Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Semester 1
1. Self Discovery UNIT
• Everything’s An Argument Chapters 1-4
• Vladimir Nabokov “Good Readers and Good Writers” Pages 4-7
• Language Lesson 1: Roger Ebert “Review of Pages 8-9
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo”
• Rhetorical Triangle Notes Page 10
• Six Keys to Understanding Rhetoric Page 11
• Tracy Foust “Scenes from an Unsane Childhood” Page 12-18
• Language Lesson 2: Pronoun Antecedent Agreement Page 19
• Gwendolyn Brooks “a song in the front yard” Page 20
• Imitation Exercise for “a song in the front yard” Page 21
• Language Lesson 3: Subject Verb Agreement Pages 22-24
• Commercial Analysis Project Page 27
• Commercial Analysis Rubric Page 28
• Frederick Douglass “Learning to Read and Write” Pages 29-32
• Richard Wright “Writing and Reading” Pages 33-36
• Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric Notes Pages 37-38
• Personal Statement Paper Prompt Page 39
• Personal Statement Scoring Guide Page 40
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “A Giant Step” Page 41-43
• Language Lesson 4: Sentence Combining Page 44
• Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
2. FAMILY UNIT
• Everything’s An Argument Chapters 6, 14, and 13
• Cornell Journal Template and Sample Pages 45-47
• Gordon Parks Photograph Page 48
• Suzanne Britt “Neat People Vs. Sloppy People” Pages 49-50
• Great Depression Photograph Page 51
• Jonathan Swift “A Modest Proposal” Pages 52-56
• Swift Imitation Exercise Page 57
• Amy Tan “Mother Tongue” Page 58-61
Semester 2
3. Gender Bender Unit
Everything’s An Argument Chapter 17
• The Good Wife Guide Page 62
• Judy Brady “I Want a Wife” Pages 63-65
• Editing Practice Worksheets Pages 66-67
• Charles Lamb “A Bachelor’s Complaint” Pages 68-71
• Peter Andrews “The Hating Game” Pages 72-73
• Stephen Gould “Women’s Brains” Pages 74-79
• Introduction to Argument and Persuasion Page 80
• Reasoning Notes Pages 81-82
• Validity Notes Pages 83-87
• Argument Practice Pages 88-89
• Group 1 Fallacies Page 90
• In Your Own Words Group 1 Fallacies Page 91
• Group 2 Fallacies Pages 92-93
• In Your Own Words Group 2 Fallacies Page 94
• Group 3 Fallacies Page 95
• In Your Own Words Group 3 Fallacies Page 96
4. Ethics and Morality Unit
• Plato “Allegory of the Cave”
• William Hazlitt “On the Pleasure of Hating”
• Brent Staples “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space”
• Debra Dickerson “Who Shot Johnny” (to be distributed in class)
• Charles Chesnutt “The Sheriff’s Children”
• Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
Good Readers and Good Writers
by Vladimir Nabokov
Questions to consider while reading:
The Nabokov piece is a seminal one in our study of reading and writing. You will come back to it again and again over the course of the year. Read it first to get an overall impression of its argument; then, read it with the following questions in mind. Your extensive Journal notes should house the answers to these questions:
1. Where does the introduction end? Identify the method(s) of introduction.
2. What is the thesis? Where is it? Is it explicit or implicit?
3. What is the author’s tone? Where and how does it change?
4. What rhetorical devices does Nabokov use?
5. What passages capture your attention, arouse a reaction? These can be ideas or elements of language.
6. What, according to Nabokov, is a good reader? What is a good writer?
7. How does Nabokov organize his piece? How does he connect the different parts?
8. What characterizes the conclusion?
9. Where does Nabokov use humor?
10. What authority does Nabokov have as a writer?
11. What is your reaction to the essay? Is it an emotional one or a logical one?
Good Readers and Good Writers
My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.
"How to be a Good Reader" or "Kindness to Authors"—something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Commel'on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."
In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.
Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.
Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to mop it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain—and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.
One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense--which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.
There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.
So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important.
We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience—of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience—he will hardly enjoy great literature.
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.
Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet—this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia. Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.
The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass. (@1948)
Language Lesson 1
Directions: Read the text carefully. Then underline the words or phrases that illustrate Ebert’s negative feelings about the film. Be sure to describe the effects of the words and phrases in the margins.
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
BY ROGER EBERT / August 12, 2005
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"Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. "Deuce Bigalow" is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.
Rob Schneider is back, playing a male prostitute (or, as the movie reminds us dozens of times, a "man whore"). He is not a gay hustler, but specializes in pleasuring women, although the movie's closest thing to a sex scene is when he wears diapers on orders from a giantess. Oh, and he goes to dinner with a woman with a laryngectomy, who sprays wine on him through her neck vent.
The plot: Deuce visits his friend T.J. Hicks (Eddie Griffin) in Amsterdam, where T.J. is a pimp specializing in man-whores. Business is bad, because a serial killer is murdering male prostitutes, and so Deuce acts as a decoy to entrap the killer. In his investigation he encounters a woman with a penis for a nose. You don't want to know what happens when she sneezes.
Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers (Glenn S. Gainor, Jack Giarraputo, Tom McNulty, Nathan Talbert Reimann, Adam Sandler and John Schneider) should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
The movie created a spot of controversy last February. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture Nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to 'Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,' a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."
Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers."
Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can't take it. Then I found he's not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a award, and the Publicists' Guild award for lifetime achievement.
Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.
But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" while passing on the opportunity to participate in "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray," "The Aviator," "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
RHETORICAL TRIANGLE
[pic]
SIX KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING RHETORIC
1. Understanding Persona (self-image, self-presentation, etc.)
a. a character in a fictional literary work
b. the public role or personality a person assumes or is perceived to assume
c. opposite of “anima,” which is the inner personality
2. Understanding Appeals to the Audience
a. logos—appeal to logic or reason (rationality)
b. pathos—appeal to emotion (pity)
c. ethos—appeal to ethics (morality)
3. Understanding Subjects (topics)
a. find something to write about—debatable
b. flesh it out (develop it)—basic move of composition
c. What the text is about—more than the topic
4. Understanding Context
a. historical background
b. cultural beliefs
c. what the text tells you about the audience/persona—what they can assume about each other
5. Understanding Intention
a. What does the speaker/author want to happen?
b. What goal does the speaker/author have for the audience?
6. Understanding Genre
a. What are the conventions of the form (i.e., what are epic conventions?)
b. Genre must appropriate to the speaker’s intentions
c. Stylistic devices the author uses
d. What did the author do in the text to make it accessible to the audience (rhetorical devices)?
i. If you were writing to a child, you would not use allusions.
ii. If you are writing to a highly educated adult, you would not simple sentences throughout the piece
Scenes from an Unsane Childhood
By Traci Foust
I HUNG OUT AT THE PLAYGROUND of our apartment complex for three days straight, scanning the scene for some friends, rocking back and forth on a metal pigeon with a fat spring where his penis should have been. But I didn't see any friends. I spun on the roundabout until my Chef Boyardee made fire in my throat. I pressed my stomach into a rubber swing seat and flew. When I caught sight of a bell-bottom or a faded sneaker by the chain link fence, I said, "Hey there"
Some kids stopped.
Most didn't.
At the end of the day, I left the playground under a rusty foam sunset, sweaty and annoyed. I sniffed my fingers. They smelled like bathroom pipes.
This new fascination with talking to people I'd never met came from my loneliness, which I understood I needed to combat by being a nicer person. I was willing to try becoming a nicer person by, say, writing poems to my mom's sponsor kid about how bad life must be for her and how having access to Pepsi and clean towels whenever I wanted wasn't as great as it seemed. That, and my greetings on the playground, was as far as my efforts went. I didn't understand that being likable would involve so much interaction with other kids.
I had my cousin Theresa, who, kind of by default, had to play with me and help me spray my Judy Blume books with Lysol because she had chronic bronchitis and was always coughing all over everything, but even when I very nicely asked if she could rinse her mouth out with a little peroxide before she got into my books she wouldn't do it and instead decided to walk home. She also threatened to take her Fleetwood Mac album back if I didn't stop talking about tuberculosis.
Sometimes I wondered what my cousin, my almost-a-teenager, Sun-In-haired cousin would say if I told her I couldn't stop. What if I told her that I knew it was stupid to think about bits of lung lining getting caught in between the pages of Blubber , and that even though I was sure letting her hold one of my books would not get me sick, still, what if it did? Even though I knew it wouldn't.
But what if it did?
What would she say to all that? Would she go home and never come back? Would I still get to keep Fleetwood Mac?
Of course I wanted a friend who wasn't a have to. Everyone wants that. But this deal about getting out of the house to meet children who weren't related to me seemed to only benefit my grandma, who wanted an empty, peaceful kitchen so she could cook and make sure all meats and starches occurred right at six o'clock. The way my dad liked it when my parents were married--the way my mom still had to have it, as if my dad were still on the back patio of our little green and white stucco house with his Lucky Strikes, blowing smoke into the shadows of the yucca trees. As if my mother were still in the kitchen dicing garlic cloves, smiling, but not really smiling.
When my parents first divorced, when we moved from my father's house and in with my grandmother, I had envisioned our new evening mealtime as a kind of all- you-can-eat Little Debbie buffet. My mother coming home from work, plopping her exhausted self on the sofa while we all ran into the kitchen and reassured her that no, we didn't mind one bit if we had to eat Velveeta sandwiches and Nutter Butters in front of Three's Company . You know, whatever we could do to help everyone adjust. But now, when my grammy began cooking and it was pretty clear the snack buffet would have to be imagined through the gristly leather of ham hocks and okra, I was ordered into the tanbark to seek out someone besides Theresa to stand me.
As I spun around on the swings I pretended the split ends of my mousy brown hair were the baby spiders from Charlotte's Web who got born and flew away laughing before they even realized their mother had died. I could see my ugly fingers bent around the chains. My cuticles looked diseased from so much hand washing. Scrubbing with nail brushes, with toothbrushes, with scouring pads had made them blister and bubble. I'm an old lady, I said in my mind. I'm a witch with baby spiders in my hair and my hands are creepy. Then I stopped the swing because that's when I saw her. I saw her legs sticking out from under the slide. She was playing with a Barbie and eating bread.
"Hey" I said, "who are you?"
"Misty" she answered. She had a brown, shiny face. "Who are you?"
By the unidentified stains on her My Little Pony T-shirt and her two missing front teeth, she was clearly a few years younger than me--seven or eight--and therefore not worthy of a proper introduction. But within three or so minutes I knew these things: Misty Salvano lived in apartment H-3; she had not been allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz on cable last night on account of God; and her mother made homemade bread from scratch because American women were lazy when it came to caring for their families.
I put my hand on my hip and didn't even flinch when she asked could I move so she could get to the seesaw. I just couldn't walk away. I'd never seen anyone eat a slice of bread for a snack before.
When I was four I squeezed a kitten so hard I almost killed it. The one thing I can tell you about that incident is that I'm pretty certain I was not trying to crunch the kitten's ribs or pop her little heart. But I never ever forgot how the might of all that helplessness felt in my palm.
Misty looked nothing like a kitten. Though she was younger, she was taller than me, with smooth, black hair and an accent that demanded the tip of her tongue stick out between her teeth on words that began with th . She had long toes that hung down over the tip of her pink flip-flops and a sofa smell to her which I couldn't quite place but eventually attributed to baked goods from her mother's un-American oven.
The first day she came over, we played kitchen. We mixed water and grass blades and tanbark in my miniature CorningWare, and not a single eyebrow was lifted when I asked Misty if she could use a fingernail brush before she touched my Easy-Bake Oven. When my mom came in and pretended to smell something delectable, Misty told me I was so lucky to have a mom who looked like Cher. "I wish my mom were that pretty," she said.
