Tag: religion

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology,

       Third Edition. Ed. Beverly Lawn. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.

Summary of Work
A grandmother is arguing with her son Bailey and his wife about taking the kids to Florida for a weekend vacation. There are plenty of other places to see in Tennessee that they have not yet taken their children, and a vicious murdering criminal, The Misfit, is on the loose from Florida. What if they get murdered by him on the way? The son and daughter-in-law do not listen and the next morning, the grandmother, her cat, the two kids, and the parents are in the car together for the weekend trip.

On the way they stop at a gas station and BBQ spot and eat lunch. June Star, one of the children, dances a tap dance on the floor to some fast music that they put on via the jukebox. Then, when the waitress compliments her and says that she would love to take her home with her, June Star is very rude and says she’d never stay in such a terrible place as where they’re at. The waitress is cold but polite from then on. The group talks more about The Misfit, and then when they are done with lunch, move on. On the way, they pass a dirt road, and the grandmother comments that there was a plantation she stayed on up the road that they should stop and visit. She fibs about there being a secret wall that opens up that might contain treasure, and the children kick their parents’ seats until Bailey turns around to go see it. He insists this will the be one time they venture off their intended path. It is a rough dirt road, and they go up it quite a ways and don’t see any plantation. Right as they wreck their car by it rolling from a rough spot in the road, the grandmother remembers that the plantation was in Tennessee, not Georgia, and she has misled them. She doesn’t say anything for fear of making Bailey angrier than he already is.

The mother has a broken shoulder from protecting her new baby, and is is holding the child on the ground. The kids are just fine, as is the grandmother and father, although the grandmother’s hat is ruined and the cat is scared and clinging to the father. They see a car coming down the road, and they offer to help. The grandmother thinks that the man looks familiar, and then shouts, “You’re the Misfit!” Because she’s recognized them, they decide they have to kill the family. The other men first take Bailey and his son out to the woods and shoot them, the whole time the grandmother talking to the Misfit, saying that she knows he’s a good man and won’t do them any harm if he just prays to Jesus for help. Then the men come back and take the mother, June Star, and the baby into the woods and shoot them. The grandmother is still talking at the Misfit and then yells that she knows him because he is her son, and the Misfit shoots her in the chest three times, telling the men that if someone had kept her at gunpoint her whole life, she might have been a good woman.

Brief Note on Themes
The story itself is a look at family life and traditions in the American South. It deals with the nature of people: their morals, their values and ideas about what makes a good person, and people’s actions. The title, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” puts into play not only what it means to be a good man, but what exactly it means to be a good person, as the Misfit claims that the grandmother was not a good woman, much as he doesn’t claim to be a good man. Southern nostalgia for plantation life and pastoral imagery play a large part in the grandmother’s character, as she is always looking toward the past and better times that are tied to plantation life in the South.

As a short story, the work is perfectly set up for drama and action with the foreshadowing of the Misfit coming around to meet the family by having the grandmother obsessed with the topic. The story continues to mention it, always through the grandmother, to the very end when she comes face to face with him.

 

by bluesyjune

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology,

       Third Edition. Ed. Beverly Lawn. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.

Summary of Work 
A crowd of children are gathered waiting for adults to arrive in the town square. The little boys are gathering stones into a large pile and the girls are talking quietly to one another. It is the day of the town lottery, which has been held for longer than anyone in the town can remember. A little town of only 300 people, they meet every year to hold this lottery before the summer crop. Much of the ritual has been forgotten, but it involves a big black box full of wood chips, now papers, that every household draws from. There used to be a song or ritual of choosing the person who ran the lottery, but now it is just a swearing in. As all the townspeople get there and Mr. Summers is being sworn in, Mrs. Hutchinson arrives. She nearly forgot the lottery while she was washing dishes. Roll call is taken, and others volunteer to draw for those unable to attend. Mrs. Dunbar and Mrs. Hutchinson talk about how in many towns they are talking about getting rid of the lottery, and that many have already gotten rid of it. The townspeople talk about how ludicrous that is, and say that people, especially the younger generation, have no love for tradition anymore. Every head of household draws their papers, and when they open them, it is revealed that Mr. Hutchinson has the black spot on his paper. Mrs. Hutchinson protests that everyone didn’t give her husband enough time to draw and that it isn’t fair. But the lottery director asks how many are in the household, and he takes the black spot paper from Mr. Hutchinson and a number of white papers and puts them back in the box. Each member of the family draws from the box and then they open their papers, starting with the children. Mrs. Hutchinson has the black spot on the paper. She starts screaming and protesting, but the villagers have already formed a circle around her, having grabbed rocks from the pile that the boys built, and they start throwing rocks at her to kill her.

