Frederick Douglas (Post 3)

Life Without Rules

          Before diving into Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave I was well aware of how poorly slaves were treated, but it was not until I read this narrative that I have become fuming at how slaves were actually treated. I am curious to know what made punishment by owners and workers so acceptable in the eyes of society. Was it negligence that was the shining star in this situation or was it that society knew no other way than to treat men and women of color in such unscrupulous ways? While reading the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave I became outraged at the disciplinary actions that were taken on both the slaves and the owners throughout the mid 1800s. By reading through this first section of our readings I have come to notice a common theme, punishment. Punishment was deemed acceptable more or less under any circumstances the owner or any of the owner’s associates found possible. Keeping in mind that while all these punishments were happening to the slaves not one owner was punished for his actions later. One of the larger instigators of punishment was not introduced until chapter 4, Mr. Gore. Colonel Lloyd who was the overall owner of the plantation hired Mr. Gore in high hopes of his persistent cruel attitude maintaining order amongst the slaves. Mr. Gore was the perfect man for the job. He was described as “artful, cruel, and obdurate” (65). This plantation gave him room to exercise all of his powers and show that he was indeed the man to fit the first-rate overseer job position.

            One instance that provided me with a solid basis on which I could convict Mr. Gore of such hatred and cruelty came from an interaction between himself and a slave named Demby. After Demby acted out Mr. Gore was self entitled to punish Demby. Demby was then given a few lashings, which caused him to surge for the river in hopes of relieving his splitting pain. Mr. Gore was not too fond of these ideas and took other actions. “Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more”(67). This passage speaks so loudly of how vicious Mr. Gore really is. He has no concern for life, he does not care what the outcome is if things do not go his way. One would think that from this murder Mr. Gore would be prosecuted and potentially thrown in jail for such a malicious act. That is where I am wrong, Mr. Gore is not only free to go about his ways but he is not even questioned in his actions.

            A great way to describe Mr. Gore is from a passage in the book that explains, “His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge”(66). This sentence was right before the Demby explanation where he obviously committed a heinous crime that was deemed acceptable. Why wasn’t this given more attention by Douglass? To me this is a pivotal point in the story where punishment is clearly given and over used for such minuscule reasons. Why was Mr. Gore not overseen in a more strict setting that would keep him on a level of civility that would not be so disgraceful? It seems that the laws and regulations on slaves were frail to say the least. From my understanding and critical analysis I have come with the conclusion that Mr. Gore was to do as he pleased as long as the product (Tobacco, Cotton, etc..) was being produced at high profitable levels there would be no reason to worry or pay any attention to the disciplinary actions that were being taken.

            At this point in the book I had to walk away for a few minutes because I was caught in the emotional state of being both outraged and confused at what had just occurred to this poor man. I was outraged at how these poor men were being treated because they did not correspond to the orders correctly as they were directed to do. The state of confusion was what really had me thinking, what could drive a man to do such things to these people? What was the purpose of such cruelty? I dug a bit deeper and started to think about our class discussions about how these men knew no difference in what should be happening. It was socially acceptable for all of these actions to be taking place. Which lead me to think that Mr. Gore was just a major player in the game that apparently everyone played in. The society at the time gave proof that not only was this behavior deemed acceptable but also it was almost encouraged from a neglecting point of view. When I say a neglecting point of view I am alluding to the people who might have though that slavery and the punishments were not right but no matter right or wrong they were not able to speak out and change what was happening.

            Although punishment was almost inevitable to a degree it was apparent that a level of neglect was also suitably active in the first parts of this book. It is frightening to comprehend that people were treated the way they were and how little people reacted to such brutal actions. One of the main themes that I came to accept was that around this era punishment was acceptable, maybe not by everyone but no one had the will to say otherwise. Which leads to neglect, therefore can be traced through this time in our history as a country where not much could be done to stop any of these actions being taken. It is sad to think how many men and women were savagely beaten, abused, and murdered through this book, which only covers a small geographical area. Its painstaking to understand how ruthless some of the players in this book (Mr. Gore along with others) treated the slaves. Douglass was able to tell about how cruelty and actions toward his race were so normal and frequent with such detail and ease that makes plantation owners and overseers to be the bad guys that they actually are. Slavery was a dark time in our countries past and the first half of this book is a clear indication of why.

Homeward Bound

            In class today we had a great discussion based on the Kindred about what it meant to be home and how Dana was reacting to being home. The class talked about how there is a difference between what it means to be home and what it means to be in a place that feels like home. Octavia Butler does an excellent job identifying and highlighting a problem that the main characters, Dana and Kevin, have. This problem of almost an identity crisis happens at the very begging of "The Storm” chapter in the book.