The next time she came over, we played hospital. I taped safety pins and strings of yarn to her thin arms and told her there was no hope. "Try and make yourself cry," I said.
But she didn't want to. She said she wanted to go home. Maybe she wanted some bread.
There were days of beauty parlor and Charlie's Angels. Some afternoons we would wait until my grammy had had enough of her game shows. When her head bobbled back against the green and gold corduroy couch we'd prop up pillows at the kitchen table and play boyfriends-at-the-bar. Sometimes we would kiss the pillows. Sometimes we would love the pillows. Once I saw Misty stick out her tongue so that the salamander tip reached deep into the fibers of my pink pillowcase, the one with the mushrooms and the little frogs that looked like they were dreaming about something. I saw her tongue press into a frog. It touched places where saliva could stay, where if you had, say, the influenza germ in your spit or the kissing disease my sister's boyfriend had given her, it would stick there. When I asked her to please take that pillowcase home to wash it, she said fine, and she even waved bye to me, her silky black hair bouncing above the jasmine-lined walkway in front of our building.
Often I didn't want Misty to go home. But my mom would have a bad day with extra hours, or my dad hadn't sent the child-support check or why was dinner being served late which would screw up everything for the entire evening especially getting me to bed because I always snuck out from my covers to lick the window locks so that no one would break into the apartment and kill my whole family while sparing my life, and then the detective with the coat would be standing by my mother's slashed throat and instead of wrapping one of those gray police blankets around me for comfort he'd ask me how I could be so irresponsible and was I happy now that my whole family had been brutally murdered on account of my laziness?
When the days started getting hotter and there was less reason to expect something fun out of my family's new life, Misty and I stayed inside with my sister's Rod Stewart albums and air conditioning. We sang "Maggie May" and played guitar with tennis rackets. Then this happened: She looked under my bed and discovered my Speak & Spell, and my mom saw that Misty had a knack for words and made a comment about her being advanced for her age.
That's about the time I remembered the kitten.
The things I excelled at in school were stomachaches and spelling. I was pretty good at dodge ball, which I liked because it was an odd and interesting way to get points for being aggressive, but spelling and reading were my things. The day my mom brought home Speak & Spell, my life changed. A purse-sized computer game that knew words I didn't but was willing to teach me through a series of questions and buttons.
He was beautiful.
Polished orange with a dark display window similar to the glasses Erik Estrada wore in CHiPs. I named him Ram after Sara Crewe's Hindu gentleman from A Little Princess. I wrapped my fingers inside his handle and turned him on. He asked me to spell astronaut. He asked me to spell comfortable. Then he said, "You are correct!" in a voice that sounded like an android who had discovered all about feelings. Each time I heard his praises, a hot surge of completion hit me in the heart.
Ram and I walked around like we were lovers. I took him to the dinner table, to the bathroom, propped him up in my bed at night. In the dark of the room I shared with my sister, surrounded by posters of John Travolta and Avon perfume figurines, I'd lie with him. The pretty glow of his display screen lit up my face. He would ask me to spell out a word, and just before I pressed the Enter button, I asked a question about myself: "Ram, I'm the best speller in the whole world, huh?"
"You are correct!"
"Ram, lots of people think I'm the smartest, prettiest girl ever, right?"
"You are correct!"
"Ram, don't you think I should marry Scott Baio?"
But isn't it funny how our little buoyancies can collapse? Maybe I had become too comfortable with my life, with Misty and how good I felt when we were together, how I could go for days without checking that the dish towels weren't too close to the stove burners. I had settled into the routine of playing with my new friend all day, then retreating to the comfort of a strong vocabulary in the evening.
See that? I wasn't watching. And when you're smiling at the butterflies above your head there's a set of white knuckles clutching very close by--a tiny tug and wham! Your mom is giggling with some yeasty little girl, telling her how smart she is, and the machine you thought you knew is telling someone else that they are correct!
"That's good, Misty;' my mother said. "'Volcano' is a pretty tough word." She was on the sofa. She had her arm around that girl.
"I should try a harder word," Misty said, "like 'daffodil.' I missed that on a spelling test once."
I tugged on my pigtails and turned to my grammy, who was in the kitchen with her onions and Hamburger Helper. "Daffodil?" I whispered. "Is she kidding? That's like the easiest word on the face of the planet."
But Grammy didn't have much to say to this. My chest felt funny. I said Misty was making it hard for me to breathe. I was offered some mentholated rub and a Spam sandwich.
That's where that ended.
The next time Misty came over, I told her my Speak & Spell had been taken away by the FBI because someone tried to spell out the words humping and butthole and those words were against the law and shouldn't be on a kid's toy.
"Well, I know I didn't try to spell words like that" she said, her eyes all agog and her skinny hand pressed against her chest. After, she stood around and acted like she didn't know what to do, then suggested we play kitchen again. "I can show you how to make homemade noodles."
I thought about the possibilities of noodles for a minute but couldn't come up with anything. "Let's go outside" I said. I took my grammy's duplicate car key from her night table. "I know something we can play."
As I pushed Misty on my skateboard toward the back parking lot of our building she kept saying, "It's so hot! Hot, hot, hot like a boiling pot, pot, pot."
"Hey, that's pretty good. You should write that one down for Ram."
But she didn't ask who Ram was. The wind was in her face. Maybe she smelled how the eucalyptus trees along the back walkway turned the hot asphalt into good medicine. When we stopped, her face was all scrunched up. "I'm not allowed back here."
"Why?" I asked. "Nothing's wrong with Back Here." In fact, Back Here was kind of a handy place. Tucked away against the brown stucco of the A through F buildings, it was sheltered by ivy and sequoia awnings over the back sidewalks of the parking lot. Perfect for teenagers--especially my sister--when seeking makeout and marijuana places. Boys peed in the sage clumps and I sometimes dumped my disgusting Vienna sausage sandwiches in there before school.
As Misty wondered aloud if she should go back home I made a few mental checks: Keys? Check. Electric locks that could only be controlled from the driver's-side lock panel made more impossible to figure out by the combination of panic and a sweltering day--no matter how many times my mom said, "She's so advanced"?
Check.
I opened the door to my grammy's white Monte Carlo. A swell of jellied heat smacked us in the face as we both got in. Misty didn't even ask why we were doing this.
I gripped the steering wheel and asked her if she'd ever been to Disneyland. "Because that's where we're going. I'm the morn and you're the daughter who just got all As on her report card so I'm taking you someplace you've always wanted to go."
"Beep! Beep!" Misty exclaimed, and pressed her hand against the dashboard. "Never been to Disneyland. No sirree. Never seen Mickey Mouse, no, not me." She giggled at her cleverness and shrugged her shoulders. "It's a rhyming day today."
My stomach unknotted.
"Well, then, strap yourself in and let's take a spin! Mickey Mouse, here we come."
But Misty didn't want to see Mickey Mouse. "I sorta like Goofy," she said. "I've always wanted to see Goofy."
"Goofy? Really?"
I tried to hide my disgust and confusion. Maybe she didn't realize it was 1981. Had she never heard of Cinderella or Snow White? Goofy wasn't fun.
She wiped her sweaty face with the apron of her sundress and again mentioned the heat. "How hot do you suppose it is? Let's roll down these windows."
She touched buttons.
"They don't work unless the car is on," I said.
"Whew. Then let's get going" She said it weird, like she totally believed we were taking a real trip.
"Misty?"
"Huh?"
"We're not really going to Disneyland. You know that, right? We're just making believe." I guess I just forgot she was younger than me. What with her height and v-o-l-c-a-n-o.
"I know we're pretending" she said. Her cheeks were red. I bet she didn't know. That can happen sometimes. You think you're so sure of what's going on, you think you know what's real, but you don't. Like when you're extra happy because the sixth-grade boy at school who you've been liking for a long time asks you to come sit with him at lunch and says he wants to share his Lik-a-Stix with you, and even though no one has ever come right out and asked if they could sit with you specifically and though you very much understand that sharing food can spread trench mouth, you do it anyway because no one that cute has ever even glanced in your direction, and sometimes your entire body aches for something that wonderful. But instead of the candy he throws a clump of dirt in your mouth and says he's just pissed in that dirt clump.
I looked again at Misty's face. Her stupid smile. I knew I must have looked like that just before I tasted the disillusionment of that boy's urine.
"Oh crap, you know what?" I began. "I totally forgot the Cheez-Its and Pepsi." I opened the door a crack. "We can't take such a long drive without some snacks."
She was going to agree. I saw her nod and open her mouth to say something. I saw her look down toward the door handle she wasn't sure about.
Then, before I could change my mind, before I could think that what I was about to do was very wrong, I took off fast. I ran back toward the trees and the ivy and the sidewalk, glancing only once at the parking lot to see the girl with both hands pressed against the window. I pushed myself as fast as I could go on my skateboard. Over Misty's screams I heard the blood graze of cicadas and the chains of the swings unraveling themselves. My plan had been to get as far away from my apartment complex as I could get, which meant the strip mall two blocks away. Maybe the warm fry oil of McDonald's could hold me safe until--I don't know--until my mother could come and get me and maybe apologize or whatever. But I ended up in the laundry room right next to my building.
Just as I opened the door, I threw up big chunks of ravioli and made neon Pixy Stix foam on my shirt. A teenage girl was sitting on a dryer smoking a cigarette and listening to Led Zeppelin on a transistor radio. She stood next to me beside the trash can while I covered hunks of lint with my sick. It was the first time I had ever thrown up without my mom rubbing my back
"Shit, kid, you okay?" the girl asked. She had a heart-shaped patch sewn onto the crotch of her jeans. "What apartment do you live in? You want me to get someone?"
"Please shut up," I said. "Shut up and leave me alone." Sour strings of mucus dripped from my nostrils. She stood there for a moment, called me a little fucker, then left before I could tell her I had just killed someone.
I knew Misty would be dead. I would walk out of that laundry room with my skateboard and my nostrils burning with inhaled bleach and there'd be a dead body waiting for me in my grammy's car. The car with the electric locks Misty couldn't work. The car that played the eight-tracks my grammy and I sang along to while we drove down Monterey Highway to the Pink Elephant for fresh cilantro: "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Poor boy, you're bound to die."
There would be a smell in the car. Would she be a skeleton by the time I got there?
My whole body leaked out sweat as the light across the cement floor slowly changed. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to cry but couldn't; the sadness was somewhere in my throat but wouldn't do anything. Maybe that girl with the heart between her legs would come back. Behind my eyes I heard the familiar clicks. In the distance I heard sirens. Click--a light switch on--click--a light switch off. Click--light--click—dark. Out loud I said, "God," then snapped my fingers just after the da sound of the . Hard da--soft da.. Softer da--softer. Fade to nothing. Little bit more.
Off.
The timing was exact. Had to be exact. Under the dicks and the snaps I aligned myself. No. She wouldn't be a skeleton by the time I got there. Nothing that bad happens that fast.
When the light outside was barely visible on the floor, there was a voice at the doorway. "Traci, come on out of there now" It was my mom. She walked to me and held my shoulders. "It's time to go home." The air outside had turned a sudden gray.
"Hi," I answered, standing. "What happened to the sunlight?"
There was a police officer, Misty Salvano's mom, and Misty. She was crying. She wasn't a skeleton. When we all walked back to my apartment, I felt that my pants were wet. I asked if I could change them. The police officer talked into his shoulder, then told me to wait. "We need to figure out what went on here."
"Where's Grammy?" I asked.
My mom said she was out by her car giving a statement. I didn't know what that meant. I just knew the kitchen didn't smell like anyone had been cooking.
Misty's mother had a crucifix around her neck and her fingers kept fluttering toward it. She wiped Misty's face and touched her hair.
"You just left me there," Misty said. She looked right at me. "You left me."