Brief Note on Themes
This story feels like a dystopia, with the population controlled and religion and tradition maintained through ritualized killing. There is very little backstory to this short story, and that in some ways increases the questions and thrilling drama and suspense of the story. It raises questions of the value of tradition, but it also raises questions about morality and human love and care. The villagers even have Mrs. Hutchinson’s baby boy throw rocks at her to stone her to death, and all of her children and even her husband participate in the ritual with no seeming care or love or regret that they are doing so. The story seems to suggest that morals are by and large culturally determined by a group and those rituals and morals are maintained regardless of the knowledge of where they come from. Much like when new ideas come forward and people object to them but can’t tell you why, the people of the town cannot imagine a world where this ritual sacrifice does not exist, believing that it helps with crop cycles. When morals or ethics are derived from cultural group decisions, especially from many generations past, how do we judge evolution or determining what is right? Here, ritualized murder is right, as it has been in historical cultures. While we may consider it barbaric today, for some cultures it was part of life. For me, the short story has us call into consideration what it is that constitutes societal standards and social morals and rituals. It is key to knowing how and why we act as we do, as individuals, as communities. And it calls into question if there are certain morals or rules that are always right, and ones that should never be broken or deviated from. Is murder ever okay? Are family groups and love superseded by the needs of the community, or should we always stick with family and have protective instincts for them? Those seem to be the two largest questions regarding moral pillars that come to mind.

by bluesyjune

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Summary of Work
This work is a series of letters to his son about what it is like to be black in America and how his son, Samori, should strive to live his life in order to both survive and be aware of the world around him, and yet at the same time have joy in his life and take the opportunities that he can. He begins his work by telling his son that race is an invention that is not new, but just continually rehashed with each new country and nation. It used to be Jews and Germans and Irish and English, etc, that would discriminate against each other; now, in America, it is “black and white,” with many of the previous groups mentioned being eventually combined into a class of white, even though they had not previously been branded as such. And it is this myth of whiteness that allowed for slavery and exploitation of black bodies. Coates is very concerned that his son know that the struggle they are dealing with is much more than racism: it is the struggle for black embodiment and empowerment. Racism is a cover term for the destruction of black bodies, progress, and livelihood.

He remembers back to his time as a child growing up in West Baltimore, feeling trapped because he had to go to school but saw no purpose to it and at the same time had to live the laws of the streets for survival and yet had no desire for the violence that went on in the streets. His father would punish him regularly with the idea that it is better that he beat him than the police, and he didn’t understand what it was about until he grew up and had a son of his own. In his desire to get out of the system, he went to college at Howard, where he spent most of his time in the library reading in the stacks and the archives. His father worked as a librarian and archivalist there, so he had always been happy to read and get knowledge from books. His parents never gave him easy answers but always referred him to books. He became very fond of Malcolm X’s writings and ideologies, and sought to have those ideas reinforced and verified as fact from history books. But he found so many different perspectives, and his history teachers gave him so much information, that he had to dispel the illusions that he had built for himself. He says he is very grateful for those historian professors who taught him the issues with grandiose ideologies. For white people, he says that the ideology is the American Dream, and the Dreamers blur faces and forget trespasses and injustices against black people in order to maintain that dream, and they continue to commit crimes against blacks in order to keep the dream.

He learned a lot at Howard, which he calls The Mecca, and met many people there. It was a haven for him where he could see what his people and his culture could be and do. He met his wife on the Howard Campus, but he could not stay long enough to graduate, feeling restrained by the courses he had to take and not caring for the things he could graduate in. He started writing, which was the one thing he really liked. When they moved to New York City, they struggled. He was not making money as a writer, and she got a job and was nearly sole support. Their son was a toddler at the time. He recalls the layout of the city both structurally and racially, and discusses how when they went to a movie on the Upper West Side one day, his four year old son got pushed by a white woman, and he turned around and yelled at her, and other white men came to her defense and told him that they’d have him arrested. He got even angrier. He explains to his son that this moment is a moment of shame for him because he forgot the code of the streets and where he was. He should have been able to call out her behavior and move on, he thought.