            Kevin one of the main characters was stuck in a time travel that was five years long, in that time he had grown accustom to what was happening in the era where he was stuck. When Kevin returned to the home that he and Dana lived in everything changed and not necessarily for the better. “I found him fiddling with the stove, turning the burners on, staring into the blue flame, turning them off, opening the oven peering in. He had his back to me and didn’t see or hear me. Before I could say anything, he slammed the oven door and stalked away shaking his head. “Christ,” he muttered. “If I’m not home yet, maybe I don’t have a home”” (Butler, 190). This quote spoke out to me and grabbed my attention in the aspect that he was not sure what or where his home was.

            While reading over this quote in the book I felt as if I had a connection with Kevin. Now that I have been attending the University of Redlands for three years now I can say that this is my home. Although, realistically, my home is still in Winter Park, Colorado where I grew up. What really catches me up is that I spend so much time in Redlands that whenever I go home I feel as if I am out of place and don’t necessarily belong there. This is the same feeling the Kevin has when he goes back to 1976 and is in the California home. Dana is able to see Kevin not really being able to adjust to their home.

            I found this portion of the book spoke out to me and gave the book a more realistic feeling because I was able to relate to what was happening to one of the characters (even though I don’t time travel). Being able to connect with a character drew a higher interest in the book for me and I hope this book did the same for others!

Kindred

In the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler, Dana, the main character, goes back in time to protect a young white boy named Rufus. It is discovered that Rufus is her great-great-great grandfather, who is a slaveholder’s son. Dana is sent back in time to protect her grandfather, who whenever is in danger or is afraid, Dana goes back to the eighteen hundreds to save him from trouble, vanishing right before her husband’s eyes and eventually bringing him with her to the year eighteen nineteen. The novel shows the contrast of the different eras’ social norms and the conditions that slaves were put through during the eighteen hundreds. During her time stuck in the era, she conforms to the role of the slave to stay protected, but does she conform too well? And if she does conform to the role of a slave, what does that have to say of the African American culture in the 1970s?

            It is mentioned in “The Fall” when Kevin and Dana transport back to eighteen nineteen to save Rufus who had just fallen out of a tree and broken his leg, that Dana believes it is in their best interest to conform because it would be too hard for other people to understand that they had time traveled. In the scene, she explains the idea that they are from the future and they are there to protect Rufus and that she is called whenever he is in immediate danger. Her statement, “[w]e’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have to play the roles you gave us”(65). To keep themselves safe, they pushed forward and changed their roles to match the society that they were in at the time, Kevin was Dana’s owner now. The change that they had to make could refer to the social changes that many African American people have to make in order to “fit in” in the seventies, just after the civil rights movement. Many white people did not consider African Americans equal citizens at the time, which better supports the suggestion that Butler is using the novel to compare the social norms of the slave era to the civil rights era.

At the time that they appeared, the marriage that her and Kevin have was illegal, and although they had been legally married in nineteen seventy-five, their relationship when they first met was mocked by Dana’s coworker, Buz. These comments made by Buz and the mention that the marriage was illegal by Rufus could very well have been a social commentary made by Butler on the idea that although the marriage between an interracial couple was legal at the time, but did not mean much when it came to the societal pressure that interracial couples faced was much different from that of a white couple. Not seen as being fit, the ability for a white man to marry a black woman was unheard of in the time of pre-Civil War. That makes the fact that Kevin is a white man in the story so much more important to the plot. The idea that Dana’s life is a “picture of progress” for African Americans is important because it also allows for the proof that they still faced major roadblocks and deserved equal rights as well, but as comparing the two lifestyles, Dana’s life was exponentially better than the slaves. 

Daddy

Relationships between family members can be tricky to describe in many instances, as one can see in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”. A single event that ruins a relationship can happen, and within the poem, the reader can sense that such might have happened, as one can see through the speaker’s choice to call the father “bastard”. Abuse happens that can change the attitude of the speaker’s view of the said father. Is the death of the father in the poem “Daddy” a literal death or a figurative cry for help towards her father in which she lost a relationship with?