"Hold on now," my morn said. She crouched to my eye level. "Traci, we just need to know why you didn't come back for your friend, honey."
I clutched a lock of her dark hair and rubbed it between my fingers.
"You need to be very clear about why you never came back," the police officer said.
I told him I didn't know what that meant. "I was just getting some snacks. We were pretending Disneyland."
"No, that's not how it happened." Misty shook her head hard. "You just left me there."
"Misty, are you kidding me? You're my friend" That part didn't feel like a lie.
"But I saw you. You were laughing at me. You made a face and did this--" She rubbed the air around her eyes with her fists. "You were never going to come back!" Then a crying burst, her face buried in her mother's side.
For a few seconds nobody spoke. All you could hear were police radio mumbles and the sscchhkk sound at the end of police sentences. I counted four sscchhkk's and liked that it was four. Then Misty's morn spoke: "We need to do something about this."
"We are," my mother answered. Kind of loud, too. "We're figuring out what happened between the girls." I was half hoping my mom would finish with something like, and your daughter is always at our house which I think is pretty irresponsible of you, especially when we have to eat dinner at six, and what's the reason she plays outside all day? My mom was good at voicing her beliefs (mostly in line at Lucky's or during school functions) that children who acted up did so because their parents ignored them and were probably off at the bars and that's why they were latchkey kids.
I guess I understood that, but someone was always home at my house,
Misty's mom said yes to pressing charges of assault, then a few minutes later said no. My mom was handed the phone number of the Santa Clara County children's crisis center and advised to keep it near. I didn't get arrested, and after a few cigarettes together and my mother's mentioning of Our Recent Divorce, Misty's mom and my morn sat at the table drinking coffee while Misty and I watched The Fall Guy with four sofa pillows between us.
Later, when my grammy remembered I had her car keys, she shoved her hands in my pockets and pulled them out hard enough so that they scraped my stomach and brought up a dot of blood. "Someone oughta skin you," she whispered in her twangy pitch. "They had to break my window with a club." Behind my eyes I saw Smash! and Crash! like in a comic book. "Girl, you're as bad as they come."
One morning my morn said, I’m taking you to talk to someone." I knew exactly what she meant. We were at Bobs Big Boy. I had ordered my favorite egg, bacon, and pancake stacker, but could only make a small hole in the middle of my pancake with my finger. I kept thinking about "talking to someone." A counselor. A psychiatrist. Once on a rerun of I Love Lucy, Ricky had used the phrase head shrinker. I knew that was just to be funny, but still.
"You're not eating your food," my mom said. "Are you sick?"
I shrugged. Maybe. "I was thinking about what I'm supposed to tell the person I'm going to talk to."
My mom looked up at me from her coffee cup, her kohl-lined eyes full of something heavy. They'd been like that for a while. "Well, you might want to tell the truth" she said. She pressed her red lips against the tip of a cigarette and pulled it out with her front teeth. "I hope you're capable of that."
"Of course I am." I nodded emphatically, trying to replace her chilly sarcasm with my own exaggerations. And after that she got very quiet and blew smoke up high into the blinds of the window and I felt like there was no way I could eat a single bite of my pancake stacker.
The counselor, I was told later, wasn't a real counselor, but a student of some kind. She had a big, blond head, and you could see the dried bubbles of hair spray in her feathered hair. There was also a gap between her front teeth that made it hard to concentrate on good answers to her questions.
I saw her only twice. I will always--always--be clear that it was only twice, because my mother and I were in line at Mervyn's when she decided to open the bill that she'd been toting around in her purse from the counseling office. The girl who rang up my jeans at the counter flashed me a worried look when she heard about the two hundred fucking dollars for two goddamned visits.
This kind of surprised me, too, because for that amount of money the counselor sure didn't do much. She spent most of our allotted hour talking to her boyfriend in the hallway while I colored pictures of Rainbow Brite. I did get asked if I had bad feelings toward my parents and had anyone ever touched me in places that were private.
I said of course I had bad feelings, then assured her no way on the touching part. I added that if those private places had been touched they wouldn't be private anymore. "Probably, they'd be shared places," I said.
She told me there was no need to make fun of the situation and what I had done to Misty was serious and that kids all over the world were hurting. Just like me.
I tried not to look at that interesting space in her mouth and her poufy head. I tried to understand what the hell she was talking about. Hurting kids in the world.
"What kids do you mean?" I asked.
Just before she got up to see why her boyfriend was standing in the hall with his arms crossed, she said, "Kids like you."
Kids like me? Kids who couldn't sleep if the microwave door wasn't open a crack because the thing could magically turn itself on and start a fire in the middle of night and then later when the fireman walked through the piles of charred bodies, would have to answer the question, "If you knew there was a possibility of fire, why didn't you do something to stop it?" Is that what she was trying to say with her bubble hair and her gappy teeth?
"Okay," I said, and went back to coloring my picture.
Misty never returned to my apartment. We never played kitchen or Charlie's Angels again. I went back to Mike and Carol Brady and watched their children being very concerned about one another. I always wondered if Misty was watching the same episode as me at the same time. I missed how she would make fun of Jan because Jan barely had any eyebrows, and thought how weird it was that I didn't think Jan's missing eyebrows were all that funny if Misty wasn't in the room watching me think it was funny.
When I sat up in bed with my Speak & Spell, knowing that the next day and the day after that I could have him all to myself if I wanted to, I didn't feel like I had hot sparkles rushing into my hands. Ram did things because I asked him to. Because he was a machine and because I pressed buttons.
One night, not long after Misty and Disneyland and the counselor who wasn't a real counselor, I heard my mother in her bed. She was praying. I heard my name in her prayers and then I heard my name turn into "That Child." I put my pink pillow with the dreaming frogs over Ram's face and listened. When she got to the part where it's time to make the cross, she finished with the words her Portuguese father had taught her before he died: "Pai, Filho, Espírito Santo. Amen." And when she said "Amen," it sounded fuzzy, watery. The same as your breath when you're trying to suck in air instead of crying because you've done something that you're pretty sure is very wrong and don't want anyone else to know about, like squeezing that kitten because you thought that if you could just press all that warmth, that absoluteness--if you could melt all that purity--into your own skin, down deep enough, maybe you would be different. Maybe you wouldn't be the kind of person who almost doesn't stop herself from pressing that kitten all the way.
PRONOUN AND ANTECEDENT AGREEMENT
Rule 1: A pronoun agrees with its antecedent in number and gender. The antecedent of a pronoun is the word to which the pronoun refers.
a) I should have thought of it myself.
b) You will be late for your appointment.
c) George is devoted to his aged mother.
Rule 2: The words each, either, neither, one, everyone, everybody, no one, nobody, anyone, anybody, somebody, someone are referred to by a singular pronoun--he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its.
Rule 3: Two or more singular antecedents joined by or or nor should be referred to by a singular pronoun.
Rule 4: Two or more antecedents joined by and should be referred to by a plural pronoun.
EXERCISE: Fill in each blank with the appropriate pronoun and circle its antecedent.
1. Each of the boys has __________ own skis.
2. Several would like to have _________ cake on the balcony.
3. The dog wagged ________ tail at the neighbors.
4. Although I wanted to go, Carlos and Regina did not want me to ride in ________ car.
5. None of us could get ________ way as children.
6. Most of the money was in _________ proper location.
7. Leslie and Laura lived together in _________ mother’s spare bedroom.
8. Who could have guessed that I could do that _____________.
9. Ricardo and Miguel drove by __________ old home this morning.
10. Li loved ________ boyfriend, but _______ family did not like her.
11. Kim went to the beach to swim, but _________ was closed because of pollution.
12. We took to the car to ________ owner before ________ lawyer got involved.
13. Keep up the good work. _________ test grade will be excellent if you do.
14. Watch ________ mouth!
15. Although ________ was hard work, finishing the job on time meant a lot to me.
| | |
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| | |
| | |
|a song in the front yard | |
| | |
|By Gwendolyn Brooks |[pic] |
|I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life. |Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was |
|I want a peek at the back |born in Topeka, Kansas, though |
|Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows. |she spent most of her life on |
|A girl gets sick of a rose. |Chicago’s south side, whose |
| |Bronzeville neighborhood she |
|I want to go in the back yard now |memorialized in her poetry. She |
|And maybe down the alley, |received the Pulitzer Prize — the|
|To where the charity children play. |first African American so honored|
|I want a good time today. |— for Annie Allen in 1950. One of|
| |her best-loved poems, “we real |
|They do some wonderful things. |cool,” is about the short, sad |
|They have some wonderful fun. |lives of pool-playing truants. |
|My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine |Brooks was devoted to encouraging|
|How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine. |young people to write. |
|My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae | |
|Will grow up to be a bad woman. | |
|That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late | |
|(On account of last winter he sold our back gate). | |
| | |
|But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do. | |
|And I’d like to be a bad woman, too, | |
|And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace | |
|And strut down the streets with paint on my face. | |
| | |
| | |
|Gwendolyn Brooks, “a song in the front yard” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by | |
|Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks. | |
Bottom of Form
Imitation Exercise for “a song in the front yard”
Objective
Students will imitate Brooks’ style, subject matter, prevailing tone, and/or prosodic techniques/structures.
Purpose
The goal of this assignment is for students to gain a fuller understanding of the prosodic craft so that it will be useful to them as they develop their own approaches to writing both verse and prose.
Project Content Overview
For this assignment, students will recall their own childhoods and a time when they were prevented from doing something by a parent or another adult in a guardianship role. Like Brooks’, the student’s experience should seem appealing to a small, naïve child and be written from that child’s perspective. Moreover, the adult and his/her insistence should be with the child’s best interests at heart. In addition to style, subject, and tone imitation, students should pay close attention to Brooks’ prosodic techniques/structures (conventions, rhyme, meter, figurative language, etc.) and replicate them in their own creations without lifting words, phrases, and/or sentences from the author.
Format
Please format your poem for submission in the following ways:
1. Put your name, date, and class period in the upper right corner of the page.
2. Center the title of your poem.
3. Align your poem to the left of the page.
4. Type your poem in Times New Roman 12-point font.
5. Be sure that your stanza breaks are after the appropriate line number (look at Brooks’ poem), and single space within stanzas.
Submission
Final drafts of this assignment are due no later than the beginning of your class period on __________________________________. No late papers will be accepted.
Grading
To obtain a C or better on this assignment, students must adhere to all contextual, formatting, and submission requirements. The highest grades will be given to students especially adept at combining the techniques used by Brooks with their own creative expression.
SUBJECT AND VERB AGREEMENT
Rule 1: A word that refers to one person or thing is singular in number. A word that refers to more than one is plural in number.
a) Singular: book, child, this, either, he, she, it
b) Plural: books, children, these, both, they
Rule 2: A verb agrees with its subject in number.
a) Singular subjects take singular verbs. (I went, he carried, he carries, I was, it is, it was)
b) Plural subjects take plural verbs. (We went, they carried, they carry, we were, they are, they were)
Rule 3: The number of the subject is not changed by a phrase following the subject.
Examples
• The performance of the first three clowns was very funny.
• The decision of the contest judges has been reversed.
EXERCISE 1: Circle the word in parentheses that agrees in number with the subject. Underline the subject.
1. The cause of heartbeats (has, have) been a subject of continuous inquiry in the scientific and medical community.
2. The heartbeat, as well as other factors, (cause, causes) blood to flow throughout the body.
3. H. Allen and others (has, have) shown that the control of the nervous system is not linked to the beating of the heart.
4. The power of rhythmic contractions (belong, belongs) to the cardiac muscle itself, unassisted by other impulses.
5. All strips of muscle in the heart (is, are) capable of rhythmic action.
6. The power to trigger contractions (differ, differs) from part to part of the heart, however.
7. The greatest centralization of energies, as in many other organs and organisms, (is, are) located at the top.
8. The lesser energies of the heart (is, are) centered toward the bottom.
9. The number of beats of the heart per minute usually (decline, declines) with age, from as much as 140 at birth to 50 in an adult male.
