Two years later, in 1963, the conflicts began in earnest, with riots and acts of racial brutality against demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating with Martin Luther Kings being jailed in Birmingham. Examples of this are shown in the episode of the dentist offices with the poor treatment received to the patients, also in the kindness given to James and his mother by the old couple. What makes the fact of Jamess narration worth remarking upon is that Gaines could, Reading Gaines first, foremost, always, and only as a black author, an author of race and race issues, rather than primarily as an imaginative author, an author of ideas, delimits the kinds of questions one can ask about his works and necessarily diminishes the readers appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works.. In the following essay, Roberts looks at the communal bonds found in Southern black communites, especially those as described by Gaines in The Sky is Gray. Along with this, he describes the dangers inherent in a community where tradition and change interact. Taking what she hasher pride and her povertyshe moves toward her goal of inculcating in James a sense of independence and dignity in self undeterred by offers of kindness and generosity. And a reading focussed exclusively on the storys racial dynamic misses this completely. As the day progresses, James shows us events from the past--from the time his mother whipped him because he could not kill . They are struggling for survival after James' father is taken in the army. 28 terms. Gaines was left in the care of his great aunt, Augustine Jefferson, a woman he preferred to call his aunt and whom he considered one of the most powerful influences on the formation of his character. Dollar and a half to have it pulled. Introduction Ernest J. Gaines was thirty in 1963, the year in which The Sky is Gray was first published, but it was not until five years later, in 1968, that the story was published as the second story in Bloodline, the thematically interwoven collection with which readers associate it today. Yet James, for all his acuteness of perception, can never follow Emerson into the parody of the Biblical command, Pray without ceasing: the New-England sage demands, Observe without ceasing (italics mine). Gaines's story "The Sky is Gray" similarly explores the differences between charity and justice within the segregated South. Indeed, the tooth with the aching root here is Jamess own Afro-American tongue and earthe dilemma of finding that his deepest roots are at odds with hypervisual America. The Sky Is Gray stream The Sky Is Gray online for free | Watch online movies through best free 1080p HD videos on desktop, laptop, notebook, tablet, iPhone, iPad, Mac Pro and more. By recording and preserving his peoples culture in his literature, Gaines creates both an ongoing memorial to a vanishing way of life and an enduring testament to human concerns., Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton share many of Babbs observations, particularly with regard to the importance of dignity under strain and courage. Try refreshing this page.If the problem persists, contact our support contact our support The title of the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest Gaines is ironic. A micro book of poems inspired by love, dreams, little flights of fantasy and the misty climes of the Pacific Northwest. The Sky is Gray Essay example. Although the point is never explicitly stated, it is apparent that Octavia finds the values of her community inadequate to make James the kind of man that she feels he must become. Observing his mother manipulate their environment moves James closer to what will be his particular entry into manhood, the psychic freedom that comes from emotional self-mastery. The student, or the boy, is somewhat out of place in this story, but was certainly not out of place at the time the story was written. Whereas the minister clings to the traditional religious value of faith, the student espouses the development of more individualistic values based on reasoning and logic. In this transformation, as he puts his collar down, the reader has taken a small but important step with James from childhood to adulthood. Her dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging the proprietor to allow her son use of the stove. Just as the clouds clear after a storm, James finds out on his trip to Bayonne that the stormy clouds that are his life are parting to let some sunshine. The reader is made aware that the act of having the tooth pulled is a large ordeal to the family. Add a gift receipt for easy returns. In Ernest J. Gaines "The Sky Is Gray", Octavia finds out the hard way. However, because she never explains her motives to him, she presents James with a world filled with extremes which endangers his realization of the manhood she attempts to force prematurely on him. [Instrumental Bridge] [Verse 3] I've got a bad feeling. have chosen to tell the story from a number of different perspectives. As they ride in the back of the bus reserved for blacks and walk the streets of . In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York and outbreaks of anti-black violence occurred in Selma, Alabama, including Ku Klux Klan shootings and Martin Luther King leading a procession of 4,000 in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. Each of the first two stories in Ernest J. Gainess BloodlineA Long Day in November and The Sky Is Gray describes a