humorous, non-hostile way by Hurston. Hurston closes by comparing all races to miscellaneous objects that are poured out of a brown bag, when the items are placed back in the bag in the same manner they exited, does a bit of colored glass matter? Hurston successfully draws the comparison between white and black, both miscellaneous objects that will become jumbled both in the bag, and when poured out.

Vocabulary

Proscenium – noun, the stage of an ancient Greek or Roman theater
Extenuate – verb, to lessen the seriousness or make light
Assegai – noun, a slender hardwood spear or light javelin usually tipped with iron and used in southern Africa

Tone

Confident, Self Assured

Rhetorical Terms

Exaggeration/Humor – “How can any deny themselves the please or my company! It’s beyond me.” (p. 117)

Simile – “I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall.” (p. 117)

Metaphor – “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea.” (p. 116)

Personification – “[Jazz] constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies…it rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until breaks through the jungle beyond it.” (p. 116)

Appeal to Pathos – “ They [white people] liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop.” (p. 115) *I had use this because this was not a essay ripe with rhetorical terms*

“A Sweet Devouring”

Analysis

Eudora Welty’s “A Sweet Devouring” collected in The Eye of the Story captures a young girl’s passion for reading and the obstacles and trials that one young lady will go through to continue reading as much as possible. Welty, even as a young child, loses herself in literature, often times wanting to mimic actions done in books in her real life such as baking a cake with a hole in it. Welty especially enjoyed writing with trouble as a central theme and would devour books, too quickly. The Purple Jar from Tales from Maria Edgeworth tells of a little girl who decides to buy a purple jar because of its beauty, not its practicality or usefulness. The young girl learns that the jar is only purple if it is filled with purple water, and to her mother’s liking now sees the importance of usefulness over aesthetics. Welty would go to the library and read everything, especially series books: The Five Little Peppers, The Wizard of Oz, The Little Colonel, and The Green Fairy Book. Welty found that she was not partial to the Randy’s series that focused on seasons that did not take very much precedence nor did they provide an interesting topic for Welty to read about. Welty had to be devious when it came to getting past the librarian who would only allow for two book check outs daily, even though Welty could read “two books in two minutes.” Aunt Virginia understood Welty’s passion for reading and sent a large book to her that had six volumes the Welty read eagerly. When Christmas arrived Welty’s grandfather took her to the store where Welty was introduced to The Camp Fire Girls series, tales of camp fire girls and Mr. Holmes who wanted to catch them. Even though Welty knew she was reading the false version of the series she still believed that no one could have written anything better. Welty continued her reading and one day came across a different kind of literature, volumes not series, written by Mark Twain, which Eudora of course devours.

Vocabulary

Raucous – adjective, disagreeably harsh or strident
Guinea – noun, an English gold coin issued from 1663 to 1813 and fixed in 1717 at 21 shillings

Tone

Genuine, Enthusiastic

Rhetorical Terms

Exaggeration – “I read them [books] with love – but snap, I finished them. I read everything just alike – snap.” (p. 246)

Exaggeration – “And exchange them [books] for two more in two minutes.” (p. 248)

Simile – “…and to buy some of it was like breaking into French bread.” (p. 249)

Simile – “…those books once open stayed open and lay on their backs helplessly fluttering their leaves like a turned-over June bug.” (p. 249)

Humor – “When I used to ask my other which we were, rich or poor, she refused to tell me…I was dying to hear that we were poor…and my mother wouldn’t tell me, she said she was too busy.” (p. 246)

“Coatesville”

Analysis

In John Jay Chapman’s Coatesville published in Harper’s Weekly and collected in Memories and Milestones, Chapman discovers that truth that everyone is involved in some way in crimes and persecutions, and not many realize that the crimes continue throughout history, while we stand and watch. Chapman has met to discuss a terrible crime in which no prosecution was made, proof thereof higher guilt according to Chapman, and to share how everyone is involved with this crime. Chapman, about a year ago, had read of a crime in which a human was burned alive while citizens stood as bystanders, no one stepped forward to put an end to the heinous scene. The crime took place in Coatesville but the event seemed to mirror the heart and soul of all of America. This scene has never left Chapman who is continually bothered by the lack of courage, willingness to do the right thing, and the excessive presence of hatred among the citizens who watched the man burn that day. Chapman was paralyzed in the nerves that it never registered to the bystanders, such “ignorant people,” what they were watching and what role they were playing in this man’s death. Chapman remains today, still aware and cognizant of what he saw that day when he read what happened in Coatesville, and holds a prayer meeting in the very town. There they prayed not for the people of Coatesville, but the people of the world, who are all involved in similar crimes and prosecutions, just as the whole world had watched the man burn the next day on the news. With every such crime comes a glimpse of history, slavery, war, all evils continue today which is the truth that most involved have not yet realized thus they continue as bystanders, “ignorant people.”



Vocabulary

Tinctured – nouns, archaic : a substance that colors, dyes, or stains

Tone

Solemn, Concerned

Rhetorical Terms

Metaphor – “I seemed to get a glimpse into the unconscious soul of this country…I seemed to be looking into the heart of the criminal – a cold thing, an awful thing.” (p. 72)

Simile – “The people stood like blighted things, like ghosts about Acheron, waiting for someone or something to determine their destiny for them.” (p. 72)

Parallelism – “The opposite of hate is love, the opposite of cold is heat” (p. 72)

Metaphor – “With the great disease (slavery) came the climax (war)” (p. 73)

Parallelism – “I will tell you why I am here, I will tell you what happened to me.” (p.71)