Paths Taken & Untaken

"the menace of its greyness" (l.20).
Amiri Baraka's "The Invention of Comics"

Points for Reflection

W. E. B. DuBois's "Jesus Christ in Texas" (1920), Dover 72-80

1. Du Bois's Darkwater; Voices from Within the Veil (1920), from which this story is taken, opens with a portion of his "Credo" (1904), part of which reads, "I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development." Does this tale effectively dramatize this perspective?
2. Can you identify any of the Biblical allusions in this tale?
3. Why does the colonel decide to hire the black convicts recommended by the promoter?
4. How do the colonel, judge's wife, young woman, young man, and rector each respond to the Christ-like stranger's presence? What do their reactions reveal about their respective characters?
5. Does the Christ figure transform the convict at only a surface level, or in more profound fashion?

Flannery O'Connor's "The Comforts of Home" (1960; 1965), 573-94

1. Does O’Connor’s apparently objective, detached description of Thomas’ living conditions and expectations at the opening of this story (573) provide an oblique commentary on his character, one implicitly elaborated later?
2. According to Thomas, what roles do propriety and pragmatism play in moral virtue?
3. Both Thomas and his mother toss about the idea that Star Drake (Sarah Ham) can’t help behaving the way she does (574, 580, 582), that she’s “‘[b]orn without the moral faculty’” (575).  Does the story itself bear out this conclusion that Star fundamentally cannot access traditional virtue?
4. Thomas’ mother repeatedly asserts that her compassion is largely motivated by imagining how she’d feel if he, her son, were in Star’s situation (575, 582).  Does Thomas’ own imagination grant him access to others’ experiences, similarly stoking compassion within him?
5. Thomas loves his mother because “it was his nature to do so,” but sometimes has difficulty accepting her love for him: “There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery and he sensed about him forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control” (575).  Is this difficulty at all related to the trouble he has accepting her kindness towards Star?
6. Thomas does not recognize the devil as an entity, but considers “engagements with the devil” merely a way of describing the foolhardy extremes to which his mother takes her charity (575).  The narrator tells us, however, that when her “virtue got out of hand, “a sense of devils grew upon him” that were “not mental quirks in himself or the old lady,” but “denizens with personalities, present though not visible . . .” (576).  What repercussions follow Thomas’ refusal to identify demons as demons?
7. Both Thomas and his mother evince a censoring impulse, Thomas wishing to spare his mother “all unpleasant sights”—including that of the sexually loose, nineteen-year-old Star in a filthy jail telling stories about being sexually abused (577)—while she tries to discourage Star from watching crime movies (579).  Are their respective censoring impulses motivated by the same principles?
8. Is Thomas’ father dead and gone, or just dead?
9. Why does Thomas find himself unable to tell Star, definitively, what he thinks of her when he has the opportunity to do so in the car (580-81)?
10. Is Thomas’ mother’s impractical, foolish love implicitly validated, or criticized, in this story?
11. Thomas maintains that he is not dead set against Star herself, but of his mother's making a fool of herself in trying to love Star (583).  Is this true?
12. What is the nature of the “disturbance in the depths of his being” caused by Star’s person and presence, and why does it lie “somewhere out of the reach of his power of analysis” (583)?
13. The current sheriff, an old friend of Thomas’ deceased father, appears rather sexist (590-91).  Does Thomas’ thought-life suggest that he is equally sexist?
14. Is Thomas responsible for his irrevocable action at the tale’s end?
15. Why does it look as though Thomas and Star are going to embrace at the story’s end?

James Baldwin's "Letter to My Nephew" from The Fire Next Time (1963), PDF

1. What two different types of laughter does Baldwin discover in his brother’s experience?
2. Why might Baldwin choose not to identify the specific injustices experienced by his brother?
3. Why does Baldwin call the white Americans complicit in sustaining a racially stratified society “innocent”?
4. Baldwin again paints in broad strokes instead of clearly delineated details when he compares the conditions of black Americans to the Victorian Londoners of Charles Dickens’s novels, instead of naming a particular novel by the British author or listing specific difficulties generated by, say, the British Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 or the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), as well as those problems imperfectly addressed by the Mines and Collieries Act (1842), the Labor in Factories Act (1844), or the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1889).  Why speak in vague, evocative generalities?
5. How many different ways does Baldwin use the word “black” here?
6. In the same breath Baldwin tells his nephew to “trust your experience” and to “know whence you came” (2).  If the latter does not come naturally because of restricting “details and symbols,” this would make it difficult to do the former.  What sort of “details and symbols” do you imagine a black individual in the early ‘60s would need to deconstruct in order to fully recognize her/his potential?
7. Why does Baldwin, in writing about integration, claim that the real crux of the matter lies in black Americans accepting white Americans, not the other way around?
8. What does Baldwin believe prevents white folk from acting on the truths they know (presumably, truths about equality like those embedded in the U.S. Constitution)?

Street to Mbari (1964)
Jacob Lawrence

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu