In my poetry reading I talked about the poem "The Wrong Street" by Cornelius Eady. In the fifth line, Eady says "the young white men at your back" while he talks about someone getting chased for being black and in the wrong neighborhood. This pretty obviously is a reference to violence committed against black people by white people (and in this case not the police).
At first I connected this to Ralph Ellison's Native Son. This was because of the scene where Bigger first goes to the neighborhood where Mr. Dalton lives. Bigger is very careful of how he looks trying to go to Mr. Dalton's house and even is careful about how he goes in the house because he is worried that other white people in the neighborhood will be suspicious and call the cops or try to do something themselves. Bigger expresses these fears once again when he is trying to deliver the ransom note to Mr. Dalton's house and he doesn't know how to approach the house.
Once I finished Invisible Man I realized that it connected with Invisible Man as well. It is a much shorter scene than those in Native Son, however, it is a much clearer connection to the poem as the narrator is actually chased by a couple of random white guys (because he's black and has a briefcase so they think he stole something).
The appearance of these kinds of scenes in both of these hugely influential novels on being African American in America seem to reinforce the the message at the end of the poem: "All of this happened. / None of this Happened. / Part of this Happened. (You dream it / on an ordinary day.) Something Different happened, but now / You run in an Old story" where Eady expresses how common this kind of thing is for all African Americans. This doesn't just show that this used to be a very common occurrence but that (since they were written 50 years apart) it is still a common occurrence and that things (if they are getting better) are getting better excruciatingly slowly.
At first I connected this to Ralph Ellison's Native Son. This was because of the scene where Bigger first goes to the neighborhood where Mr. Dalton lives. Bigger is very careful of how he looks trying to go to Mr. Dalton's house and even is careful about how he goes in the house because he is worried that other white people in the neighborhood will be suspicious and call the cops or try to do something themselves. Bigger expresses these fears once again when he is trying to deliver the ransom note to Mr. Dalton's house and he doesn't know how to approach the house.
Once I finished Invisible Man I realized that it connected with Invisible Man as well. It is a much shorter scene than those in Native Son, however, it is a much clearer connection to the poem as the narrator is actually chased by a couple of random white guys (because he's black and has a briefcase so they think he stole something).
The appearance of these kinds of scenes in both of these hugely influential novels on being African American in America seem to reinforce the the message at the end of the poem: "All of this happened. / None of this Happened. / Part of this Happened. (You dream it / on an ordinary day.) Something Different happened, but now / You run in an Old story" where Eady expresses how common this kind of thing is for all African Americans. This doesn't just show that this used to be a very common occurrence but that (since they were written 50 years apart) it is still a common occurrence and that things (if they are getting better) are getting better excruciatingly slowly.
The whole "white men at your back" thing seems to refer to the general hostility of whites against blacks, too (and vice versa). Invisible Man's narrator seems to (try to) accept this passive hostility, while characters like Ras openly fight against it.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post! The connections you make between Bigger's discomfort in the Daltons' neighborhood and the "wrong neighborhood" portrayals in Invisible Man and "The Wrong Street" are very interesting. An interesting difference between Native Son and the other two is that it shows how the fear of this racially charged violence can become ingrained. All three works also criticize this racial violence and bias by showing that the black people being attacked, chased, or accused are all doing nothing wrong other than simply being in the neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteNice post iz ! I really like your point about how these novels, in a similar vein to the message of the poem you read, reinforce the normalization of white violence against black people. I also liked your post about the scene in Native Son. It was pretty obvious that Bigger was uncomfortable in white neighborhoods, but I hadn't thought too much about exactly why - for Bigger, like the poem says, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially when that place is a white neighbor, can be fatal.
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