He also takes a lot of time to discuss police brutality, shootings, and judicial injustice to his son, who was very upset after hearing the verdict in the Michael Brown case. he talks about Prince Jones, who he knew at Howard, getting shot by the PG policeman in Virginia. He describes his feelings of anger, because Prince was an upstanding citizen, with a fiancee and a daughter on the way; he was a very intelligent man, a prodigy, who valued experience over things; he had it all, and had seemingly beat the system of the ghettos and projects, and yet his life was still taken from him. Coates started writing about the injustice of the police system after that, full of anger. He offers no real relief or respite for his son about these injustices, but tells him that they have always happened, and will continue to happen, without consequences for those who commit the crimes. He talks about how Prince’s killer was put back on the streets to patrol without even a trial. He talks about Prince’s mother’s amazingly strong and calm reaction to the whole affair, even as she grieved for the loss of her son. Toward the end of the book, he describes sitting down with Dr. Jones and learning of her story of success, becoming a doctor and then the chief of radiology and being able to offer her son and daughter everything she didn’t have growing up. To talk about Prince comforts her, but at the same time, the pain never goes away.

Coates reflects on these shootings and injustices and how they are dealt with within the community. He says he knows that he is somewhat disconnected from them because they can speak of forgiveness and turning to God, but he does not believe in their God, but instead believes that this life is all we have. He tells his son that perhaps he could have taught him more if he did believe, but that he cannot offer that comfort.

His wife’s life had been very different than his growing up, and she had been afforded opportunities to travel when he hadn’t, among other opportunities. She lived in a more well off area in a more well off home. He never understood his wife’s need to travel, thinking back to his French class days and thinking that France was as far away as Jupiter. But his wife went to Paris and came back with stories and photos, and he went by himself later on and got to see a new world, one that was not underpinned by the same superficially-created racial divides of black and white. And yet he also noticed that there is simply a different system of oppression in place: France, like every other European country, was built upon colonizing and oppressing other groups of people. Being aware of that, he thinks, is important so that they don’t lose perspective on how systems of oppression function. He also goes back for a time with his whole family to explore France, and further comes to this conclusion.

He tells his son to live his life, to enjoy it and live it fully, and to fight for the struggle to equality, but to not fight it in hopes that the Dreamers will convert their thinking and ways and come down from their mountain. He says that also to think that gods or ancestors will come and reap revenge and justice upon the Dreamers’ heads is also unrealistic. Instead, he says, Dreamers will always keep exploiting black people, but with technological improvements, they are also exploiting the Earth, which is no respecter of persons. The Dreamers, he says, will eventually destroy themselves.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The main theme of this work is the exploration of what black embodiment means, and Coates does this through an exploration of his own experience with life and watching people engage with the oppressive superstructures forced upon them. Understanding what it means to be racially embodied versus simply a human being is the main message that Coates brings to his son and to all that read the book: there are different rules and codes imposed upon those with darker skin, and even if the rules are followed, there is no guarantee that it will lead to a good life free of violence and terror. And yet there are still spaces that allow for black communities to share in joy and the power of owning their own bodies, of living as a community and an individual.

There are two spaces outside of the Mecca of Howard University that he describes this happening: religion and dance. Religion offers comfort in a higher being and in the spirit, a relationship he doesn’t understand but can appreciate in the community it brings to people who are feeling broken and are oppressed. For dance, he describes it saying that he “would watch how black people moved, how in these clubs they danced as though their bodies could do anything, and their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm’s voice on the outside black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies . . . . But in the clubs, under the influence of two-for-one rum and Cokes, under the spell of low lights, in thrall of hip-hop music, I felt them to be in total control of every step, every nod, every pivot” (62). Movement, then, becomes a form of joy and communal engagement and solidarity; it is unique in its function for the community and the individual, as it affirms control over the body in a way that is not possible outside of the shared communal space.

This book also contains photographs periodically throughout the book: of Coates, of his wife, of his son, of the doors in France his wife describes to him, and more. It is worth considering how the photographs enhance the narrative. Is their purpose merely personal, to show his son? Or are they meant to emphasize important messages contained in the text about black embodiment and black bodies?

 

Brief Note on Dissertation Uses
For purposes of my dissertation, this book is going to be very useful in helping me to understand how the power of dance is a way to assert control over one’s own body and to be embodied in a communal space. In literature, then, dance could be discussed in terms of embodiment and communal and public messages of personhood. I have seen this discussed in lectures before in context of blues: it was one of the only ways black people, during enslavement and after, could assert control over their bodies and their lives, not dictated to by white people.

 

 

by bluesyjune

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. 1952. Vintage International, 2013.

