Lets read books

  There was some debate in our class on the selfishness/selflessness of Nanny. Certainly Nanny’s actions had a negative effect on Janie’s life, but I believe she acted in Janie’s interest, and truly thought the marriage she pushed her into was the best thing for her. Let’s discuss. I’m going to start by recapping Nanny’s life, for context. When she was younger she was a slave, was raped by a slave owner, and had his child. This child, whom the reader can tell Nanny cares greatly about, grew up and at seventeen, was also raped, and then the two of them became estranged. Now, at the end of her life, Nanny’s primary commitment is raising Janie, her granddaughter, the product of two generations of traumatic sexual experience.  That history provides a clear reason for Nanny to have issues regarding sex and love, which is arguably the main area where she and Janie clash. Janie wants to pursue love, but Nanny sees only danger there. In her mind, a kiss from Johnny Taylor is a “laceration”. So

Nanny describes black women as the "mules" of the world - burdened with a load passed from white men to black men, to them. She hopes to save her granddaughter, Janie, from that fate with a strategic marriage to a well-off black man.  Janie, however, is reluctant - because sitting under a pear tree one day, Janie saw beautiful visions of love and marriage. She' was awestruck, and longed to feel for herself what she saw in the blossom - "to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom!" But her romantic aspirations clash with Nanny's pragmatic socio-economic solution. Nanny and Janie's ideas of womanhood were incompatible. Nanny was focused on the disadvantages of being a black woman, and hoped to help her granddaughter as much as she could. Her viewpoint reflected the harsh realities of the world and of her life, which from the story she told Janie, seemed to be full of mistreatment and hardship. Janie, on the other hand, seems to have had a pretty good life so fa

The Brotherhood is a strange cultish organization that recruits the narrator after seeing him deliver a scattered but passionate speech. Despite much confusion and many awkward and racist interactions, the narrator climbs the ranks, becomes a community leader, and delivers more of his trademark speeches. The Brotherhood is weird, and at times, I found their goals unclear. They want equality, I think, and pursue various shades of activism, including race and sex-based advocacy.  But the people at the top of the Brotherhood's hierarchy aren't actually affected by those issues, like the rich white people at the parties, and more specifically, Brother Jack. The organization's higher-ups seem to believe in a vague moral idealogy that they awkwardly attempt to translate onto modern issues. But they're not very good at it, and sometimes don't even seem invested in it. For example, plenty of the members are straight-up racist, or at least covertly racist, so it's clear

Once upon a time, the asylum patients the narrator meets in the Golden Day were the kind of men Mr. Norton would have loved to meet. They were all professionals, successful in their field, and from Norton's perspective, evidence that his efforts to "uplift" black people were fruitful.  But things didn't quite go to plan. All of them were drafted into the war, suffered immense trauma, and returned to suffer even more due to their race. Their credentials weren't enough to exempt them from racism, and eventually they either gave on up society or were pushed out, and ended up in an insane asylum. The veterans represent the shortcomings of institutions like the narrator's college (and coincidentally, their aslyum is right down the road from it). They did everything right - got an education, learned a trade, showed talent for it - but then came war and racism. In a way, the war could represent the experience of dealing with racism - the veterans just wanted to live

One of Bigger Thomas's most symapthetic moments in when he's put in an impossible situation. He's in his rich, white boss's house, on top of his daughter, a few feet away from his blind yet observant wife. Bigger can either allow himself to be discovered, and almost definitely face the consequences of a sexual assault conviction, or silence the girl, and face the consequences of that. Running on instinct and desperate to escape the first option, Bigger chooses the latter, and begins to discover the ramifictions of his decision a few minutes later.  It's hard to fault Bigger for Mary's murder. He did his best to avoid being in the position where Mrs. Dalton almost found him, and mostly ended up there due to bad luck and Mary's obliviousness to his vulnerability. And once he was there, he didn't mean to kill her, he just wanted very badly for her to stop talking. I can even justify how he concealed his crime, on the grounds that the punishment he would hav