Tea Cake's Everlasting Impact

Tea Cake's impact on Janie, both during his life and in death, is profound.  She wasn't the only one he changed though.  I'm not sure if I would say that the people of the Muck were changed by him; Motorboat, Sop-de-Bottom, and Stew Beef don't seem to change much from when we first meet them to when Janie leaves the Muck for the final time.  I believe that instead it is the people of Eatonville that change due to Tea Cake.  They are gossipy when Joe is around yes.  They continue to gossip once Tea Cake comes and after he's gone, true, but they no longer live in the same way.

I would say Phoebe is a prime example of the town's change due to Tea Cake.  When she cautions Janie about him at the end of Chapter 12 saying, "But anyhow, Janie, you be keerful 'bout dis sellin' out and goin' off wid strange men.  Look whut happend tuh Annie Tyler.  Took whut little she had and went off tuh Tampa wid dat boy...It's somethin' tuh think about" (Hurston 114).  Phoebe is warning Janie out of love for her, but there is also a disapproval of Tea Cake that she tries to project onto Janie.  By the end of Janie's story upon her return to Eatonville, Phoebe, "[A]in't saitisfied wid mahslef no mo'" (Hurston 192).  She want's the love affair that Janie had, and she appears jealous of the fun nature of Janie and Tea Cake's relationship, though she wholeheartedly disapproved of him--and his fun care-free ways--earlier on.

Phoebe leaves Janie's presence at that point, in the middle of the night, to go fishing with Sam.  Her nonchalant attitude about leaving Janie to go do that shows just how much the culture of the town has changed.  When Janie goes with Tea Cake early on in their relationship to go fishing at night, "[S]he felt like a child breaking rules...Then she had to smuggle Tea Cake out by the back gate and that made it seem like some great secret she was keeping from the town" (Hurston 102).  Granted, Sam is no Tea Cake, he seems respected by pretty much everyone, but still, where before it would have been a huge scandal, by the end of the novel it isn't something needing to be hidden at all.  While Tea Cake may not have physically impacted the town any where near as much as Joe Starks did, in terms of social change, he may have done even more than the great Mayor Starks in all his years in Eatonville.

A statue I found while in
 Chicago last weekend

I know it's kind of late to still be discussing Invisible Man, but on my trip to Chicago this past weekend I went to my uncles' house.  They live on the second floor of a building, and the owner of the building lives on the first floor.  She is my uncle's (a different one's) mom, and over the years we've become friendly.  For the first time I noticed this statue thing (I couldn't find anything closely resembling it in size or design on the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, though I suspect it is part of the lawn jockey category) this trip, with it sitting right at eye level as you walk in the stairwell, in front of her back door.  She is an old white lady who I've never heard say anything racist, or do anything racist.  So the question remains, why does she have it, and especially in such a prominent location?  

I suppose she comes from a time where images like this were, for many, not even a statement about their views on people, but instead just normal trinkets to pick up from somewhere.  Maybe in the 50's that would be an acceptable answer, but nowadays, I would think everyone knows how racist and unfair these images are.  Maybe her reasoning behind keeping the statue out were the same as Mary's.  She wants to hold onto her past, and objects like this (or the bank in Mary's case) are a reminder of her past.  But there isn't any contradiction to her though, because unlike Mary, she doesn't actively push for equal rights, nor does she let others live in her home rent free.  Maybe she is just an old woman who doesn't even remember its there, and means nothing by it.   But even if she doesn't mean anything by it, what does it say about our society that statues like this are still in found in everyday life, have we really not come any further than Mary Rambo of the 30's?     

Do you see it now?

In class today, we were asked how we interpreted the last sentence of Invisible Man, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" (Ellison 581).  When I first read the end I wasn't sure what it meant.  During the writing time in class today, I still wasn't sure how I felt about it.  Then we began discussing it as a class, there wasn't a consensus, but most people seemed to be leaning towards a warning to the reader, or some kind of advice to us.  I began to agree with a version of what other people were saying until the very end of class when a completely different interpretation popped into my head.  The more I tried to reason out why it didn't make sense (and even as I write this I'm still not sure it completely does), the more it took hold in my mind and wouldn't let me push it away.  The last line isn't a warning but instead a challenge.  It's asking us if we really understood the story we just finished reading.  Because if we did, then we should reject it what the author has been telling us.

The narrator's entire story is told to us in first person, with no physical descriptions of the narrator beyond a few passing comments here and there.  This allows us to experience the events of his life first hand as if we ourselves experienced them.  We are given a new identity, much like the narrator is by Jack, by the author.  It's just written down on a piece of paper (his book) for us, and thrust into our waiting hands.  We are given ideological arguments about humanity and society and expected to publicly endorse them to others around us, both to people who have read the material and those who haven't.  Meanwhile, like Jack writing his pamphlets in his industrial hole downtown surrounded by believers, the author of these ideas is not doing so from reality, but instead in his own secure location where he is never challenged by anyone.  He is not in touch with the world in which we live, instead his ideas only are based on memories of life and reality.  I believed in the author's story of himself.  I didn't see that he was trying to control how we viewed the world around us.  Now I think I do.

This in not to say I've rejected Ralph Ellison's work, in fact I really like Invisible Man, it's by far one of the hardest books I've ever read, but it's also one of the most worthwhile.  Ellison is not the author I have been referring to previously. The author I'm talking about is the older version of the narrator, while he is writing in his hole, the book that spans the course of Ellison's work.  This author is trying to pull our strings, in the same way that Jack tried to control the narrator-the younger version of the author.  So if I've broken the trance of believing in the author, does this make me an invisible man as well or less of one?  Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I may be speaking for you too?