Summary of Work
John, the stepson of Gabriel Grimes and son of Elizabeth, is sure he is expected to be a man of God, but he worries he is not yet saved. He knows that there is sin in him and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He goes to church regularly with his family. Elisha, the preacher’s son, comes into town, and he teaches Sunday school. John is having a hard time paying attention because he is focused so much on Elisha. He gets to watch Elisha dance before God and pray and sing, and he wants to be very much like Elisha. Elisha is once reprimanded for spending time with Ella Mae, Harriet Washington’s ward. They are publicly shamed in front of the congregation and made an example of for being together so often unchaperoned and unmarried. After that, Elisha never sees Ella.

John wakes up the next Saturday to realize it’s his fourteenth birthday, and wonders if his family will remember. Sometimes his family has completely forgotten. But he doesn’t make a fuss about it. He goes downstairs for breakfast and his mom and his brother Roy are having a heated discussion about their father Gabriel. Gabriel, a man of god and a former preacher, regularly beats his sons for disobedience. They are not allowed to play outside with other children or go to the movies or do anything that Gabriel Grimes considers unholy. So they spend their days in the house or at school doing work and they go to church as a family on Sundays. They also go on Saturday evenings to the prayer service and they regularly have Bible lessons.

When his mother asks him to do chores, he believes his mother has forgotten about his birthday. He does the chores, and afterwards his mother calls him in the kitchen. She gives him some coins and tells him he can go out and buy what he wants for his birthday, but that he needs to do so before his father comes home. He goes into New York City and determines that he will go see a movie, an activity which has been forbidden him by his father. He feels guilty as he starts watching the film, but as the film goes on he empathizes with the main character. John is tormented because he cannot decide if he wants to follow religion or if he wants to participate in what his father determines are sinful activities. He knows that the people in his school and at other places are good people, even though his father says they are sinners. His father has also told him to never trust a white person.

When he gets out of the movies he sees his sister Sarah running home with a package. He quickly follows and finds that his brother Roy has been sliced open with a knife from his temple to his eye. He had gone to the West side of town and picked a fight with white boys. His father is taking care of his son and is angry that John has been gone so long. John goes to take care of his baby sister. And his Aunt Florence is also there. They argue over what happened and over his wife’s inability to keep his son in the home, and Florence is defending his wife Elizabeth when Gabriel strikes his wife. Roy tells his father never to strike his mom again or he will kill him.

That evening John goes to the Church early to clean it before the Saturday evening prayer service. Elisha also comes along. They wrestle and then clean the Church. Slowly people come in and they start to pray as Elisha plays a sad tune on the piano. As Florence prays, she thinks back on her past: she was a girl born to a former slave, and her mother saw no need to move North. She forced her daughter to stay home instead of go to school so she could learn what her mother saw as the skill set she needed to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper in the South. Florence resented her brother Gabriel’s opportunities to learn and be out and about doing whatever he pleased, and felt disgusted at his philandering and drinking and gaming. His mother always asked him to come to God, but he never would. Then, as Florence’s mother was about to die and her employer had asked her to be his concubine, she decided to buy a ticket to New York and leave everything behind. Her family tries to stop her, but she goes North and gets a job and finally meets a husband, who is a bluesman and who wastes his money on drink and frivolous things. She loves him, but always fights with him. One day he comes home and they have a large fight and he never comes back. She finds out from his mistress years later that he has died in the war in France. She is heartbroken.

As Gabriel watches his sister pray, he prays and thinks back on his life. After his sister left he became a preacher, and he was very successful. He marries Deborah, a woman who had been gang raped by white men in a field as a young girl. She is plain and eight years his senior, but very faithful and a woman of God. She is barren, and one day he meets a young woman named Esther who he is tempted by. While they are at work together, she gets a little drunk and lures him into the house, and he decides to sleep with her. They have sex together for nine days, and then he determines he can no longer be unfaithful and ends the affair. But she gets pregnant. He will not leave his wife and marry her and wants nothing to do with her, so he steals his wife’s savings and gives it to Esther to go to Chicago. She dies in childbirth there, and her family brings her body back and buries it, and take care of the baby, Royal. Royal is the name he was going to give his firstborn son. He watches his son grow up but will not claim him, and he dies in a knife fight in Chicago when he is 18. When he learns this and breaks down, Deborah admits that she knows about the affair and wants to know why he never admitted it and claimed his son. She tells him that he had better repent and keep repenting until he knows for certain God has forgiven him. She dies soon later from her illness. Florence also knows about her brother’s sins because Deborah sent her a letter about it.