black boy or youth attempting to come to terms not just with the world in which he lives, his parents problems, and the racism which circumscribes him but, more importantly, with the sensory orientation of his own body, the struggle between what William Faulkner called a black blood and white blood. It is this private or internal struggle more than any public or external debate that creates the real identity crisis for the young black and for the artist or writer who would contend with an America which has painted the senses white! Both Sonny in A Long Day in November and James in The Sky Is Gray have to resolve the conflict between their African/aural roots and their American/visual reorientationbetween James Baldwins declaration that it is only in his music . His publication record is not extensive, but his works have been well received. Awesome read. (February 23, 2023). In physical terms, there is motion from one pole to its opposite: from warm, to cold, to warm again; from beyond the outskirts of Bayonne to the city and back again; from the doctor's office to the street, and to the office again, and so on. While gray literally represents the harmonious blending of black and white, its use in the story to describe the sky before a brewing storm symbolizes a potentially destructive force. He responds to the emotional intent of the act. Houston Community College English 1301 Professor Hinchen-Bryan "The Sky is Gray" Discussion Questions Directions: Type your answer to the following questions on this sheet in a different color and submit it canvas by Saturday, October 30, 2021 by 11:59 p.m. 1. Moreover, while an adult may be judged on the basis of his or her thoughts and actions, a child is still too completely a product of his or her parents to evaluate as an independent being. While the action of the stories revolves around, The gray of the sky which hangs threateningly over the action of the story symbolizes the dangers inherent in the extremes which James must reconcile.. During the exchange between the men, the minister exposes the weakness of his position when he becomes frustrated and strikes the student. The Sky is Gray contains many of the themes and images Gaines returns to again and again in his work: themes of personal responsibility, grace under pressure, and moral behavior; images of strong mothers, mysteriously absent fathers, and families in which love is expressed more often in harsh words or silence than in overt praise or affection. Powerfully told with a convincing use of African-American dialect and dialogue, the story features nine-year-old James and the lessons he learns from his mother, Octavia, and others. What might be complex, three-dimensional people with equally complex motivations threaten to become two-dimensional caricatures with obscure, even uninteresting motivations when seen through the eyes of a child. And by the end of the story, the reader does indeed sense that there has been some change to who James is in that short span, a sense reinforced by his mothers assertion that he is not a bum, but a man. This comment incites a young mana teacher, James thinks, or a studentto join in. It is through these kinds of moderating forces in James environment that Gaines sees his salvation. This tooth of endless remorse/aurality may be deniedIt aint hurting me no morebut will never be extracted from the central black consciousness of The Sky Is Gray. Of course, too, there is a shrewd and even humorous irony involved in attempting to exorcise the black hyperverbality by prayerwhether this be Baptist or Catholic incantationfor the Word/word, spoken or sung, lies at the root of black religiosity. Themes The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else. The Sky is Gray is a bildungsroman, a story describing the growth of a child into adulthood. Encyclopedia.com. 1. The feeling of community which permeates A Long Day in Novemberthat sense that whatever happens to Amy and Eddie is everybodys concernis conspicuously absent from the second story in Bloodline, The Sky Is Gray. James, the eight-year-old narrator of this story, struggles to understand his mother and her conceptions of manhood and dignity without aid from the community. I've got a real bad feeling. Why does he later say that grass is black? Edited by Eugene Current-Garca and Bert Hitchcock. . Sometimes it just hurt, hurt, hurt. His father left his mother when Gaines was a small boy, forcing his mother to move to New Orleans to find work. The Sky is Gray is episodic in formthat is, the story is not told as a sequence of events, but as a sequence of events punctuated by narrative flashbacks and broken up into numbered segments. $18.75 + $3.99 shipping. The minister accepts God unquestioningly, while the student rejects God because belief in Him alleviates the need to question: Show me one reason to believe in the existence of a God, the boy says. Lowe, John., editor. Analysis: "The Sky Is Gray". The dramatic conflict endemic to the stories in Bloodline arises out of the efforts of various characters to reconcile their individual needs with community prerequisites. . Mama tries to teach James that he is the man of the family now. For Further Study The Sky Is Gray. In American Short Stories. With James' toothache at the central point of the plot, the story takes us through the obstacles this black family faces in terms of safety . This poor, Negro boy, James, lives with his mother and five other relatives while his father is away. SHORT STORY