10. The sequence of events in a single heartbeat (is, are) complex and well worth studying.
Rule 4: The following common words are singular: each, either, neither, one, no one, every one, anyone, someone, everyone, anybody, somebody, everybody.
Rule 5: The following common words are plural: several, few, both, many.
Rule 6: The words some, any, none, all, and most may be singular or plural, depending on the meaning of the sentence.
Rule 7: Subjects joined by and take a plural verb.
Rule 8: Singular subjects joined by or or nor take a singular verb.
Rule 9: When a singular and a plural subject are joined by or or nor, the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
a) Either the judge or the lawyers are wrong.
b) Neither my sisters nor I am going to summer camp.
It is usually possible to avoid this awkward construction altogether.
a) Either the judge is wrong or the lawyers are.
b) My sisters are not going to summer camp, and neither am I.
EXERCISE 2. For each of the following, determine whether the verb agrees with its subject in number. If the verb in a sentence agrees with its subject, write correct after the sentence. If the verb does not agree, write the correct form of the verb on your paper.
1. One of the oldest foods in the world is cheese.
2. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were ignorant of its strength-giving properties in ancient times.
3. The extent of its uses have yet to be exhausted.
4. Neither shepherd nor astronaut has failed to appreciate it.
5. Chesses of every kind has nourished both.
6. The art of making various cheeses are older than recorded history.
7. The appearance and the nutritional value of different kinds of cheese varies widely.
8. Each of the many different varieties have a unique history.
9. In fact, every cheese found on our dining tables has a rather involved history.
10. Not one of the familiar cheeses occur naturally without human intervention.
11. Special equipment, as well as careful planning, is necessary to make any kind of cheese.
12. Few of the familiar cookbooks shows how to make even the simplest cheese.
13. Curds of whole milk without the whey is the essence of cheese.
14. The milk of goats, sheep, reindeer, zebras, and yaks, as well as the milk of cows, are used in cheesemaking.
15. Neither milk nor cream, it appears, satisfies the human imagination, to judge by the astonishing phenomenon of cheese.
Rule 10: When the subject follows the verb, as in questions and in sentences beginning with here and there, be careful to determine the subject and make sure that the verb agrees with it.
a) There are three routes you can take.
b) Where are your mother and father?
Rule 11: Collective nouns may be either singular or plural. A collective noun names a group: crowd, committee, jury, class. A collective noun takes a plural verb when the speaker is thinking of the individual members of the group; it takes a singular verb when the speaker is thinking of the group as a unit.
a) The team were sleeping in different rooms at the Holiday Inn.
b) The team was ranked first in the nation.
c) The family have agreed among themselves to present a solid front.
d) The family is the basic unit of our society.
Rule 12: Expressions stating amount (time, money, measurement, weight, volume, fractions) are usually singular when the amount is considered as a unit; however, when the amount is considered as a number of separate units, a plural verb is used.
a) Three years in a strange land seems like a long time.
b) Ten dollars is not enough.
c) Three fourths of the money has been recovered.
d) These last three years have been full of surprises.
e) There are two silver dollars in each of the stockings.
Rule 13: The title of a book or the name of an organization or country, even when plural in form, usually takes a singular verb. Some names of organizations (Girl Scouts of America, New York Yankees, Chicago Bears, etc.) customarily take a plural verb when you are thinking of the members and a singular verb when you mean the organization.
a) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884.
b) The Knights of Columbus is sponsoring a carnival.
c) The United States remains the leader of the Western bloc.
d) The Girl Scouts of America wear this uniform.
e) The Girl Scouts of America is a nonprofit organization.
Rule 14: A few nouns, such as mumps, measles, civics, economics, mathematics, physics, although plural in form, take a singular verb. The following similar words are more often plural than singular: athletics, acoustics, gymnastics, tactics. The word politics may be either singular or plural, and scissors and trousers are always plural.
Rule 15: When the subject and the predicate nominative (the noun or pronoun in the predicate—the part of the sentence that says something about the subject-- that refers to the same thing as the subject of the sentence) are different in number, the verb agrees with the subject, not with the predicate nominative.
a) The most appreciated gift was the clothes that you sent us.
b) The clothes that you sent us were the most appreciated gift.
Rule 16: Every or many a before a word or series of words is followed by a singular verb.
Rule 17: Don’t and doesn’t must agree with their subjects.
Rule 18: In formal English, verbs in clauses that follow one of those are always plural. Even though informal usage often permits a singular verb in the clause following one of those, the plural verb is always correct. Note: this is not the case if one is the subject of the sentence.
a) That is one of those remarks that are intended to start arguments.
b) Joan is one of those people who go out of their way to be helpful.
Rule 19: The word number is singular when preceded by the; it is plural when preceded by a.
EXERCISE 3: Circle the correct verb in parentheses.
1. The cost of his explorations (was, were) paid by the UN.
2. Neither the President nor the FBI (was, were) willing to release any information.
3. Every one of her daughters (has, have) been successful.
4. The Case of the Missing Butler is one of those books that (is, are) easy to put down.
5. The question of taxes (doesn’t, don’t) pertain here.
6. Neither our car nor the cars of the others (was, were) able to plow through the drifts.
7. Fifteen minutes (is, are) enough time for this exercise.
8. There (seems, seem) to be many arguments on both sides.
9. Every planet, including earth, (revolves, revolve) around the sun.
10. The Magnificent Ambersons (is, are) worth reading.
11. Many of Abigail Adams’ letters (has, have) been collected and published.
12. The mayor of the city and the governor of the state (has, have) been in conference.
13. It (doesn’t, don’t) matter to me where you go.
14. Neither his secular music nor his religious compositions (appeals, appeal) to the popular taste.
15. Some of the oranges (doesn’t, don’t) ripen until April.
16. The fruit on the outdoor stands (looks, look) tempting.
17. Neither the doctor nor the nurse (was, were) in the patient’s room when the crisis came.
18. College life and high school life (is, are) vastly different.
19. (There’s, There are) not many selfish people in the world.
20. Two weeks (is, are) enough for a trip of that length.
21. She is one of those people who (is, are) never late.
22. The acoustics in this room (has, have) always been bad.
23. Each of the cheeses (was, were) sampled by the inspector.
24. Few members of the scientific world (is, are) able to explain Professor Von Faber’s new theory.
25. Measles (is, are) not exclusively a children’s disease.
COMMERCIAL ANALYSIS PROJECT
During this first unit of the school year, we have studied the Rhetorical Triangle and its six points. We all now know how those six points inform our analyses of texts. Now, working with a collaborative group, you will provide a written analysis of commercials in an expository essay. Each group will turn in one essay that discusses how and why the four commercials chosen reflect the target audience of a television program(s). Additionally, groups will create a poster of a Rhetorical Triangle for one of the commercials, changing the audience. Below is a list of requirements:
1. Choose group members (four or five students only).
2. Decide on a television channel and one consecutive hour of television to watch.
3. Document each of the commercials shown during your pre-selected hour of television.
4. Decide which four commercials best represent the target audience of the program(s) you watched.
5. Discuss each of the commercials in terms of the Rhetorical Triangle, focusing each of the points of the triangle as reflective or representative of audience.
6. Create a thesis that identifies the name of the program(s) watched, channel, time watched, and target audience.
7. Flesh out an essay that discusses how each of the commercials reflects the target audience. Remember that you still have to talk about the other five points of the triangle, but do so discussing their impact on the audience.
8. Create a poster size Rhetorical Triangle that shows how one of your four commercials would be different if the audience were different. Hint: Notice how each of the points alter with one change.
9. Completed project due ________________________________. Papers are due at the beginning of the class period. NO EXCEPTIONS
10. Do not wait until the last minute to begin work. When you do so, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Commercial Analysis Project Rubric
|Criteria |4 |3 |2 |1 |
|Content Focus |You discussed each of the|You discussed each of the|You discussed at least |You discussed fewer than |
| |four commercials in terms|commercials in terms of |three of the commercials |three of the commercials |
| |of the target audience |the target audience. You |in terms of the target |in terms of the target |
| |well. You analyze each of|analyzed each of the six |audience, or you analyzed|audience or you failed to|
| |the six points of the |points of the Rhetorical |most of the points of the|analyze at least four of |
| |Rhetorical Triangle |Triangle. |Rhetorical Triangle. |the points of the |
| |exemplarily. | | |Rhetorical Triangle. |
|Clarity of Thought |You delved into |Your thought processes |Thoughts are not |Thoughts are neither |
| |insightful, unique |are mostly insightful and|particularly unique or |original nor well |
| |thought processes to help|unique and provide for a |well articulated. |articulated. |
| |structure and solidify |structured, solid | | |
| |your argument or |argument or response. | | |
| |response. | | | |
|Organization |You wrote in an |Your writing is mostly |Your writing is either |Your writing is neither |
| |interesting and logical |interesting and logical, |interesting or logical. |interesting nor logical. |
| |sequence, which the |but there may be a few |Some digressions leave |Too many digressions |
| |reader can easily follow.|minor digressions. Ideas |the reader in a state of |leave the reader |
| |Ideas are grouped |are mostly grouped |confusion. Ideas are not |confused. Ideas are |
| |appropriately. |appropriately. |always grouped properly. |randomly inserted and |
| | | | |improperly grouped. |
|Poster |Your poster aptly |One of the points of the |Two of the points of the |Three or more of the |
|Content |presents one commercial |Rhetorical Triangle is |Rhetorical Triangle are |points of the Rhetorical |
| |with an altered audience.|confusing or incorrect. |confusing or incorrect. |Triangle are confusing or|
| | | | |incorrect. |
|Poster Creativity |Poster is neat, colorful,|Poster is mostly neat and|Poster has some unclear |Poster is not |
| |and incorporates pictures|colorful. It incorporates|areas and may lack visual|particularly neat or |
| |to enhance ideas. |some pictures that |appeal. Pictures may not |colorful. Pictures are |
| | |enhance ideas. |enhance ideas. |nonexistent or irrelevant|
| | | | |to ideas. |
Learning to Read and Write
By Frederick Douglass
I lived in Master Hugh's family about seven years. During this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by anyone else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.
My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender- hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.
From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the ~inch,~ and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ~ell.~
The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;--not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard. I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. "You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, ~but I am a slave for life!~ Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?" These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.
I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being ~a slave for life~ began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled "The Columbian Orator." Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master-- things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.
In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.
I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I could hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make it an interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of ~abolition.~ Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant. The dictionary afforded me little or no help. I found it was "the act of abolishing;" but then I did not know what was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. I did not dare to ask any one about its meaning, for I was satisfied that it was something they wanted me to know very little about. After a patient waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the States. From this time I understood the words ~abolition~ and ~abolitionist,~ and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. The light broke in upon me by degrees. I went one day down on the wharf of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, "Are ye a slave for life?" I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He said it was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should be free. I pretended not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters. I was afraid that these seemingly good men might use me so; but I nevertheless remembered their advice, and from that time I resolved to run away. I looked forward to a time at which it would be safe for me to escape. I was too young to think of doing so immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would learn to write.
The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it would be marked thus--"L." When a piece was for the starboard side, it would be marked thus--"S." A piece for the larboard side forward, would be marked thus--"L. F." When a piece was for starboard side forward, it would be marked thus--"S. F." For larboard aft, it would be marked thus--"L. A." For starboard aft, it would be marked thus--"S. A." I soon learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended when placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, "I don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster's Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors, and then laid aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the Wilk Street meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take care of the house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.