Elizabeth was the daughter of a bluesman. Her mother died young, and she was taken away from her father by her Aunt, who believed her father would not raise her right. Elizabeth resented her Aunt for it her whole life and hated the church. While living in the South she met Richard, the store boy, and they fell in love. She follows him to New York City, and they work in the same hotel together. She starts sleeping with him and gets pregnant, but doesn’t tell him. One early morning when they stay out too late, he takes her back to Harlem but then gets caught in a bad situation that lands him in jail. The cops tell her he robbed a store, even though he didn’t and was simply caught in the crosshairs. He will not sign a confession, and he is severely beaten. The cops let her see him, and he stands trial and is found innocent on others’ testimony. He is broken when he gets out of prison and he kills himself, and she never gets to tell him she is pregnant. She still works to take care of herself and the baby, and now she lives in her own space instead of her Aunt’s friend’s home, but she is miserable. She meets Florence, and confides in her about her son and his daddy. She becomes fast friends with Florence, and when Gabriel comes to town, she doesn’t understand why Florence doesn’t like him. Gabriel ends up marrying Florence and promising he will raise the child like his own. She thinks about his promise and that he kept the word but not the spirit. Gabriel hates that John is more righteous than his own son, and cannot stand the thought of John being better than his flesh and blood.

John falls under the power of the Lord and has a vision of going through the gates of hell and being under Satan’s power, and being lifted up by Christ. The congregation is elated that he has been saved. Elisha helped him through the process. The only people who are not so happy are his mother and stepfather. As they walk in the morning light, for they have prayed all night long in the Pentecostal Church, Elisha and John talk about praying and staying on the path to God. Florence and Gabriel talk about Gabriel’s past and Gabriel is furious that Florence knows and that she knows how much he hates John. Elizabeth is crying for her past love and for the lack of love Gabriel has for her son and herself and the sorrow he has brought into her life as the other members of the Church talk about how amazing it is that John has so young discovered the path to God and been saved. As Elisha and John get to John’s home, John wishes to tell him about his father, but only asks for Elisha to always pray for him and be with him. He walks into the house at his father’s bidding before Sunday services later that morning.

Brief Note on Themes
Religion and how it works within people is a large theme in this book. This is particularly true for how certain truths for certain individuals lead them in specific paths and often lead to their downfall as they think their way is the only right way. What does it mean to be saved? How can a person come to be saved through Christ? And can a person stay saved, or are they destined to continually fail and fall into sin?

There is also a theme of finding identity and what it means to be religious and American and living in the North versus the South as a black person. Black identity is also overtly discussed, as each of these people come to learn what it means to be black in America and to in one way or another fear and resent white people and their power.

The power of the word of God through the Bible and through prophecy are always present in the work. There is a big tension between being part of the world and being part of religion. This is always in some way or other expressed using the blues and bluesmen and the jook joint spaces they are played in as a secular representation, and the church and the Bible and God as contrast. That tension is a long and well established running theme in black history, and many preachers were at some point bluesmen before they turned to God. Others were originally preachers who turned to blues. So there is a lot to explore in the ways the “world” is represented in comparison to religion. It’s also interesting that dance is associated with the Bible and God, and there does seem to be a sense of possession, much like the mounting of the Vodun, in black Christian worship in the book. When blues is mentioned, any activities surrounding it are always linked to sex. This continues to show that the music and dances, both done secularly and religiously, have the same call and response ties, the same roots.

Family relationships and sexual relationships and dalliances, are also very common in this work, and love as real and love as convenience are explored. Gabriel loves for duty or convenience: he marries those he thinks will bring him closer to God because he is called to lift them up. Elizabeth comes the closest to finding true love with Richard because no matter what they stick together until he commits suicide. Florence falls into the trap of loving someone to have someone around, and though she does love her husband, she cannot truly forget his faults.

by bluesyjune

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Dover, 1995.

Summary of Work
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is a novel that contains a series of short stories interwoven to create a picture of the town, its history, and its residents. The story is framed by the brief introduction of a writer who, upon reaching old age and spending most of his time in his room, has a dream/vision where he sees truth created and then people walking past and picking up a truth or two, some as many as a dozen, and then going about trying to live their lives by those truths, and in turn becoming corrupted because they take the truth and turn it, and themselves, into a falsehood, a grotesque. The idea is that a truth clung to fiercely creates all sorts of problems for people and can destroy happiness and lives. The whole of the novel functions with this frame.

