"the sky is gray" quotes

Put another way, if Gainess stories were set in the India of 1946, two years before partition, if the primary groups described were Muslim and Hindu, rather than black and white, would the stories still merit reading? Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. The narrator is James, an eight-year-old black boy living in rural Louisiana. With all of these facets, why would Gaines end the story with this quest unfinished? Their meal finished, James and his mother thank the woman for her hospitality. Subsequent publications included the short stories A Long Day in November (1959), Just Like a Tree (1962), and The Sky is Gray (1963), and the novels Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), In My Fathers House (1978) A Gathering of Old Men (1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Later, the whole family is at hand when Octavia and Jamess aunt count out the cost of a trip to the dentist: She say: enough to get there and get back. She was preparing him to take care of himself in case she had to go away like his father did. The blacks then leave the store under the kindly but acute genius in America, with tyrannous eye: James recounts how shes still there watching us (italics mine). Gates, Henry L, and Nellie Y. McKay. i love Gaines' use of symbols senses in this story it is one of hope I think. Jamess mother talks at length about how much it will cost while James pretends to sleep. Although her primary goal is to project a model of strength for James through her own actions, her inability to make her sense of the world comprehensible to him leaves James vulnerable to the very forces from which she would shield him. The Sky is Gray is told entirely from the point of view of the eight-year old narrator, James. Genre: . Sometimes it just hurt, hurt, hurt. I think the message it sends about how people treat each other is important. 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. 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 . Gaines, Ernest. My heart tells me, the boy says. By forcing James to sublimate his emotions and accept them as signs of human weakness, she fails to provide him with a means of dealing with the emotional responses of others in a way consistent with her philosophy. 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. 110-13. Based on the story of the same title by Ernest Gaines, about a young Black farmboy's dawning of awareness about himself and society. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. Thats the thing. In the communal microcosm of the doctors office he represents the defiance, the nonviolent non-cooperation of the Civil Rights movement that would sweep through the South thirty years later. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, because there were no high schools for blacks near his home. A strong offstage presence, Jamess father is most profound in his absence. But what the narrative loses from one hand it gains in the other. Other awards he has received include the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Study Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant-in-Aid, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and honorary doctorates from Denison University, Brown University, Bard College, Whittier College, and Louisiana State University. Twenty-five for me to go, twenty-five for him. 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. A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist. Gainess story is meant as more than an entertainment; it is meant as a critique of the racial injustice he experienced as a boy made vivid again by a visit to Louisiana in 1968. 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. Further Reading The Sky Is Gray by Ernest J. Gaines is a poignant and thought-provoking short story about a young African American boy named James, who lives in rural Louisiana with his mother and grandmother during the mid-20th century. As they wait, his mother thinks about homeabout his aunt, the other children, the farm animals and the weatherthe narrative follows Jamess thoughts back to the origins of his toothache. Categories: American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literature, Short Story, Tags: Analysis of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, appreciation of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, criticism of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, Ernest J. Gaines, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray analysis, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray appreciation, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray essays, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray guide, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray notes, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray plot, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray story, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray summary, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray themes, essays of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, guide of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, notes of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, plot of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, story of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, summary of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, themes of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, Analysis of Ernest Hemingways The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Analysis of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, appreciation of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, criticism of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray analysis, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray appreciation, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray essays, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray summary, Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray themes, essays of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, guide of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, notes of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, plot of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, story of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, summary of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray, themes of Ernest J. Gainess The Sky Is Gray. The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. Like James and Jamess mother, the source for Jamess aunt is drawn from Gainess own experience, modeled after his own great aunt, Augustine Jefferson. THE SKY IS GRAY by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968. His writings reproduce the communal nature of storytelling in his rural parish while accenting the historicity that joins members of the African-American diaspora to larger American society. 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. kui. He is a sincerely religious faith healer/musician, but his religion is heavily tinged. 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. Here, the key episode occurs between the liberal black student and the conservative black preachera paradoxical conflict between Word and word, between faith and sight. Lowe, John., editor. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. Introduction 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. The distinction his mother makes between men and bums is both subtle and significant: bums pull their coat collars up, while men dont. James tries to keep silent about his tooth not out of fear, but because he knows how expensive it will be to have a dentist pull it. What exemplifies the American national narrative in the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest J. Gaines? The importance of this distinction is difficult to overstate: it is nothing less than the difference between a story about people living in perpetual victimhood, on one hand, or a story about a mother trying to teach her son what it will take to become the sort of man she will respect, on the other. Like the narrator in Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man, the student is profoundly alienated from his community. Get help and learn more about the design. Due to the several barriers James and his mother, Octavia, encounter trying to get to the dentist, the theme of . In 1968, the same year that Gainess Bloodline was published, Reverend Martin Luther King himself was assassinated in a Memphis hotel. What this suggests is that in the highly polarized world in which James is growing up, external appearance can be more significant that internal realityafter all, whether Jamess collar is up or down, hes clearly not a bum, but a boy, and even a man can be permitted, under conditions as cold as those James and Octavia find themselves in, to pull his collar up around his throat. . The title of the story by Ernest Gaines is ironic. 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. In The Sky is Gray, the goal is not exactly reached. The great fear here is not the capriciousness of white townfolk, but of being beholden, as a result of their poverty, to anyone. Octavia overcomes the hardships of segregation and poverty while doing so. Cane, c. 1917 Add a gift receipt for easy returns. kayeeaugust17. 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. Source: John W. Roberts,. 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. As we discussed Ernest J. Gaines's "The Sky is Gray" during the NEH Summer Institute a couple of weeks ago, one of the participants, Dianna Shank, pointed out the ambivalent use of the pronoun "they" throughout the text.At first, this did not necessarily strike me as anything warranting further exploration since the narrative comes to us from the point of view of an eight-year-old boy. Short Stories for Students. His choices should involve a conscious effort to integrate the extremes. Conversations with Ernest Gaines, Mississippi: Mississippi University Press, 1995. It is in probing the underlying community attitudes, values, and beliefs to discover the way in which they determine what an individual will or has become that Gaines gives poignancy to the pieces in his short-story collection Bloodline. In short, the unfortunate consequence of exclusively race-based readings is that they narrow the readers scope of inquiry, inviting the reader to ask fewer questions and questions of a more particular nature than one would ask of an author like James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, or J. M. Coetzeeeach of whose writings are intimately concerned with different conceptions of race and their ramifications. Futhermore, he is forced to wash dishes at night to finance his education. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. But this state of affairs does not lasthis Auntie soon discovers that his tooth is rotten. The scene in which Jamess mother is toldor discoversthat her son must go to the dentist is skipped over, but the familys poverty, and the comparatively huge cost of having the tooth pulled, is not. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. 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 . This is particularly useful in a story limited by the narrative point of view to the description of a young persons inner life. Look up the phrase rite of passage. Does Jamess situation fit the definition? He could have told it through the eyes of Jamess mother Octavia, or Val; he could have told it in epistolary form (as a letter) from Jamess mother to his father; or from an omniscient perspective, one that allowed him to describe the sensory and sentient world from all of these vantage points in turn. 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. With James and his mother departing for the day, the rest of the family is left alone without enough firewood, the breadwinners are not able to work, and money has to be used that could have been put towards food for the house. 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. They briefly duck into a hardware store to warm up, but must soon leave. The storys protagonist, or main character, James is a young boy of about eight who lives with his mother, aunt, and their immediate family in the outskirts of Bayonne, Louisiana. Based on Gaines own experience, the character of Monsieur Bayonne is a mildly unsympathetic but still dangerous figurethough he acts without malice, his actions keep James from a dentist for several days. Bajo el cielo gris y nubes bajas, las olas oscuras ocultan su potencia bajo una aparente tranquilidad. 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, racism, hunger, cold and money. Roll the dice and learn a new word now! . The reader only sees a small part of this process, a few hours one morning, a few more that afternoon, but these hours are important: they form some of the bedrock upon which the foundation of Jamess manhoodhis sense of personal dignity and worth, as well as courage and silence in difficultywill be built. The limitations imposed on the narrative by an eight-year-old narrator are more obvious when he tries, unsuccessfully, to understand his mothers frequent mood changes or her mysterious decisions to fight or flee at each of the stations of mood the narrative visits. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. Hills Like White Elephants. They are unwilling, or unable, to follow his line of reasoning, for to accept that the signification of green or black has no intrinsic relationship to a Platonic ideal of green or black, but signifies by consensus only, comes perilously close to accepting that the other words about which the young man seems to care even more than Godfreedom and libertyare empty of meaning unless they signify the same thing to speakers both black and white. The first volume contains stories about.- A lonely woman who works part-time, and who has crippling social anxiety that leads to misunderstandings.- She feels her first duty to her children is to toughen them up and show them how to live and survive. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Bryant, Jerry H. Politics and the Black Novel, in The Nation, Vol. But Jamess narration creates a rationale for reading the story as a moral story. 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. "The Sky Is Gray" is a story narrated by eight year old James which tells the events of a Louisiana morning in which James and his mother, Octavia, take a bus to Bayonne to have a dentist take a look at James' ailing tooth. Me, I dont listen to my heart. Characters 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. Babb seems to approach this realization when she writes that Octavias dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging. Babb realizes that Octavias act is fundamentally about dignity, not about warmth, but she doesnt think through the implications of the point she has made, here or later. Critical Overview Helena tries to give them a larger piece, but Jamess mother insists on an accurate measure. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. Set during the 1940s, "The Sky is Gray" is narrated by James, an eight-year-old boy with a horrible toothache; the story focuses on the cold winter's journey he and his mother Octavia make to see the dentist in town. The Sky Is Gray is a great portrayal of racial differences. Can I get a job tomorrow? Gaines creates these moments with sufficient force and clarity both to explain his protagonists past and to anticipate his future. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. In such a cultural climate, the spiritual and emotional well-being of both the community and the individual is threatened. Are the two related? 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. 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. Overarching theme in this story is change and transformation and to anticipate his future and the. His community, c. 1917 Add a gift receipt for easy returns nearly succumbing to piercing... 1917 Add a gift receipt for easy returns hope i think Jamess father is most profound in absence. 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