Writing and Reading
By Richard Wright
The eighth grade days flowed in their hungry path and I grew more conscious of myself; I sat in classes, bored, wondering, dreaming. One long dry afternoon I took out my composition book and told myself that I would write a story; it was sheer idleness that led me to it. What would the story be about? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who wanted a widow's home and I called it "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre." It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered what to do with it.
The local Negro newspaper! That's it. . . I sailed into the office and shoved my ragged composition book under the nose of the man who called himself the editor.
"What is that?" he asked.
"A story:' I said.
"A news story?"
"No, fiction."
"All right. I'll read it," he said.
He pushed my composition book back on his desk and looked at me curiously, sucking at his pipe.
"But I want you to read it now," I said.
He blinked. I had no idea how newspapers were run. I thought that one took a story to an editor and he sat down then and there and read it and said yes or no.
"I'll read this and let you know about it tomorrow," he said.
I was disappointed; I had taken time to write it and he seemed distant and uninterested.
"Give me the story," I said, reaching for it.
He turned from me, took up the book and read ten pages or more.
"Won't you come in tomorrow?" he asked, "I'll have it finished then."
I honestly relented.
"All right," I said. "I'll stop in tomorrow."
I left with the conviction that he would not read it. Now, where else could I take it after he had turned it down? The next afternoon, en route1 to my job, I stepped into the newspaper office.
"Where's my story?" I asked.
"It's in galleys," he said.
"What's that?" I asked; I did not know what galleys were.
"It's set up in type," he said. "We're publishing it."
"How much money will I get?" I asked, excited.
"We can't pay for manuscript," he said.
"But you sell your papers for money," I said with logic.
"Yes, but we're young in business," he explained.
"But you're asking me to give you my story, but you don't give your papers away," I said.
He laughed. "Look, you're just starting. This story will put your name before our readers. Now, that's something," he said.
"But if the story is good enough to sell to your readers, then you ought to give me some of the money you get from it," I insisted.
He laughed again and I sensed that I was amusing him. "I'm going to offer you something more valuable than money," he said. "I'll give you a chance to learn to write."
I was pleased, but I still thought he was taking advantage of me.
"When will you publish my story?"
"I'm dividing it into three installments," he said. "The first installment appears this week. But the main thing is this: Will you get news for me on a space rate basis?"
"I work mornings and evenings for three dollars a week," I said.
"Oh," he said. "Then you better keep that. But what are you doing this summer?"
"Nothing. "
"Then come to see me before you take another job," he said. "And write some more stories. "
A few days later my classmates came to me with baflled eyes, holding copies of the Southern Register in their hands.
"Did you really write that story?" they asked me.
"Yes. "
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to."
"Where did you get it from?"
"I made it up."
"You didn't. You copied it out of a book."
"If I had, no one would publish it."
"But what are they publishing it for?"
"So people can read it."
"Who told you to do that?"
"Nobody."
"Then why did you do it?"
"Because I wanted to," I said again.
They were convinced that I had not told them the truth. We had never had any instruction in literary matters at school; the literature of the nation or the Negro had never been mentioned. My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre." The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them. They looked at me with new eyes, and a distance, a suspiciousness came between us. If I had thought anything in writing the story, I had thought that perhaps it would make me more acceptable to them, and now it was cutting me off from them more completely than ever.
At home the effects were no less disturbing. Granny came into my room early one morning and sat on the edge of my bed.
"Richard, what is this you're putting in the papers?" she asked.
"A story," I said.
"About what?" "It's just a story, granny."
"But they tell me it's been in three times." "It's the same story. It's in three parts." "But what's it about?" she insisted.
I hedged, fearful of getting into a religious argument."It's just a story I made up," I said.
"Then it's a lie," she said.
"Oh, Christ," I said.
"You must get out of this house if you take the name of the Lord in vain," she said.
"Granny, please. . . I'm sorry," I pleaded. But it's hard to tell you about the story. You see, granny, everybody knows that the story isn't true, but. . ."
"Then why write it?" she asked.
"Because people might want to read it." "That's the Devil's work," she said and left.
My mother also was worried. "Son, you ought to be more serious," she said. "You're growing up now and you won't be able to get jobs if you let people think that you're weak-minded. Suppose the superintendent of schools would ask you to teach here in Jackson, and he found out that you had been writing stories?" I could not answer her.
"I'll be all right, mama," I said.
Uncle Tom, though surprised, was highly critical and contemptuous. The story had no point, he said. And whoever heard of a story by the title of "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre?" Aunt Addie said that it was a sin for anyone to use the word "hell" and that what I was wrong with me was that I had nobody to guide me. She blamed the whole thing upon my upbringing.
In the end I was so angry that I refused to talk about the story. From no quarter, with the exception of the Negro newspaper editor, had there come a single encouraging word. It was rumored that the principal wanted to know why I had used the word"hell." Had I been conscious of the full extent which I was pushing against the current of my environment, I would have been frightened altogether out of my attempts at writing. But my reactions were limited to the attitude of the people about me, and I did not speculate or generalize.
I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation's capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.
Had I been articulate about my ultimate aspirations, no doubt someone would have told me what I was bargaining for; but nobody seemed to know, and least of all did I.
My classmates felt that I was doing something that was vaguely wrong, but they did not know how to express it. As the outside world grew more meaningful, I became more concerned, tense; and my classmates and my teachers would say: "Why do you ask so many questions?" Or: "Keep quiet." I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.
Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric
When you begin to write essays for yourself (or when you analyze the work of an established author), consider the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric. This will help you ensure that you aptly appeal to your readers.
1. Invention: The art of finding and developing material for discussion (verbally or in writing)
a. One may begin by asking the journalistic questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how?)
b. …using Burke’s Pentad
i. Each point proposes something a person can say about a text or purposeful form of communication
1. Act: What happened?
2. Scene: When and where did it happen?
3. Agent: Who did it?
4. Agency: How was it done?
5. Purpose: Why was it done?
c. …using Topics from Aristotle’s works (look at pp. 46-47)
i. Possible vs. Impossible
ii. Past Fact
iii. Future Fact
iv. Greater and Less
d. …using Common Topics (and other Modes of Discourse) (look at pp. 48-50)
i. Definition
ii. Division
iii. Comparison and Contrast
iv. Relationships
v. Circumstances
vi. Testimony
vii. Description
viii. Narration
2. Arrangement: The art of deciding how and where to place ideas, facts, and examples to make them most effective in a text
a. The second canon, Arrangement, was classically only discussed in terms of speeches because there was no printing to make texts available, so, when speaking about Arrangement, we tend to speak about speeches (although we understand that today we are also talking about written texts as well). There are six parts to a speech, or six parts to consider when arranging a text:
i. Exordium—this is the web that ensnares listeners, causing them to want to hear more. It’s the attention grabber you learned about as a freshman, but it’s much more sophisticated now.
ii. Narration—this provides the background information for the material you will discuss.
iii. Partition—this is where you divide up the points you will make in the rest of the speech. It’s like the thesis of the text.
iv. Confirmation—here, you provide evidence, testimony, facts, reasons, details, etc. to support the argument made in the partition.
v. Refutation—this is when you consider the points that counter your argument. Another name for this could be concessions. You mention the opposing viewpoints without diminishing your own position. Mention these points to knock them down.
vi. Peroration—this is your conclusion. Consider what you want the audience to do with the information you have provided.
3. Style: The art of making conscious choice about writing (diction, syntax, etc.) Be sure to consider what occasion would call for certain stylistic choices.
a. Diction—word choice
i. formal vs. informal
ii. simplistic vs. complex
iii. technical vs. common
iv. denotation vs. connotation
v. figurative language
vi. tropes
b. Syntax—sentence structure
i. simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences
ii. active vs. passive voice
iii. convoluted sentences
iv. parallelism
v. schemes
4. Memory: This is what the speaker can aptly expect an audience to know/understand prior to encountering the text. For example, I would expect students in AP English to know Romeo and Juliet, so if I made an allusion to the play in a speech, it would be reasonable for me to believe that they will understand the reference.
5. Delivery: This is the canon that helps the speaker bring/convey the argument/speech well to the audience.
a. Formatting
b. Using links, hyperlinks, photographs, etc.
c. Cover? Title Page?
d. Font, spacing
Personal Statement Paper
Objective
Students will write a narrative essay using the vocabulary and rhetorical devices studied.
Students will use the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric to design their narratives.
Purpose
The aim of this assignment is for students to use Gates’ essay, “A Giant Step,” as a catalyst for ideas, techniques, and structures for a personal narrative that can serve as a free response question for college entry.
Project Content Overview
For this assignment, you will recall an event from your youth that helped you decide on your chosen career path. You will isolate this event and discuss it using the narrative form. Essay development should include adherence to the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric as a way to structure the design process. Moreover, you should use creativity of design, precise diction, and other stylistic elements to both engage and inform readers. The chosen career path should be clear to the audience even if not explicitly stated in the text itself.
Format
Please format your poem for submission in the following ways:
1. Put your name, date, and class period in the upper right corner of the page.
2. Center the title of your essay.
3. Align your essay to the left of the page, indenting appropriately for paragraphs.
4. Type your essay in Times New Roman 12-point font, and be sure to double space it.
Submission
Final drafts of this assignment are due no later than _____________________. Students will submit papers in class. No late papers will be accepted.
Grading
To obtain a C or better on this assignment, students must adhere to all contextual, formatting, and submission requirements. The highest grades will be given to students especially adept at combining the elements of narration and exposition with their own creative expression.
Personal Statement Scoring Guide
A: 9 or 8
▪ These well-conceived and well-ordered essays provide insightful narration and exposition (implicit as well as explicit) of a childhood event and discussion of how that event influenced the speakers in choosing particular career goals. They demonstrate the subtleties of diction and syntax and the use of rhetorical devices. These essays go far beyond the surface and delve into symbolic meaning and style. Although the writers of these essays may offer a range of interpretations and/or choose different ideas, techniques, and/or details for emphasis, these papers are convincing and maintain consistent control over the elements of effective composition. Their references are apt and specific. Though they may not be error-free, they demonstrate the writers’ ability to write with clarity and sophistication.
B: 7 or 6
▪ These essays prove less sensitive than the best essays, but they do provide narration and exposition of childhood events and a discussion of how those events influenced (implicitly as well as explicitly) the speakers’ choices in career goals. The papers may falter in some particulars, or they may be less thorough or precise in their discussion.. These essays demonstrate the writers’ ability to express ideas clearly, but they do not exhibit the same level of mastery, maturity, and/or control as the very best essays. These essays are likely to be briefer, less incisive, and less well-supported than the 9-8 papers.
C: 5
▪ These essays are, at best, superficial. They respond to the assigned task yet probably say little beyond the most easily grasped observations. Their discussions of how a childhood event influenced career goals may be underdeveloped and/or vague, formulaic, or inadequately supported. They tend to rely on paraphrase but nonetheless paraphrase which contains some implicit analysis. Composition skills are at a level sufficient to convey the writer’s thoughts, and egregious mechanical errors do not constitute a distraction. These essays are nonetheless not as well-conceived, organized, or developed as upper-half papers.
D: 4 or 3
▪ These lower-half essays reveal an insufficient understanding of the prescribed task: they may emphasize literal description without discussing the deeper or more symbolic associations. The analysis may be partial, unconvincing, or irrelevant—or it may rely essentially on paraphrase. Evidence may be meager. The writing demonstrates uncertain control over the elements of composition, often exhibiting recurrent stylistic flaws and/or inadequate development of ideas. Essays scored 3 may contain unusually inept writing.
F: 2 or 1
▪ These essays compound the weaknesses of the papers in the 4-3 range. Frequently, they are unacceptably brief. They are poorly written on several counts and may contain many distracting errors in grammar and mechanics. Although some attempt may have been made to respond to the question, the writer’s assertions are presented with little clarity, organization, or support.