The stories range from tragic to hilarious in nature. Wing Biddlebaum is the first character that we meet. He is talking to George Willard, the young and naive reporter for the newspaper in town, and George always wonders about Wing’s hands, but has enough respect for the man to never ask. Wing has the fastest hands for picking produce in the town, but he is always insistent on trying to hide his hands, as if he is ashamed of them. His past is tragic. As a schoolteacher, he is affectionate and caring for the boys in his classroom, but upon one boy deciding that the man’s hands were making sexual advances rather than more of a fatherly care, the townspeople become enraged and one comes into the classroom and beats him bloody. Afterward, the townsmen come to his house with intent to hang him, change their mind and let him run, but then decide after all that they want to hang him. He gets away, changes his name to Biddlebaum, and lives a life in Winesburg after his relative dies that he had been living with.

Doctor Reefy is an older man who is known for having had a very young wife. The story goes that she came to him one day after a suitor had gotten her pregnant and she didn’t know what to do. He decided to try to help her as he could by offering her company and advice, and after she miscarried the child, the woman found that she very much loved the doctor, and married him. He was known for keeping thoughts on small pieces of paper, which he would read to her, and then put them in his pockets and roll them into balls and then throw them away when they were fully rolled. A year after they married she died of illness.

Elizabeth Willard, George’s mother, is the wife of Tom Willard, who runs the hotel in town. The hotel was her father’s, and she feels trapped in the town, unloved and unseen, never having been on an actual adventure. She hates her husband and her life, and wants her son to have the adventures she never had. There are later stories about her telling of her affair with Doctor Reefy, of her father’s giving her 800 dollars to live a different life than the one she had, and her inability to tell anyone about it so her son could have the money before she died.

Doctor Parcival is one who believes in living life with little amounts of work and going around hating people and feeling superior to them. When he refuses to help during an accident that leaves people dead, he, terrified, tells George that people will be after him for it and that everyone is Christ and ends up crucified in the end. Louise Trunnion is a woman on the poorer end of town that sends George a message that he can meet her one evening. He goes and they spend an evening together, and they figure no one has to know about it.

Jesse Bentley is a boy from a farmer’s family who goes away to become a preacher but must come back to his family when all his brothers are killed in the Civil War. He goes back with his wife and he becomes very industrious, but everyone is unhappy under him, including himself, despite his extreme success. He talks to God and is convinced his mission is to be like the Israelites of old and to conquer the Philistines around him by buying up all their farms, and he is convinced he needs a son, David, to help him. His wife delivers a child, Louise, and dies in childbirth, and Jesse is upset more at the birth of a daughter than his wife’s death. Louise receives no love from anyone, and in an attempt to find love, married Mr. Hardy. She is still very unhappy and is more unhappy when she has a son, David. She is vicious and cruel to everyone, including her son. One evening her son runs away to try and get to his grandfather because he doesn’t want to go home, and he gets lost. A search party is sent out, and when he is found and taken back to his mother, he is surprised by her warmth and care and concern. When her father states that he would like David to come live on the farm with him, everyone is even more surprised when she agrees. David loves the farm and gets the love his mother denied him, but Jesse is still insistent that he is God’s chosen. The first time he takes David out to the woods to pray, David becomes terrified and runs from the man who no longer looks like his grandfather. He gets over it, but years later after Jesse has become the most successful farmer in town, he gets it in his head that he needs to offer a burnt offering to the Lord with David. They get a lamb and tie it up and go to the same spot in the woods. While Jesse gets a fire going, David unties the lamb’s feet and waits for Jesse, but is determined that both he and the lamb will run when needed. When Jesse pulls out a knife to kill the lamb, David thinks that Jesse is going to kill him, and he runs with the lamb. David finds a rock, puts it in his sling, and hits Jesse square in the forehead with it, knocking him out. David thinks he has killed his grandfather and runs away, and when Jesse wakes up, forever after he states that he lost David due to his pride.

