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U.S. Minority Literature Week 3c

U.S. Minority Literature Week 3c. Quiz. What is free indirect discourse? 2) How does Tea Cake die? 3) What does Janie do by Joe Stark’s deathbead ? 4) What is “the muck”? 5) How do the black people in the courtroom treat Janie?. Group Presentation!.

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U.S. Minority Literature Week 3c

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  1. U.S. Minority LiteratureWeek 3c

  2. Quiz • What is free indirect discourse? 2) How does Tea Cake die? 3) What does Janie do by Joe Stark’s deathbead? 4) What is “the muck”? 5) How do the black people in the courtroom treat Janie?

  3. Group Presentation!

  4. In groups, identify answers to the following questions: 1) Why does Janie get together with each husband in the story? 2) Does her thinking develop in these relationships? (Consider how this is a bildungsroman novel) 3) What do Logan and Joe do that ultimately hurts Janie and turns her away from them? In what ways do Logan and Joe try to control Janie? 4) When does a woman have the most power according to the men in the text (such as Logan and Joe)? 4) How do you interpret the scene where Tea Cake slaps Janie?

  5. “Class Off” as a verb • “You’se different from me. Ah can’t stand black niggers. Ah don’t blame de white folks from hatin’ ‘em ‘cause Ah can’t stand ‘emmahself. ‘Nother thing, Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid’ em. Us oughta class off” (141) (Miss Turner to Janie)

  6. Du Bois talks about sorrow songs as being strange and familiar. There is a disconnect. “Dey laughs too much and dey laughs too loud. Always sing’ ol’ nigger songs! Always cuttin’ de monkey for white folks. If it wuzn’t for so many black folks it wouldn’t be no race problem. […] De black ones is holdin’ us back” (141) **In Hurston, there is no friction between the narrator’s perspective and Janie’s. There is no friction between the elevated diction and the folk songs and vernacular.

  7. How might you think about Hurston as critiquing Du Bois and Booker T. Washington based on our previous readings?

  8. Page. 142 on Booker T. Washington. Beginning in the middle of the page.

  9. Hurston focuses on the importance of race, but on the importance of including African Americans of lower classes within that definition. They have been excluded from Washington’s and Du Bois’s interpretations. • “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (160)

  10. Court Scene • “Three hours in jail and then they set the court for her case. The time was short and everything, but sufficient people were there. Plenty of white people came to look on this strangeness. And all the Negroes for miles around. Who was it didn’t know about the love between Tea Cake and Janie?” (185) • What is the point of this free indirect discourse here?

  11. Free indirect discourse demonstrates a double consciousness: Janie knows that the white people think the courtroom scene is a “strangeness” “Twelve strange men who didn’t know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her were going to sit on the thing. Eight or ten white women had come to look at her too. They wore good clothes and had the pinky color that comes of good food. […] what need had they to leave their richness to come look on Janie in her overalls?” (185)

  12. What do the black people think of Janie? • What do the white women think of Janie? • End of page 185

  13. What do you make of the court’s decision about Janie? • Pg. 188. • Is this a “colorblind” or “postracial” courtroom?

  14. “The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sign out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sign, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.” (193)

  15. Zora Neale Hurston is relevant historically. But how might she shed light on issues today?

  16. President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Act (Feb 2014) • "No excuses. Government, and private sector, and philanthropy, and all the faith communities, we all have a responsibility to help provide you the tools you need. We've got to help you knock down some of the barriers that you experience," he said.

  17. Voting Rights • 1869—Congress passes the 15th Amendment giving African American men the right to vote. • 1919—women given the right to vote. • 1940—only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South are registered to vote. Jim Crow laws (literacy tests and poll taxes were meant to keep African Americans from voting)

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