0
▪ A response with no more than a reference to the task
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• A blank paper or completely off-topic response
A Giant Step
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"WHAT'S THIS?" the hospital janitor said to me as he stumbled over my right shoe.
"My shoes," I said.
"That's not a shoe, brother," he replied, holding it to the light. "That's a brick."
It did look like a brick, sort of.
"Well, we can throw these in the trash now," he said.
"I guess so."
We had been together since 1975, those shoes and I. They were orthopedic shoes built around molds of my feet, and they had a 2 1/4-inch lift. I had mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, they had given me a more or less even gait for the first time in 10 years. On the other hand, they had marked me as a "handicapped person," complete with cane and special license plates. I went through a pair a year, but it was always the same shoe, black, wide, weighing about four pounds.
It all started 26 years ago in Piedmont, W.Va., a backwoods town of 2,000 people. While playing a game of touch football at a Methodist summer camp, I incurred a hairline fracture. Thing is, I didn't know it yet. I was 14 and had finally lost the chubbiness of my youth. I was just learning tennis and beginning to date, and who knew where that might lead?
Not too far. A few weeks later, I was returning to school from lunch when, out of the blue, the ball-and-socket joint of my hip sheared apart. It was instant agony, and from that time on nothing in my life would be quite the same.
I propped myself against the brick wall of the schoolhouse, where the school delinquent found me. He was black as slate, twice my size, mean as the day was long and beat up kids just because he could. But the look on my face told him something was seriously wrong, and -- bless him -- he stayed by my side for the two hours it took to get me into a taxi.
"It's a torn ligament in your knee," the surgeon said. (One of the signs of what I had -- a "slipped epithysis" -- is intense knee pain, I later learned.) So he scheduled me for a walking cast.
I was wheeled into surgery and placed on the operating table. As the doctor wrapped my leg with wet plaster strips, he asked about my schoolwork.
"Boy," he said, "I understand you want to be a doctor."
I said, "Yessir." Where I came from, you always said "sir" to white people, unless you were trying to make a statement.
Had I taken a lot of science courses?
"Yessir. I enjoy science."
"Are you good at it?"
"Yessir, I believe so."
"Tell me, who was the father of sterilization?"
"Oh, that's easy, Joseph Lister."
Then he asked who discovered penicillin.
Alexander Fleming.
And what about DNA?
Watson and Crick.
The interview went on like this, and I thought my answers might get me a pat on the head. Actually, they just confirmed the diagnosis he'd come to.
He stood me on my feet and insisted that I walk. When I tried, the joint ripped apart and I fell on the floor. It hurt like nothing I'd ever known.
The doctor shook his head. "Pauline," he said to my mother, his voice kindly but amused, "there's not a thing wrong with that child. The problem's psychosomatic. Your son's an overachiever."
Back then, the term didn't mean what it usually means today. In Appalachia, in 1964, "overachiever" designated a sort of pathology: the overstraining of your natural capacity. A colored kid who thought he could be a doctor -- just for instance -- was headed for a breakdown.
What made the pain abate was my mother's reaction. I'd never, ever heard her talk back to a white person before. And doctors, well, their words were scripture.
Not this time. Pauline Gates stared at him for a moment. "Get his clothes, pack his bags -- we're going to the University Medical Center," which was 60 miles away.
Not great news: the one thing I knew was that they only moved you to the University Medical Center when you were going to die. I had three operations that year. I gave my tennis racket to the delinquent, which he probably used to club little kids with. So I wasn't going to make it to Wimbledon. But at least I wasn't going to die, though sometimes I wanted to. Following the last operation, which fitted me for a metal ball, I was confined to bed, flat on my back, immobilized by a complex system of weights and pulleys. It was six weeks of bondage -- and bedpans. I spent my time reading James Baldwin, learning to play chess and quarreling daily with my mother, who had rented a small room -- which we could ill afford -- in a motel just down the hill from the hospital.
I think we both came to realize that our quarreling was a sort of ritual. We'd argue about everything -- what time of day it was -- but the arguments kept me from thinking about that traction system.
I limped through the next decade -- through Yale and Cambridge . . . as far away from Piedmont as I could get. But I couldn't escape the pain, which increased as the joint calcified and began to fuse over the next 15 years. My leg grew shorter, as the muscles atrophied and the ball of the ball-and-socket joint migrated into my pelvis. Aspirin, then Motrin, heating pads and massages, became my traveling companions.
Most frustrating was passing store windows full of fine shoes. I used to dream about walking into one of those stores and buying a pair of shoes. "Give me two pairs, one black, one cordovan," I'd say. "Wrap 'em up." No six-week wait as with the orthotics in which I was confined. These would be real shoes. Not bricks.
In the meantime, hip-joint technology progressed dramatically. But no surgeon wanted to operate on me until I was significantly older, or until the pain was so great that surgery was unavoidable. After all, a new hip would last only for 15 years, and I'd already lost too much bone. It wasn't a procedure they were sure they'd be able to repeat.
This year, my 40th, the doctors decided the time had come.
I increased my life insurance and made the plunge.
The nights before my operations are the longest nights of my life -- but never long enough. Jerking awake, grabbing for my watch, I experience a delicious sense of relief as I discover that only a minute or two have passed. You never want 6 A.M. to come.
And then the door swings open. "Good morning, Mr. Gates, " the nurse says. "It's time."
The last thing I remember, just vaguely, was wondering where amnesiac minutes go in one's consciousness, wondering if I experienced the pain and sounds, then forgot them, or if these were somehow blocked out, dividing the self on the operating table from the conscious self in the recovery room. I didn't like that idea very much. I was about to protest when I blinked.
"It's over, Mr. Gates," says a voice. But how could it be over? I had merely blinked. "You talked to us several times," the surgeon had told me, and that was the scariest part of all.
Twenty-four hours later, they get me out of bed and help me into a "walker." As they stand me on my feet, my wife bursts into tears. "Your foot is touching the ground!" I am afraid to look, but it is true: the surgeon has lengthened my leg with that gleaming titanium and chrome-cobalt alloy ball-and-socket-joint.
"You'll need new shoes," the surgeon says. "Get a pair of Dock-Sides; they have a secure grip. You'll need a 3/4-inch lift in the heel, which can be as discreet as you want."
I can't help thinking about those window displays of shoes, those elegant shoes that, suddenly, I will be able to wear. Dock-Sides and sneakers, boots and loafers, sandals and brogues. I feel, at last, a furtive sympathy for Imelda Marcos, the queen of soles.
The next day, I walk over to the trash can, and take a long look at the brick. I don't want to seem ungracious or unappreciative. We have walked long miles together. I feel disloyal, as if I am abandoning an old friend. I take a second look.
Maybe I'll have them bronzed.
SENTENCE COMBINING
Directions: Underline the subordinate clause or clauses in each sentence.
1. You will learn to speak Spanish if you practice.
2. I know a girl who sings in the chorus.
3. Although English is my favorite subject, I also like algebra.
4. We can go to the mall unless you are too busy.
5. Madeline is from a part of France where few people speak English.
6. The judge, who was angered by the outburst, slammed her gavel down.
7. When we arrived at the hotel, we discovered that our reservation had been cancelled.
8. Though many of us stood in line, only a few people bought concert tickets.
9. Maggie, whose birthday is in July, has already decided.
10. I peeled the potatoes while mother shredded the carrots.
Directions: Write “s” if the sentence is simple, “c” if it is compound, “cx” if it is complex, and “cc” if it is compound-complex.
1. __________We watched the baseball game, and we went for ice cream afterward.
2. __________The library was empty and quiet.
3. __________Although I didn’t brew it long, the coffee tastes bitter, and I will not drink it.
4. __________My grandfather made his fortune in the computer industry.
5. __________In his speeches, Douglass recalled life as a slave, and he called for an immediate end to slavery.
6. __________Dr. May was the only doctor who was available in the middle of the night.
7. __________Marcus and Wolfgang, brothers from Germany, toured the United States and Canada last Spring.
8. __________As we neared the hot-air balloon festival, the sky looked like a fairyland.
9. __________He escaped to the North in 1838, where he changed his name to avoid being caught.
10. __________Paul’s speech will emphasize the budget because we must reduce the deficit, and his book will say the same.
CORNELL JOURNAL
Template
|TITLE OF SELECTION AND AUTHOR |STUDENT NAME |
| |CLASS PERIOD |
|Summary |DATE |
| |Comments |
|Provide a summary of the text. |Respond to your summary. |
|Interpret/explain the author’s ideas. |Reflect on the author’s ideas. Consider your agreement or |
| |disagreement. |
|Identify how the author advances important details. |Raise questions about those details and methods. |
|Relate details and ideas to the unit theme. |Relate that connection to another text or experience. |
Cornell Journal Example
|“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass |Ms. Joshua |
|Summary |Period |
| |November 7, 2010 |
| |Comments |
|1. Douglas discusses the link between illiteracy and slavery |1. On a more basic level, we have all felt the need to leave |
|and, in contrast, the necessity of freedom once literate. Douglas|the household of our parents and guardians. This need is natural |
|furthers this revelation by asserting that to be literate and a |and, usually, welcomed by those who have taken care of us. Today,|
|slave creates in that slave a greater sense of unrest with his |in a society that allows for free and equitable education, |
|lot in life, believing that the ignorance found in illiteracy |literacy is expected. Why then do so many of us “buck the |
|allows for a more contented, though not necessarily happy, |system,” casting off this liberty in favor of a life that will |
|existence. Determined to leave, Douglas realized the importance |forever be mandated and dictated by others? Just as in Douglas’ |
|of reading and writing to his ultimate escape. |day, an education affords us the opportunity to see things as |
| |they really are and, most importantly, leave situations not |
| |necessarily for our good in favor of more pleasurable and |
| |rewarding ones. |
|2. Douglas maintains that the slaveholders’ insistence on |2. Americans of African descent have often said things like |
|keeping the slaves ignorant furthers the masters’ own agenda. To |“the man is keeping us down,” and in Douglas’ day this was indeed|
|educate the slave directly contradicted the tenets of slavery, |true. To afford a slave an education directly assaulted the |
|allowing the slave the opportunity to question his lot instead of|lifestyle on which slaveholders could rely. In an era where a |
|performing duties mindlessly and willingly. |black man has been elected president of the United States, can |
| |the same victimized mindset be true? Maybe…. Although there are |
| |instances of oppression and maltreatment still plaguing our |
| |society, the reality is that blacks have more opportunities today|
| |than they ever had. Blacks must never forget their treatment |
| |throughout American history, but they must also not succumb to |
| |defeat when oppressions are not present. To blame society today |
| |of “keeping us down” seems silly when so many of us submit to a |
| |culture of failure and domination that was never really pressed |
| |upon us as it was years before. |
|3. To discuss the evolution of his literacy, Douglas uses |3. Obviously, this piece is a denunciation of the slaveholding |
|several anecdotes. These anecdotes provide a more intimate |establishment; therefore, to use anecdotes, such as those Douglas|
|glimpse into the life of this slave. The audience cannot help but|includes here, and a more formal diction, adds to the implied |
|perceive Douglas’ ingenuity despite the slaveholding South’s |assertion that slavery dehumanizes. To enslave a being capable of|
|insistence of the slave’s inherent incompetence. Additionally, |the thought, feeling, and skill Douglas has displayed in this |
|Douglas’ uses formal yet direct diction. The read is not replete |text would be contrary to the basic tenets of human rights. |
|with convoluted syntax, but a more educated audience would |Moreover, Douglas, in his depiction of Mistress Hugh, shows how |
|understand the vocabulary much better than a less educated one. |slavery has the potential of corrupting the most vulnerable |
| |members of white society—its women. |
|4. In a sense, the ideas of ignorance and illiteracy that |4. Similar to Douglas’ text, Richard Wright in his |
|Douglas advances--in relation to the relative contentment with |autobiography Black Boy discusses the role of education and |
|one’s station--represents a youthful perspective. Once the slave |oppression in his own life. Wright, like Douglas, confirms the |
|grows in maturity, helped along significantly by learning to read|ease and malice with which whites oppress blacks and how that |
|a write, the “ease” with which he once lived is forever banished.|oppression could be obliterated by education. Shorty, Wright’s |
|Now that slave must live in a world replete with reminders that |teenaged associate, who asserts that he will never leave the |
|he is nothing more than chattel. Douglas muses that being |South because he isn’t smart, could be compared to the |
|illiterate and a slave is a much better existence than being |innocent—therefore illiterate—slave. Acquiescing his liberty (and|
|literate and a slave because knowing one’s true worth and one’s |maturity), Shorty has regulated himself to a slave-like existence|
|true perception by those with which he lives erases any youthful |in a racist South while Wright’s wisdom allows him the |
|innocence that may have allowed for an easier life as a slave. |opportunity to move, both physically and mentally, from the |
| |domination and tyranny. |
Photograph by Gordon Parks
[pic]
Neat People vs. Sloppy People
By Suzanne Britt
I’ve finally figured out the difference between neat people and sloppy people. The distinction is, as always, moral. Neat people are lazier and meaner than sloppy people.