Joe Welling is a man who runs around with all sorts of funny stories and ideas, and he falls in love with a woman who is part of the scariest, meanest, toughest family in town. When they come to tell him to stay away, he wins them over with his strange ideas, obliviousness, and charm. Alice Hindman waits for a lover that will never come back. Wash Williams was made a cuckold by a wife and he hates all women for it and spends his days as a telegraph operator in Winesburg after that. Seth Richmond is quiet and doesn’t feel he fits into the town. He loves Helen White, but determines that he cannot be with her because he isn’t part of the town, and he decides to leave to find a better life. Tandy Hard is a young girl who’s name is given to her by a drunkard who is passing through town. The Reverend Curtis Hartman is married and a good reverend, but he is tempted when he sees the schoolteacher partly naked and reading a book through his open window, which is stained glass with a picture of Christ with a child. He breaks a hole in the corner of the glass so he can “overcome temptation,” but he is never able to. He sees her naked, praying, and crying in her room one cold night when he has nearly frozen himself to death waiting in the bell tower to see her and walked with no shoes through the cold to do so, and he runs to George Willard and says that God has saved him and shown him new ways. Kate Swift is a teacher who is unmarried, bound to be an old maid, but who cares about her students and in a motherly and womanly way loves George Willard and tries to guide him but also fails because she loves him but doesn’t feel she can be with him. Enoch Robinson spent time in New York City and became an illustrator for an advertisement company, but he leaves his wife and two children to be with himself and his imaginary friends. He is happy in his small hallway-like space until a neighbor starts talking to him and he realizes she’s ruined everything because she understands him. He moves back to Winesburg a bitter and lonely old man.

Belle Carpenter loves the local bartender but does not feel like she can just see him because of her social station. So she sees George Willard, but isn’t really interested, and George knows it and is unhappy. George makes one more attempt to woo her, but the bartender has come by earlier to tell her not to see him, and so she uses that as an opportunity to make the bartender jealous. George is shoved out of the picture and his pride is wounded. Elmer Cowley feels like his father and his whole family are queer and that they will never understand that is how the whole town sees them and their little shop. He feels like he needs to let the town know, and particularly George Willard, that he isn’t queer like his family, and after several failed attempts, decides to leave town, and before he goes, he beats up George Willard. Ray Pearson reflects on his life and how if he hadn’t had gotten his girl pregnant he wouldn’t be married, and that perhaps he shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place because it wasn’t his responsibility to take care of a woman after he got her pregnant. He is going to tell a fellow farmhand this in regard to his same situation, but then determines that it is a lie and the farmhand decides to marry the girl he has gotten pregnant. Tom Foster is a boy who comes to Winesburg with his grandmother and does odd jobs around town. He tries things once so he knows what it is like and then never does them again.

Helen White reflects upon her time with George Willard and determines she has some sort of affection for him after spending time with city folk and academics and determining that she doesn’t like their company. She and George spend an evening together, and out of it they gain a mutual respect for each other. They never sleep together, but instead laugh and occasionally kiss and then get serious as they think about life. They do not get married, but instead George leaves the city in search of a job as a reporter in a bigger city, perhaps Cleveland or Chicago.

Brief Note on Themes
The themes of this work deal very much with the idea of the grotesque as outlined in the beginning of the book, but it also describes much of small town life in the Midwest and deals with the relationships between people in small towns as well as the mentalities and personalities that come with that town. The strongest, most overt themes come in the stories that deal heavily in religion, making commentary about how seemingly good things and religious upbringing and study can lead to a warped sense of reality and disaster for families and individuals as they lose their way by getting caught on certain particulars of religion. The idea of getting caught up on small things rather than seeing a bigger life picture is, in fact, what hooks all of these stories together outside of their happening in the same town.

by bluesyjune

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Picador, 1968.

Summary of Work

Tom Wolfe documents the lives of the Merry Pranksters, the group of acid-tripping hippies who drove around the nation in a Day-Glo covered bus with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The group forms around Kesey as they start using LSD to have transcendent experiences, a drug he had on hand from volunteering as a test subject in a study at a college and from working at the mental hospital for a time while he wrote his first book. However, upon the announcement of the destruction of the neighborhood he is living in, he moves to La Honda, California, where a group of people, later known as the Merry Pranksters, follow him. They all live in the same home, spread out on the land and in the woods, and each work on their own projects. But two things bring them together: LSD and sound. Taking after William Burroughs’ ideas, they decide to wire everything up with both microphones and speakers and record all of it. They play back the sound by splicing it and speaking over it, as well as gathering any and all sound they can. When they decide that they’d also like to make a grand movie to cover their experiences on LSD, they take it one step further. Kesey buys a bus, which they paint in various Day-Glo colors. They completely gut the bus and remodel it to be a road-trip vehicle for them, and they wire it for sound inside and out so that they can play music, broadcast sound, and record while they are on their trip. Neal Cassady is the driver of the bus, and they take off across the country, doing acid at various points along the way and filming the acid trips.