TEST! Helena tries to give them a larger piece, but Jamess mother insists on an accurate measure. Nor can the mothers demands for stoicism keep James from nearly succumbing to the piercing chill of the sleeting gray sky. At this point, almost by deus ex machina, the black youths deepest self reasserts itself in all its visceral aurality: My stomach growls and I suck it in to keep Mama from hearing it . It also involves the problem of integrating the individual and the community in a mutually rewarding relationship in the face of dehumanizing individualistic forces. With his degree in hand, Gaines won the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship for Graduate Work which allowed him to begin work in Stanfords Creative Writing program, the first of many fellowships he has received. But the counter to this argument is that one should, if Gaines is successful, be able to see how James will turn out, that the creation of a characterization sufficient to demonstrate that the child is father of the man is a demonstration of a naturalism like Zolas, and worthy of similar respect. It is my belief that Gaines' "The Sky is Gray" depicts the possible roots of a public leader, in the way the nature of the young narrator James is portrayed it illuminates the character traits in civil leader. The sky is gray, the clouds are low and the dark waves are hiding their power under a more neutral appearance. . In this case, consciousness raising of blacks should not lead to an alienation from the community as it has for the student and Octavia; it should provide the basis for bettering the community. Although he claims to have a solution for the black community, he refuses to consider its level of comprehension. The best-known version is by the Mamas & the Papas, who sang backup on the original version and released it as a single in 1965.The lyrics express the narrator's longing for the warmth of Los Angeles during a cold winter in New York City. Rather than explaining his position to her in such a way that she will be able to understand it, he raises his argument to a metaphysical level and alienates her: You really dont believe in God? the lady says. It is not possible, within the scope of this essay, to survey all of Gainess works, or to make more than a cursory pass through The Sky is Gray. It is also not possible, in a discussion of what Im calling moral readings, to avoid some necessary oversimplifications of the complex issues surrounding and clouding the idea of race. They are struggling for survival after James' father is taken in the army. One means nothing more than the other. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. songplace. Publisher Chicago : Perspective Films Language English. In the short story The Sky is Gray, Ernest J. Gaines shows the struggles, inflicted by poverty, in an eight-year-old boys life. Home American Literature Analysis of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray. In the gloomiest days, when the calendar suggests that winter is over, but the St. Petersburg weather is still unrelenting, the sky is gray, snow and wind are underfoot all over the world . The story begins with James and his mother waiting, on a painfully cold morning, for the arrival of a bus which will take them to nearby Bayonne. Random Word. Gaines's prose is stark, spare, unrelenting in its precision and honesty. 4, June, 1991, pp. Reading Gaines first, foremost, always, and only as a black author, an author of race and race issues, rather than primarily as an imaginative author, an author of ideas, delimits the kinds of questions one can ask about his works and necessarily diminishes the readers appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works. Written during the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, the stories in Bloodline describe a less turbulent but perhaps even more racially raw period: Louisiana in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She offers them food, but though James is hungry, his mother will not accept any charity, so Helena has James move some empty trash cans to the street as a face-saving gesture for his mother. The greatest advantage of an episodic form is that it allows the author to follow the protagonist, or main character, from one important event to another without recording all the unimportant events in between. He was the first of twelve siblings, seven by his father Manuel, five by his mother Adriannes second husband, Ralph. With nowhere to go, and no money to buy anything, James and his mother have no choice but to walk, aimlessly, until the doctors office opens again. "The Sky is Gray 01 Mar 2023 12:32:41 Contrary to what Octavia would have him believe, the choices that James must eventually make about the quality of his existence should not be between bum and man, or between adhering to the dictates of the head or heart as advocated by the student and the minister respectively. Gaines, Ernest J. James is on the cusp between youth and adolescence, trying to understand what is expected of him by his inscrutable mother as he enters this next phase of his life. Introduction Can I get a job tomorrow? 