Sloppy people, you see, are not really sloppy. Their sloppiness is merely the unfortunate consequence of their extreme moral rectitude. Sloppy people carry in their mind’s eye a heavenly vision, a precise plan that is so stupendous, so perfect, it can’t be achieved in this world or the next.
Sloppy people live in Never-Never Land. Someday is their métier. Someday they are planning to alphabetize all their books and set up home catalogs. Someday they will go through their wardrobes and mark certain items for tentative mending and certain items for passing on to relatives of similar shape and size. Someday sloppy people will make family scrapbooks into which they will put newspaper clippings, postcards, locks of hair, and the dried corsage from their senior prom. Someday they will file everything on the surface of their desks, including the cash receipts from coffee purchases at the snack shop. Someday they will sit down and read all the back issues of The New Yorker.
For all these noble reasons and more, sloppy people never get neat. They aim too high and wide. They save everything, planning someday to file, order, and straighten out the world. But while these ambitious plans take clearer and clearer shape in their heads, the books spill from the shelves onto the floor, the clothes pile up in the hamper and closet, the family mementos accumulate in every drawer, the surface of the desk is buried under mounds of paper, and the unread magazines threaten to reach the ceiling.
Sloppy people can’t bear to part with anything. They give loving attention to every detail. When sloppy people say they’re going to tackle the surface of a desk, they really mean it. Not a paper will go unturned; not a rubber band will go unboxed. Four hours or two weeks into the excavation, the desk looks exactly the same, primarily because the sloppy person is meticulously creating new piles of papers with new headings and scrupulously stopping to read all the old book catalogs before he throws them away. A neat person would just bulldoze the desk.
Neat people are bums and clods at heart. They have cavalier attitudes toward possessions, including family heirlooms. Everything is just another dust-catcher to them. If anything collects dust, it’s got to go and that’s that. Neat people will toy with the idea of throwing the children out of the house just to cut down on the clutter.
Neat people don’t care about process. They like results. What they want to do is get the whole thing over with so they can sit down and watch the rasslin’ on TV. Neat people operate on two unvarying principles: Never handle any item twice, and throw everything away.
The only thing messy in a neat person’s house is the trash can. The minute something comes to a neat person’s hand, he will look at it, try to decide if it has immediate use and, finding none, throw it in the trash.
Neat people are especially vicious with mail. They never go through their mail unless they are standing directly over a trash can. If the trash can is beside the mailbox, even better. All ads, catalogs, pleas for charitable contributions, church bulletins, and money-saving coupons go straight into the trash can without being opened. All letters from home, postcards from Europe, bills and paychecks are opened, immediately responded to, and then dropped in the trash can. Neat people keep their receipts only for tax purposes. That’s it. No sentimental salvaging of birthday cards or the last letter a dying relative ever wrote. Into the trash it goes.
Neat people place neatness above everything else, even economics. They are incredibly wasteful. Neat people throw away several toys every time they walk through the den. I knew a neat person once who threw away a perfectly good dish drainer because it had mold on it. The drainer was too much trouble to wash. And neat people sell their furniture when they move. They will sell a La-Z-Boy recliner while you are reclining in it.
Neat people are no good to borrow from. Neat people buy everything in expensive little single portions. They get their flour and sugar in two-pound bags. They wouldn’t consider clipping a coupon, saving a leftover, reusing plastic nondairy whipped cream containers, or rinsing off tin foil and draping it over the unmoldy dish drainer. You can never borrow a neat person’s newspaper to see what’s playing at the movies. Neat people have the paper all wadded up and in the trash by 7:05 AM.
Neat people cut a clean swath through the organic as well as the inorganic world. People, animals, and things are all one to them. They are so insensitive. After they’ve finished with the pantry, the medicine cabinet, and the attic, they will throw out the red geranium (too many leaves), sell the dog (too many fleas), and send the children off to boarding school (too many scuff-marks on the hardwood floors).
Iconic Great Depression Photograph
[pic]
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country,
and for making them beneficial to the public.
1729
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbados.
I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the common-wealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.
But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars: it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age, who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand our charity in the streets.
As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years, upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of our projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It is true, a child just dropt from its dam, may be supported by her milk, for a solar year, with little other nourishment: at most not above the value of two shillings, which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner, as, instead of being a charge upon their parents, or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall, on the contrary, contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing of many thousands.
There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.
The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children, (although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom) but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand, for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, How this number shall be reared, and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during which time they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.
I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value.
I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragouts.
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increased to 28 pounds.
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.
Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of Popish infants, is at least three to one in this kingdom, and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of Papists among us.
I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, laborers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend, or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants, the mother will have eight shillings neat profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.
Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flea the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.
As to our City of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose, in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said, that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age, nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service: And these to be disposed of by their parents if alive, or otherwise by their nearest relations. But with due deference to so excellent a friend, and so deserving a patriot, I cannot be altogether in his sentiments; for as to the males, my American acquaintance assured me from frequent experience, that their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our school-boys, by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable, and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the females, it would, I think, with humble submission, be a loss to the public, because they soon would become breeders themselves: And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice, (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, how well so ever intended.
But in order to justify my friend, he confessed, that this expedient was put into his head by the famous Salmanaazor, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London, above twenty years ago, and in conversation told my friend, that in his country, when any young person happened to be put to death, the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality, as a prime dainty; and that, in his time, the body of a plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an attempt to poison the Emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and other great mandarins of the court in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town, who without one single groat to their fortunes, cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at a play-house and assemblies in foreign fineries which they never will pay for; the kingdom would not be the worse.
Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed; and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken, to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance. But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known, that they are every day dying, and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young laborers, they are now in almost as hopeful a condition. They cannot get work, and consequently pine away from want of nourishment, to a degree, that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labor, they have not strength to perform it, and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.
I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my subject. I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.
For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom we are yearly over-run, being the principal breeders of the nation, as well as our most dangerous enemies, and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good Protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country, than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an Episcopal curate.
Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to a distress, and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown.
Thirdly, Whereas the maintenance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old, and upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation's stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, besides the profit of a new dish, introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom, who have any refinement in taste. And the money will circulate among our selves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.
Fourthly, The constant breeders, besides the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year.
Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great custom to taverns, where the vintners will certainly be so prudent as to procure the best receipts for dressing it to perfection; and consequently have their houses frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating; and a skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as they please.
Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards, or enforced by laws and penalties. It would increase the care and tenderness of mothers towards their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to the poor babes, provided in some sort by the public, to their annual profit instead of expense. We should soon see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring the fattest child to the market. Men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, or sow when they are ready to furrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.
Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barreled beef: the propagation of swine's flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat yearly child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a Lord Mayor's feast, or any other public entertainment. But this, and many others, I omit, being studious of brevity.
Supposing that one thousand families in this city, would be constant customers for infants flesh, besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly at weddings and christenings, I compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses; and the rest of the kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining eighty thousand.
I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the kingdom. This I freely own, and 'twas indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. I desire the reader will observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual Kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon Earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither clothes, nor household furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: Of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: Of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our animosities and factions, nor acting any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure, and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it.
Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.
But, as to my self, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, and flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.
After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to reject any offer, proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, As things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for a hundred thousand useless mouths and backs. And secondly, There being a round million of creatures in humane figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock, would leave them in debt two million of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession, to the bulk of farmers, cottagers and laborers, with their wives and children, who are beggars in effect; I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like, or greater miseries, upon their breed for ever.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.
Swift Imitation Exercise
Objective
Students will imitate Swift’s organizational design, style, subject matter, prevailing tone, and/or rhetorical techniques/structures.
Purpose
The goal of this assignment is for students to gain a fuller understanding of the craft of writing (using the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric). Students will imitate Swift’s technique, adhering to the tenets of Arrangement (Canon #2) as they develop their own satirical arguments.
Project Content Overview
For this assignment, students will consider American issues/problems. They will offer satirical arguments as solutions to the issues/problems chosen. As students set out to write their pieces, they should reflect on the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric and how those canons interact in a text and with specific audiences. Note, however, that Arrangement is of paramount importance, as it was in Swift’s piece, and must be readily discernible to the intended audience. Obviously, the other canons’ significance is neither diminished nor obsolete; therefore, careful planning and design are necessary for maximum credit.
Format
Please format your essay for submission in the following ways:
1. Put your name, date, and class period in the upper right corner of the page. This information should be single-spaced.
2. Center the title of your piece, capitalizing major words.
3. Align your essay to the left of the page, indenting paragraphs.
4. Type your essay in Times New Roman, 12-point font.
5. Double-space the entire essay. Do not quadruple space between paragraphs.
6. There is no “required” length. The essay must be long enough to give adequate attention to ideas as well as cover all of the points in Arrangement well.
Submission
All papers will be due __________________________________, at the beginning of the period. Papers will NOT be taken late. Do not wait until the last minute to begin or print out this assignment. If you will not be in class, the paper must be emailed no later than 7:45 the morning it is due. Remember that when you wait until the last minute, everything that can go wrong will go wrong!
Things to Remember:
• You are discussing a current American issue/problem
• Your “solution” should be satirical
• You are using the Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric to design your argument
• Arrangement’s six points must be discernible
• You must provide at least one piece of research (cited using MLA style) in your essay
• Diction, syntax, and other stylistic elements must be used for specific reasons/effects
• The fewer grammatical/mechanical errors, the easier to read
Mother Tongue
By Amy Tan
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus'--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's, Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mother's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."
You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as 'broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.
And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."
Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English -- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, "Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was --." And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:' Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship -- for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as is to ." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall"--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words --red, bus, stoplight, boring--just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys -- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.
But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts--I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."
The Good Wife's Guide
From Housekeeping Monthly, 13 May, 1955.
• Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have be thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they get home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.
• Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.
• Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
• Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Run a dustcloth over the tables.
• During the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
• Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet.
• Be happy to see him.
• Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
• Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
• Don't greet him with complaints and problems.
• Don't complain if he's late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
• Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or lie him down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
• Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
• Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
• A good wife always knows her place.
I Want a Wife
By Judy Brady
I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife.
And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh
from a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his
ex-wife. He is looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I
was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that 1, too, would
like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically
independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent
upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I
am going to school, I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a
wife to keep track of the children's doctor and dentist appointments. And
to keep track of mine, too. I want a wife to make sure my children eat
properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who will wash the children's
clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturant
attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure
that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to
the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when
they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need
special care, because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My
wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose the job. It may mean
a small cut in my wife's income from time to time, but I guess I can
tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care
of the children while my wife is working.
