Incident by Countee Cullen
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
In A Lesson Before Dying, the first 4 chapters focus on the power of just one word as this poem does. Using only the first 4 chapters of the novel to support your claims, explain the power of the one word in the novel and how it is used as a catalyst for this novel. Who do you think is most affected by the word? Why? Give a quote to support your claim . Your quote must be from Chapters 1-4. (The deadline to post a response to this question is midnight July 5,2014.)
4 comments:
In the beginning of the novel A Lesson Before Dying, the court calls the man in trial for murder (Jefferson) a hog. This brutal name for a human has a strikingly large impact on Jefferson's godmother Miss Emma. Along with the fact that her godson was being sentenced to death, being named a hog before dying was depressing to her. To help Miss Emma mourn, Grant's Aunt wanted him to ask Henri Pichot for the privilege of seeing Jefferson in jail before his near death. Therefore, this brutal nickname for Jefferson acted as a catalyst for Grant's attempt to turn Jefferson into a man by teaching. -Emily Kellar Cameron
^(an add on to my above comment)
Quote from chapters 1-4: "But I want him be a man, too, before he go to that chair", is a sentence Miss Emma said to Henri Pichot pleading for the privilege of Grant's teaching to Jefferson before the death sentence. She wants Jefferson to be a man, and to feel like a man dying in that chair. She does not want him to feel like a hog being burned away with nothing to show of himself in his short life journey.-Emily Kellar Cameron
I believe that the word focused on by this book is how Miss Emma called Grant the teacher. Throughout the book he is expected to teach Jefferson how to be a man again instead of the hog the court calls him. ""You the teacher," she said" (page 13). The saying a teacher learns as much from their students is shown through this book by how teaching Jefferson that he is a man instead of a hog, grant finds he still has much to learn.
Travis Stennett
In chapters one through four of A Lesson Before Dying, one key word. "I don't want them to kill no hog." The word hog is used mainly in the book to symbolize what white people had compared AfricanAmericans to. The first four chapters help really explain who this word hurt and affected the most. Ms. Emma and Tante Lou were affected by the word the most. The first couple of pages help to explain this because it tells us who was really watching the lawyer who was calling Ms. Emma's godson a hog. Tante Lou was the one watching him. She did not believe along with Ms. Emma that it was right for a man to have his pride ripped from him before being put to death. So they come up with a bright idea for Grant to go to the jail and convince Jefferson that he was not no hog but a man.
Jenna Anderson
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