Evolving Loyalties

When Beloved enters Sethe and Denver's life, she messes up the dynamic even more than when Paul D did. Many readers in my class at least, believed that she was the living form of the dead baby that had haunted 124.  On page 89 we get confirmation.  Denver figures it out, and Beloved admits it.  But when Denver tells Beloved not to tell Sethe about who she is, Beloved snaps, saying, "Don't tell me what to do.  Don't you never never tell me what to do" (89).  Beloved goes on to say, "She is the one I need.  You can go but she is the one I have to have" (89).  I was surprised by both characters reactions, but I didn't think much of it until later when they go to the clearing Baby Suggs used to preach at.  Denver believes Beloved caused Sethe to choke, and Beloved's only response is, "Look out, girl" (119).  This left me wondering why Denver doesn't immediately run and tell Sethe.  Beloved appears violent towards the one thing she wants, Sethe, so there's no telling what she'll do to someone like Paul D.  Instead, Denver chases after Beloved to try to make up.  She seems to care more about continuing a new friendship than protecting her mother, and sole companion of ten years.

This issue of loyalty has become somewhat of a theme throughout Beloved so far.  When Paul D first arrives,  Sethe must pick, does she remain loyally alone, in solidarity with Denver's perpetual loneliness, or does she welcome this man from her past.  She must then completely abandon her loyalty to Halle, when she invites Paul D to stay a while.  I didn't find either of these decisions to override total loyalty too strange.  When she decides to show more love attention towards Beloved than Denver, I was a little more surprised.  Denver has been the loyal daughter towards Sethe, she hasn't run away like her brothers, nor does she make trouble, she's just is a constant in Sethe's life.  But as soon as Beloved comes, Sethe begins to open up to the stranger more so than she ever did with Denver.  Maybe Sethe has figured out who Beloved is, she surely must have her suspicions, and that's why she is so openly loving towards Beloved, versus her normal shortness with Denver.  Whatever her motives, it's clear that Sethe is no longer as loyal towards Denver as she once was, and in that context, Denver's lack of loyalty towards Sethe is much more understandable.      

Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog

Your typical love story depicts romantic love, a bond between two people that through trials and tribulations grows over time.  It seems like the characters you want to get together always do, and they ride off into the sunset together.  All the Lonely People is not that kind of love story.  Dennis, the protagonist, at every turn is telling us how pathetic and dependent everyone else around him is, except Gerald, yet he isn't a "lion" like he says, he's what he would deem a "real hunter," or maybe not even a member of that group.

We first meet Dennis in a cafe, late at night, talking with Alfred.  Alfred immediately seems like the down-trodden one of the pair-spilling his guts to this man he doesn't really know in a coffee shop.  We see Dennis attract the attention of a woman, causing him to leave the cafe after her.  Dennis lights her cigarette, but then walks immediately away from her.  What I initially took as aloofness on Dennis' part, by the end of the story I think was a lack of confidence.  He left her before she could possibly leave him, therefore maintaining his belief that he can be selective about who he goes out with.  Betty, the girl who Dennis expects the night Alfred comes over, doesn't come, instead postponing their rendezvous, but he is so desperate for her he said he, "was prepared to lie relentlessly just to have her there that one night" (148).  That's not quite the type of behavior you would expect of a lion who is being hunted.  Dennis becomes so desperate that week, that he needs his friend Gerald to set him up with Gloria, a "community chest" as they described her.  Yet Dennis can't even close this deal, one that Gerald has practically set in his lap.

Dennis isn't a lion.  He is not hunted by others, and he's too ashamed to be a real hunter so instead he subtly uses his friends to hunt for him.  He judges everyone around him, which to me makes him worse than anybody who he's deemed below him.  Even in the last section when he finally begins to examine himself, he still has to judge Alfred for not being home at 2:00 a.m. though he then goes to the old coffee shop at 3:00 a.m. and sits alone.  Dennis is the saddest character of them all, not because he doesn't have girls hunting him, but because he has to put down everyone else to construct his self-superiority.    

With Friends Like This

The ending of White Boy Shuffle was strange, very strange.  The saddest part for me was Chapter 12 when Scoby goes over the edge and kills himself.  While reading those five or so pages where we see Scoby go from "bizarre" (203) behavior to killing himself, I couldn't help but yell at Gunnar in my head.  What was he doing when his best friend was all but telling him flat out that he wanted to kill himself?  Scoby asks him, "To kill yourself you don't need a permit or anything like that, do you?" (204) then leaves his cassette player on the beach with Sarah Vaughan still playing.  Every reader at this point has to know that Scoby is going to jump off the law school building, and Gunnar certainly has to know, but instead of going to stop his friend, he drinks beer, listens to jazz, and writes a poem on the train ride home.

At first I didn't blame Gunnar, I figured he was probably in denial that Scoby would even consider killing himself.  But now that I think about it, my theory is that Gunnar wanted Scoby to commit suicide.  He makes the statement that, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live.  In other words, I'm just ready to die.  I'm just ready to die" (200), but after saying that, he's receives huge cheers calling for him to become the leader.  Later, when he returns to Hillside, he is the unofficial leader of Hillside (with Physco Loco's help) and the budding leader of angry people everywhere.  He knows, while he is still in Boston, that he can't kill himself, he means to much to too many people.  Then the only way for his suicide pact to not look totally hypocritical is for him to lose someone close to him, and Scoby is perfect for that role.  People know about Scoby, the perfect basketball player, and they know that he and Gunnar have been best friends for years, so for Gunnar to lose someone so close to him to suicide shows that he's all in, saying these things from a leadership position isn't a game to him, he means every word because it's real to him.  Though in fact, he doesn't take being a leader so seriously, his public actions (like cutting off his finger) keep up his serious leader persona, and make Scoby's death seem all the more convenient.

Rooting for Bangers

In almost every other book I've read I've known who to root against, or at least not to really pull for.  In a lot of these books I find myself rooting against gang members, as in these books they normally terrorize the main characters or kill innocent people.  But in White Boy Shuffle that's who Gunnar is turning into, and certainly who Psycho Loco is.  He is introduced to us as the leader of the Gun Totin' Hooligans, and as being, "home on parole for killing a paramedic who refused to give his piranha Esta Lleno mouth-to-mouth resuscitation" (Beatty 84).  Later we hear that a big part of Gunnar's favors to Psycho Loco consists of "My backyard became a burial ground for missing evidence; warm guns and blood-rusted knives" (Beatty 97).  In real life Psycho Loco, or Gunnar, is not the kind of random stranger I would walk up to and start talking to on the street.

Even with their less than legal and nice behavior at some points, I can't help but root for them.  When they went to attack the rival gang (who didn't do anything wrong this time) I was rooting for No M.O's balloons to find their mark, and when one of the Ghost Town guys shoots at them with a shotgun I feared one of them would be hit.  I laughed when they were rolling through a nice neighborhood smashing cars indiscriminately.  Maybe the reason I like these characters so much is because of how outrageous some of their actions are, like killing a paramedic for not reviving a fish, or maybe it's because of how human they are.  When Physco Loco is in Gunnar's bathroom crying hysterically I saw a side of him I haven't ever seen before, normally the calm and calculated leader, his actions seem more like the Gunnar we saw fresh out of the car from Santa Monica.  So far it seems to me that Paul Beatty does such a successful job showing people like us who live in a largely protected small town (compared to LA) what it was like to grow up an African-American male in the inner city in large part due to this humor and compassion that he brings out in seemingly hardened main characters.

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?