As they start to become noticed across the country (LSD was not yet illegal), Kesey becomes a main face of the counterculture movement, and they start to come in contact with people such as the Grateful Dead and Hells Angels, and the relationships and associations help all groups they come in contact with gain more prominence. Kesey writes one more novel but then gives up writing and focuses on making acid tests catch on for the public. He and the Merry Pranksters host many different acid tests in California, fooling the cops along the way. They even attend a Beatles concert ridiculously high on LSD and don’t get caught for it. They watch the crowd and see how enthralled they are by the Beatles and the control the Beatles have over the crowd but do not use for anything outside of the music or money-making business itself, and Kesey and the group leave back to their bus to make noise on their microphones and tapes. They host a big party for the Beatles, who never show up.

When they do finally get in trouble for something, it is for possession and use of marijuana. The first time the sentencing is lighter, but the next time Kesey is caught with it, he knows that it will be a prison sentence. So he runs away to Mexico, becoming more and more paranoid that the cops are after him and he is going to be extradited. The Pranksters make their way down to Mexico and stay with him for a time, and then help him get back across the border, where he spends some time in California before he is caught and thrown in jail. He avoids sentencing by saying that he would like to tell people that they need to go “beyond acid.” The authorities, thinking that he means that he will tell everyone to stop doing acid and talk about the dangers of it, give him a light sentence and ask him to go on public television to make his statement. But when he goes public with his statement, he never outright declares acid to be a bad influence or as having negatives. He simply says that once you go through the door that acid opens up, you have to take more steps rather than just keep opening and closing the same door.

Kesey and the Pranksters host one more “Acid Graduation” event, where they show that the next step is trying to achieve the transcendence they experience on LSD without the mind-altering drugs. Many news crews, journalists, and others show up to document the event, but leave before it ends, unable to understand what is going on.

The Pranksters themselves aren’t sure that they understand what Kesey’s new goals and direction are, and eventually, one by one, the group members go their own separate ways. Kesey serves his time in work camps in California while his family lives in Oregon. The movie never gets finished, although during the whole time the Pranksters are active people are cutting it and editing it and shooting more film. The film, writings, and sound recordings that are in the Prankster archive are what Wolfe used to piece together the biographical, very subjective narrative that is the book.

 

Brief Note on Themes

This work is a prime example of New Journalism, and it is considered a great representation of the counterculture of the Beat Generation in the 1950s and 1960s. Sound and music plays a large part in this book, making it great for sound studies considerations. Pseudo-religious activity is also a major part of the work, as the Pranksters nearly worship Kesey as the new Messiah, with the Pranksters as the apostles, and they utilize LSD trips to have essentially religious experiences. Drug use is a major theme, particularly acid use. Intersubjectivity is prominent in the work, and focuses on the idea that people can enter into a space where they know what it’s like to be someone else and achieve the ability to think and act as a group. For counterculture, the work focuses on the differences between what others were doing at that time, which was largely unknown, and what the Pranksters were doing, which was bringing the alternate lifestyle to the public eye rather than keeping it underground.

 

Questions about the Work

  1. In this book, we see clearly the obsession that the Pranksters have with mixed media content in conjunction with their acid trips. Claire, a young and naive girl who shows up to an Acid Test event in Watts, states in her account that before she, unawares, dosed herself with LSD, she didn’t understand what was going on: “This may explain why a lot of people were digging the film, laughing, and also why a lot of people were there . . . I’m sure that I was one of a minority who had no idea what to expect. The word must have been passed, but didn’t get to me” (272). After ingesting the LSD, Claire’s perspective of the film and sounds changes from simply odd nonsense to an otherworldly environment. This got me wondering, what is it about sound, lag, and reverb that create situations that seem otherworldly or out of place? What is the purpose of the acid trips and the sound and image manipulation beyond the vague notion of expanding understanding or knowledge?
  2. Tom Wolfe describes his process as one that tries to encompass the full Prankster experience: the drugs, the pranks, the adventures, and the recordings. He states, “The Pranksters recorded much of their own history in the Prankster Archives in the form of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour movie of the bus trip” (415). How does having so many recordings of people change the way we approach writing a nonfiction work, and when is it useful to stray away from transcription and become more subjective, as Wolfe suggests that he does throughout the work?
  3. Geographically speaking, the many of the acid tests are done in largely black communities (see the houses they rent/use, geographical areas like Compton). What is problematic about the image the Pranksters and other whites have created around these black communities?

 

by bluesyjune