Throughout the poem, the speaker speaks of her father as if he was dead, but what if there were another scenario that might have happened? The tone of the poem is clearly angry but also comes across as a cry for attention that might be seen from the view of the reader. Because many readers tend to read poems in a biographical way, the fact that Sylvia Plath’s actual father passed away when she was young is a good reason to assume that the father is actually dead, but stepping away from this view, one might insinuate that the death was simply, or not so simply, figurative. The poem suggests several instances where the speaker reveals conflict that she had with her father. Lack of communication seemed to be the biggest issue that the speaker had with her father, which can be seen in the lines, “I never could talk to you./ The tongue stuck in my jaw./ It stuck in a barb wire snare” (Plath 24-26). Lack of communication in relationships, especially in child-parent relationships, tend to scar the children and teaches them to fear their parent to a certain extent. Fear is a great component of the poem because she compares her father to a Nazi, which, at the time, was rather extreme because of how recent the Holocaust had been.

At a point in the poem, the speaker refers to the fact that she married a man just like her father, “I made a model of you,/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw./ And I said I do, I do” (Plath 64-67). When a girl marries a man who is just like her father, it is thought to be an Elektra complex, which insinuates that she has some sort of unresolved issue with her father. When the speaker states, “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-/ The vampire who said he was you/ And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know./ Daddy, you can lie back now./” (Plath 68-70), is it truly possible that she killed people? Probably not, but speaking metaphorically, she might have cut them out of her life. This leads to the idea that her father isn’t actually dead, but rather figuratively dead to the speaker at the moment. This leads to another idea that quite possibly the speaker is trying to make amends with her father, but at the end of the poem, the speaker says, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (Plath 80), offering the idea that she has simply given up hope on redeeming the relationship that was held between the two.

            

No Namers

The No Named Woman is a story that has the ability to relate to todays world. It is unfortunate to say that what happened to the aunt in the eyes of the mother; who concurs that the aunt must have been raped and impregnated, is relevant in society today. There are many instances in which women are raped but they do not have the ability to speak out and defend themselves. This story speaks loudly of the actions that were taken between men and women. It is scary to say the least. One of the worst quotes I ran into states, “No one talked sex, ever. And she might have separated the rapes from the rest of living if only she did not have to buy her oil from him or gather wood in the same forest” (Kingston, 7).  This really grabbed my attention in realizing that this type of action happens all around the world and even on our college campus. It has come to my attention that this story is relevant in today’s society.

            At the beginning of this story I thought there would be a different intro into why the aunt is having the baby and out of nowhere, bam, Kingston hits you with the possibility of rape. It is frightening to read what happens to the aunt and how she was treated even though it was not her fault in what the outcome was. What caught my attention in the earlier quote was how it the possibility of the rape scandal to be coming from a man that is active in her everyday life. Furthermore, she would not be able to mention anything due to the social stigma that would bring on both of them. To me this relates straight back to actions that happen on college campuses all around the country and world. Girls are sexually abused at a rate which is sickening, but, what is even worse is that the person doing the actions are everyday people that walk around the campus with that girl. Yet, these girls are afraid to come forth and tell people what happened because the social stigma would still follow that she was lesser of a human. I am not saying that rape victims are the less of a person because that is not what I am saying at all. I am saying that rape is a very touchy and uneasy topic that people aren’t familiar on how to react or go about consolidating or facing the fact that it happened to some one they know.

            I know this blog post isn’t as connected to the reading as it could have been but I wanted to take the time and point out that this story grabbed my attention in the way that the content is such a relevant topic in society. It was hard for me to read the rest of this story with a clear mind as to what happened to the aunt. Between the aunt in the story and people around campus, it is clear that rape is not dealt with lightly and that it is important to speak out unlike the aunt in the story. We do not live in China during the early 1900’s; there should not be a social stigma on being raped. It should be dealt with in the most professional way possible.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

 

As soon as you start reading this story, you immediately get a feeling for the family dynamic. What I picked up on instantly was how the members of the family treated the grandmother. In most scenarios—real or fiction—grandparents are loved and respected, but here, the grandmother was openly disrespected by her own son and daughter-in-law.

            On the very first page of the story, the family kind of ignored the grandmother while she talked about the Misfit and brushed her off like she’s a senile old lady who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And when the car crashes, her son yells at her and then yells obscenities at her again when she recognizes the Misfit and calls him out. If I had to feel bad for any of the characters, it’d be the grandmother because she never intentionally does anything wrong, it’s just plain bad luck. Her memories getting jumbled, the cat causing the crash, her panicking and calling the Misfit by name, all things that could have happened to anyone in that situation. None of it is forseeable.  Even when their lives are being threatened, the poor grandmother is still being disrespected by her son and the murderer is the one who is standing up for her. If that isn’t completely, 100% backwards, I don’t know what is.

            I don’t feel badly for the rest of the family and I certainly do not feel bad for the Misfit. Giving yourself a clever nickname and blaming it all on your messed-up childhood is not an excise to go around killing innocent families.  The way I see it, everyone gets dealt either a lucky or a crappy hand in life and using that as a justifiable reason for what the Misfit did makes zero sense to me.

