My Four Reading Responses

Running head: FOUR READING RESPONSES1
Four Reading Responses
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Four Reading Responses
Going To Meet The Man
In “Going to meet the man,” Baldwin (1965) offers an eerily common story of a man of law, Jesse, enduring rising “insurgency” of blacks in 1960s. Typically white, Jesse, addressing a sleeping wife, remembers childhood memories. Troubled by growing unrest by blacks in his small city, a nod to nationwide political protests in U.S. during 1960s, Jesse appears to assure himself of his long-held beliefs by addressing a wife no longer listening to him. The recollections start by recent developments. Putting black protesters in jail against charges of blocking traffic flow around courthouse, Jesse hears singing in cells. The signing is incessant, irritating – and frightening. To Jesse, black songs are hymns addressed to God. Instead, a more focused Jesse believes, songs are appeals to God to send whites to Hell. The songs highlight, however, a paradox: “It was the sound with which he he was most familiar – though it was also the sound of which he had been least conscious – and it had always contained an obscured comfort” (Baldwin, p, 1753). The spirituality, not necessarily meant by blacks, is, believes Jesse, a reminder for him
– and, for that matter, all white men – to be good men. Indeed, Jesse appears in so many places in “Going to meet the man” to question his own beliefs and, less explicitly, to question whether all blacks are really one: “They [blacks] could no longer be sure, after all, that they had all done the same things” (Baldwin, p. 1755). The white man’s burden is relieved once Jesse, going as far back to old childhood memories, to remember a “bad nigger” lynched, set on fire and beaten by white crowds. The graphic details of a big, black nigger tortured to death is, to Jesse, a white man, a literary device so brilliantly employed to act as a means of white self-vindication. The
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initial question, “Wouldn’t you think they [blacks]’d learn?” (Baldwin, p, 1750) can now be understood as rhetorical.
Lullaby
In “Lullaby,” Silko (n.d.) speaks of lost dreams and lost connections to Mother Earth. The Navajo way of life, pervaded by white frowning men and women speaking English, is swept away. Danny and Ella, once playful children in a genuinely Navajo way, grew up to be aliens, speaking English, after being “weaned” from Navajo way of life. The endless nights she slept outdoors at a spot she ran to away from khaki-uniformed doctors about to send Danny and Ella away. The pain Ayah endured could be understood, accordingly, as a rebirth phase, a phase Ayah reconnects to nature, earth and sky. The sense of loss in “Lullaby” is perhaps best captured by Chato. Loyal and speaking white man’s English, Chato is, however, dismissed since he is no longer of use, something Ayah does not feel sorry about and, as she recalls, “he should have known all along what would happen” (Silko, p. 50). To serve a white man...