414-25. And when, at the storys conclusion, his mother pronounces him a man, the reader who has been inside Jamess subjective world can take measure of both how far he still is from manhood and of what he has learned from the lessons meant to take him the rest of the way there. Figuratively, it is a metaphor of the collective black experience.. This story, which initially appeared in Ernest J. Gainess collection entitled Bloodlines, has become a classic contemporary bildungsoman. Two of the stories in Bloodline, A Long Day in November and The Sky Is Gray, are particularly illustrative of the conflict between community perspective and individual needs. A black boy comes of age in Louisiana during the 1940's and learns of racism and poverty firsthand. Such readings all share a serious, albeit unintentional, flaw; they suggest that one must understand all actions and most events as direct or indirect consequences of race, rather than individual choice. Not wanting to be a crybaby and knowing well that his mother cannot afford a trip to the dentist, James recalls his efforts to disguise his pain from the rest of his family. Burke, William. 14, April 5, 1971, pp. Jamess vulnerability to this aspect of human nature is illustrated in the episode with an old couple who offer them food during their visit to town. James' mother is "wearing that black . For the sky is, indeed, gray in this story. Ill take coke, or Ill use any kind of profanity, I dont give a damn. On the other side are the preacher and the other woman the young man speaks to after the preacher departs. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. BIBLIOGRAPHY Lets hope that the ones who come after will have your faithif not in your God, then in something else, something definitely that they can lean on. In thematic terms, two of the most important sections in the storysections seven and eightexplore the relationship between God, religion, knowledge, and ignorance. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else.. - "The Sky is Gray" 9 terms. two young boys, the resolution of the conflict resides with their parents. but should you say the sky is gray well, it still looks blue to me i know the road is light and i've known this all along but should you say the sky is gray then i won't say that you're wrong [chorus] because today, i love everybody everybody i see today, i think that all folks are great and everybody here loves me ooh, today, i'd give . Babb, Valerie Melissa. It also refers to the complexity of the time in which James's character livesthe mid- to late-1950s or early-1960sand how previous values will no longer hold as the South shifts toward modernity. But instead, Gaines allows James to tell his story in his own words. In the following essay, Meyer describes how The Sky is Gray is a coming of age story not just about coming to terms with growing up, but also dealing with the sensual orientation of ones body. As a result, she has made protecting James from becoming vulnerable her primary goal in life. The symbolic significance of the gray sky is the key to an understanding of the complexity of the issue raised in the story. Sold by: Tidal Wave Group . [Chorus 2] All the leaves are brown (All the leaves are brown) And the sky is gray (And the sky is gray) I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk) On a winter's day (On a winter's day) If I didn't tell her (If I didn't tell her) I could leave today (I could leave today) California dreamin' (California dreamin') On such a winter's day (California dreamin') On such a winter's day, (California . Monsieur Bayonne at the storys beginning is the superstitious complement to the preacher in the middle section. But if one decides to read the story as a more complex critique, not of racial relations, but of the valueand the costof dignity, one sees that even as an eight-year-old James understands her, Octavia is an interesting, fully-realized character. The Sky Is Gray Analysis. The story occurs on a cold winter day in Louisiana, whose gray sky suggests the lack of hope for many African Americans. The Sky is Gray is told in the first person by an eight-year-old child, James, on the cusp of youth, and describes a half-day in Jamess life. Words, he says, mean nothing. It is through Jamess eyes that the story is told; consequently, the story is heavily filtered through his sensibilities. Although Octavia does not operate from the same level of awareness that the student does, it is strongly implied that her attitude stems from perceptions and conscious choices made as a result of her husbands army duty. Gravel crunches under the tires of the Rolls Royce as it trundles up the country road. Some of the reasons for what Lowe considers the unfair obscur[ity of] Gaines gifts are that Gaines writes about a largely rural community, isolated by both its southernness and its special Louisiana qualities, which it is true make it exotic, but at the same time somewhat inaccessible, even for many African Americans. Another reason Lowe cites for Gaines neglect is his refusal to cater to stereotypes. He states that although people expect stories set in Louisiana to take place in New Orleans, Gaines has never set one there. Retrieved February 23, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray. whatever their motivation may be, their small generosity will only be accepted as kindness, not as charity. . Through the stories of the many fascinating people who touch Jane's life, Gaines presents not only a moving perspective on the struggles of African Americans but also a social history of the United States since the Civil War. She has cut herself completely off from the community which conceivably could have provided her with support while her husband does his tour of duty in the army. 23 Feb. 2023
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