The Cost of Julius's freedom

The narrator of the Goophered Grapevine is a self-centered businessman, in addition only caring about money and success as a businessman, he believes everyone else is the same way. In the beginning of the story, he claims he moved to the south for his wife’s health, but he also admits that he was involved in the grape-culture and wanted to expand his business. The narrator explains, “Some years ago my wife was in poor health, and our family doctor, in whose skill and honestly I had implicit confidence, advised a change of climate.  I shared, from an unprofessional standpoint, his opinion that the raw winds, the chill rains, and the violent changes of temperature tended to aggravate my wife’s difficulty, and would undoubtedly shorten her life if she remained exposed to them,” (31). The fact that he explains his wife’s condition in a few sentences, yet uses the rest of the story to explain how he came across the grape business in the south, shows that he places more importance on his vineyard than his wife’s health. In addition, the narrator explains he has been looking to expand his grape business in either France, Spain, Or California for a while before his wife fell ill.  Also, I find it suspicious that he especially emphases the fact that he has “implicit confidence” in his doctor’s advice, as if he is trying to cover someone questioning the doctor reliability. Therefore, using the excuse of his wives health, the narrators decides to invest, for his own personal (selfish) success and enjoyment, in the grape business down south.

The final piece of evidence that the narrator views everything from an investment standpoint, is when he buys Julius’s land and pays him a profit in return to be his coach-driver: “Uncle Julius had occupied a cabin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grape vines… I believe, however, that the wages I paid for his service as a coachman, for I gave his employment in that capacity, were more than equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the vineyard,” (43). By the time Julius meets the narrator, Julius was enjoying his personal freedom for only a few short years. The narrator doesn’t understand what it is like to be someone’s property, which takes away your personal freedom. However, after being a slave for most of his life, Julius does understand what it means to be someone property. The narrator’s inability to understand the cost of Julius’s freedom can’t be bought with any dollar amount, causes the narrator to believe that Julius will be happy to be payed a sum of money worth way more than the value of Julius’s property. Especially after never being allowed to own property for most of his life, finally owning part of the vineyard probably meant more to Julius than just a business. However, the narrator fails to step outside his own shoes and see from Julius’s point of view- that Julius’s land is not just a business- a way to earn profit- but also his home. In other words, the narrator believes that money can replace Julius’s loss. In addition, the narrator fails to understand that by buying the property from Julius, Julius loses more than his home and his business, but also his personal freedom, which is worth more than any sum of money Julius is offered.   

The Misfit

Tuesday was a very active day when it came to discussion on the readings that we were assigned. I first want to commend the group that presented for their hard work and ingenuity to be able to ask the questions that sparked such a grand discussion. I immediately wanted to post about the discussion but I was unsure of what to write about. I knew that death was a large part of the discussion whether it was who to blame or why it happened or how it could have been avoided. I recently caught myself reading through a fellow students blog and I realized that Tuesday was focused on murder and how it affected the plot of the story. But we were never able to focus on murder and how it affected the characters in the story. I have taken some time to think about and consider some of the options that could have occurred if we were to look at how murder affected the characters.

            At the end of the story the family (including the grandmother that seemed to be the lead of all this mayhem) was maliciously murdered and everyone in class really reacted to why they were murdered and seemed to forget the fact that murder is such a large action to take. I am interested to know the motives behind the Misfit as to why he would murder the whole family, baby and all. I have taken some time to reflect and I think that one of my comments that I made in class could be true or maybe I think it is that way because I watch too much criminal minds, anyways… I have come to think that the Misfit killed the whole family because he was on the run and times were tough. Not only was he a fugitive of the law but the grandmother found him out and now he ran the risk of once again being caught.

My first instinct was to think what would I do in this situation if I were him? Would I tie them to a tree considering it is a road off of the beaten path and get away in the rolled car that could be fixed and hope they didn’t get out? Or do I commit the ultimate deed and end them. Just thinking those thoughts is gut wrenching to me and I have no idea how or why anyone would murder anyone. Taking another persons life seems unfathomable. No matter if the law is after you, murder has no positives. It may have a short-term benefit but in the end you are taking the lives of a whole family that otherwise would be on their way to Florida to enjoy some of those sunny rays. Regardless of his motives and the discussions in class. I have become curious at not only myself but todays society for how we read and watch stuff that is so graphic that we just override the fact that a family was brutally murdered by a serial killer. I hope I have not offended anyone.