I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife
who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children,
a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes
clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that
my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what
I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife
who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the
necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and
then do the cleaning up while I do my studying. I want a wife who will
care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time
from school. I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation
so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a
rest and change of scene.
I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a
wife's duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the
need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course
studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have
written them.
I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life.
When my wife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will
take care of the baby-sitting arrangements. When I meet people at school
that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house
clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and
not interrupt when I talk about things that interest me and my friends. I
want a wife who will have arranged that the children are fed and ready
for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not bother us. I
want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feel
comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are
passed the hors d'oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the
food, that their wine glasses are replenished when necessary, that their
coffee is served to them as they like it. And I want a wife who knows
that sometimes I need a night out by myself.
I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes
love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure
that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand
sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who
assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not
want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me
so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies.
And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more
than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate
to people as fully as possible.
If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the
wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with
another one. Naturally, I will expect a fresh, new life; my wife will
take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free.
When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit
working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely
take care of a wife's duties.
My God, who wouldn't want a wife?
Editing Practice Worksheets
Vivid Verbs
Directions: In each sentence, fill in the blank with a vivid verb.
1. Freshmen __________ about the cafeteria food.
2. Lola __________ at the mall.
3. The Southwest __________ some of the most spectacular scenery in the country.
4. The Hopi people still __________ ancient rain dances.
5. Many Native Americans still __________ the customs of their ancestors.
6. Deep canyons and tall mesas __________ the landscape.
Active vs. Passive Voice
Directions: Tell whether the following sentences are in active or passive voice.
1. In 1995 the largest airport in North America opened for business.
2. Denver International Airport has been labeled by its supporters as the airport for the twenty-first century.
3. The airport was built on fifty-three square miles of prairie land northeast of the city.
4. Mismanagement and technological mishaps pushed the final cost to almost 5.3 billion dollars over budget.
5. Three parallel runways are designed to handle ninety-nine aircraft every hour.
6. Some of the glitches in the $232-million automated baggage system have been corrected.
7. Baggage is no longer shredded by the state-of-the-art system.
8. The baggage system winds for twenty miles beneath the terminal.
Cutting Wordiness
Directions: Change the italicized portion of each sentence to make the writing more concise.
1. I want you to completely finish cleaning your room.
2. Lisa is a totally unique girl.
3. Marlo spent the entire twenty-four-hour day at her grandmother’s house.
4. I saw the Bible in close proximity to the table last night.
5. In some cases, pasta with clam sauce is better than rice.
6. Manny took a large number of students with him on the trip.
7. Living for one-hundred years is within the realm of possibility.
8. In view of the fact that I am in love with her, I will not submit to the temptation.
9. Raymond has the ability to earn good grades in all of his classes.
10. In my own personal opinion we need to have closed campus lunch.
Dangling and Misplaced Modifiers
Directions: Identify whether each of the following sentences contains a misplaced or dangling modifier.
1. I got fine pictures of the puppies with my new camera.
2. Dented and scratched, Marta found her bicycle.
3. Watching television, the screen suddenly went blank.
4. Carlos only eats spaghetti with clam sauce.
5. Hoping for a break from the heat, a Canadian cold front brought relief.
6. We took a backpack on the train stuffed with sandwiches and fruit.
7. After working feverishly for days, the science project was completed.
Errors in Modification
Directions: Rewrite any of the following sentences that contain an error in modification. Corrections can be made by shifting words around or revising the whole sentence. Some may be correct.
1. The bowling alley lends out shoes to its customers of all sizes.
2. An old bike was given to a junk man we planned to put in the trash.
3. At the age of ten, my family and I emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S.
4. Still sound asleep at noon, my mother thought I was sick.
5. Totaled beyond repair, Allison knew she would have to buy another car.
6. The coach said that canceling the swim meet was the right thing to do under the circumstances.
7. Used all night to illuminate the steps, I needed new batteries for the flashlight.
8. A report was submitted about the latest bank heist by the police.
9. Pausing for a drink of water after the hike, a grizzly bear stood in front of me.
10. After a quick breakfast, the school bus picked me up at the corner.
Parallel Structure
Directions: Look for faulty parallel structure in the following sentences. Write the correct version of the offending word or phrase in the space provided. Some sentences may be correct.
1. This book not only shows what happens to mentally depressed people but it’s all right to seek help.
2. A more easier and direct route exist between Oakland and San Raphael than the one we took.
3. Jim is tall, kind, and forward on the basketball team.
4. Whitney prefers to cook at home rather than going out to eat.
5. Both angry and disappointment at the team’s dismal performance, the coach resigned.
6. The men haven’t decided whether canoeing across the lake would better than a sailboat.
7. The wind had not only knocked down the tree but the electric lines came down, too.
8. After finding a job, she’ll get an apartment, continue playing the guitar, and friends will party with her.
9. Either the mouse will find a quick way into the attic or will gnaw at the siding for days.
10. City living is exciting, convenient, and provides amazing entertainment.
A Bachelor’s Complaint on the Behavior of Married People
By Charles Lamb
As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am.
I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more substantial considerations. What oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a different description;—it is that they are too loving.
Not too loving neither: that does not explain my meaning. Besides, why should that offend me? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other’s society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world.
But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely; but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman understands this as clearly as if it were put into words; but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man,—the lady’s choice. It is enough that I know I am not: I do not want this perpetual reminding.
The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made sufficiently mortifying; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve me; and in the rich man’s houses and pictures,—his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives: it is throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult.
Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces.
Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple, in that of the lady particularly: it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world: that you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none; nor wishes either, perhaps: but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company: but their arrogance is not content within these limits. If a single person presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to differ from her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters for the London market, had the assurance to ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to know any thing about such matters.
But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these creatures give themselves when they come, as they generally do, to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity children are,—that every street and blind alley swarms with them,—that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance,—that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains,—how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, & etc.—I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common—
I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we, who are not their natural-born subjects, should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense,—our tribute and homage of admiration,—I do not see.
“Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children:” so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:” So say I; but then don’t let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless;—let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double-headed: they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other. As for instance, when you come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually engaging,—if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room: they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr.——does not like children. With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you.
I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if it gives them any pain; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion,—to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine, or ten, indiscriminately,—to love all the pretty dears, because children are so engaging.
I know there is a proverb, “Love me, love my dog:” that is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing,—any inanimate substance, as a keep-sake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I love him, and any thing that reminds me of him; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a real character and an essential being of themselves: they are amiable or unamiable per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either 'in their qualities. A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly: they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. O! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age,—there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us. That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest.—I was always rather squeamish in my women and children.
But this is not the worst: one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,—if you did not come in on the wife’s side,—if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,—look about you—your tenure is precarious—before a twelve-month shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some limitations they can endure that: but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him,—before they that are now man and wife ever met,—this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these new mintings.
Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husband’s confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is one of the ways;—they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose;—till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist,—a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has oftenest been put in practice against me.
Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you; by never-qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate esteem,—that “decent affection and complacent kindness” towards you, where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to her sincerity.
Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, “I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr.——as a great wit.” If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, “This, my dear, is your good Mr.——.” One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband’s old friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr.——speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations; for from her husband’s representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like looking man (I use her very words); the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was candid; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband’s friends which differed so much from his own; for my friend’s dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance.
These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour: I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty,—of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versâ. I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr.——did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband’s importunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and decorum: therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of——.
But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future.
(1811)
The Hating Game
By Peter Andrews
"Did you make whoopee first and then decide to get married or did you decide to get married and then make whoopee?"
This is a typical question asked on The Newlywed Game, one of five participation shows producer Chuck Barris is currently inflicting on the television screen. It is also the kind of slop I watched for one week to write this column, so don't expect me to be pleasant. In fact, after putting in 10 or 12 hours watching Chuck Barris shows, I may not even be coherent.
I didn't start out to do a column on Chuck Barris and his works. The original idea was to develop a theory of mine about how it seems to be almost a requirement that nonactors agree to make fools of themselves in order to appear on television. As I saw it, I was going to trace a line from those blank-faced characters at sporting events who point to themselves whenever the camera swings in their direction to contestants on such shows as The Price is Right who come apart at the seams over the excitement of winning a year's supply of birdseed. Then I was going to touch on the serious side and briefly discuss the unseemly rush on the part of half the women in television to take over Shana Alexander's doleful spot on 60 Minutes. Alexander quit, by the way, not because she and James Kilpatrick were an embarrassment but because she felt she wasn't getting enough money. The apotheosis of these shows, I had supposed, was Let's Make a Deal, a program in which the producers take no chances whatsoever. Contestants have to arrive dressed like idiots even to be considered. I had not, however, reckoned with the cosmic vulgarity of Chuck Barris.
Besides The Newlywed Game Chuck Barris numbers among his creations The $1.98 Beauty Show, The Gong Show, The Dating Game, and Three's a Crowd. All five attempt to make entertainment out of self-degradation. Without exception they are unremittingly witless, tasteless, illiterate, and stupid--I'm not being obscure here, am I? Additionally, all five Chuck Barris programs display what seems to be his almost psychotic hatred of women. No opportunity is ever missed to show a woman as some sort of Daffy Duck who doubles as the town moron and the community punchboard. Barris shows amount to a systematic assassination of women, and that his victims skip to executioner's block fairly squealing with delight at the prospect is no defense.
Take The $1.98 Beauty Show--in the word of Henry Youngman, "please!" In case you have missed it, the format is simplicity itself, which is probably the only way host Rip Taylor can keep track of it. Taylor, whose entire inventory of comedic devices consists of his single impersonation of a man having a nervous breakdown on his way to a transvestite costume party, reels onstage in a sequined ringmaster's outfit at full screech and then divides his time between delivering satiric introductions and standing to one side shouting incomprehensibly while the women go through their paces. The "contestants," who usually resemble the kinds of ladies the police try to get off the streets before political conventions come to town, dance and sing after a fashion and then parade around in joke-shop bathing suits. And, for something really funny, Taylor brings on a fat lady who waddles around the stage with the vacant expression of a cow who has just been hit on the forehead with a sledgehammer. Finally, for the big boffola finish, the fat lady wins while Taylor breaks into hysterics and strews confetti over her capacious bosom.
In comparison, The Gong Show is almost austere, combining third-rate professional acts with some truly horrific amateur ones. The principal interest here is that we get to see the master, Chuck Barris himself, who works as his own emcee. At 50, Barris is still the eternal classroom cut-up your parents didn't want you to associate with because he never would amount to anything. And they were right. He never did. Barris is a constant source of amusement to himself as he claps his hands and breaks himself up with gag introductions to the acts, mostly old vaudeville wheezes like "here he is fresh from an engagement on the Astor roof laying tar paper" mixed with a few Barris locker room touches of his own. He introduced one act as "Flash Beaver," which gives you an idea of the humor level Barris is comfortable with. As you might expect, the entertainment is supposed to come not from what the acts do but from their ineptitude, the amusement equivalent of putting turtles on their backs so that you can watch their feet wiggle.
Benumbing as these shows are, I suppose they could be defended as representing at least a perverted attempt at variety entertainment in the slapstick tradition of burlesque. But to get the real, double-dipped Chuck Barris passion for voyeurism combined with self-debasement, you have to include his other shows, which are just crawling with social commentary.
Watching The Dating Game, a television update of a forlorn radio show some 30 years past, is like being lashed to a stool in a singles' bar, and if that's your idea of a good time, you're welcome to my seat. In this one, a woman so aroil with passion she is suffused with a pre-coital glow gets to talk to but not see three macho types. They in turn try out their lines and one who weaves the finest seine bags her for the night. On the show I watched, the woman's opening question to all three was, "Imagine I am a beer can and then describe everything you are going to do to me from the time you pick me up until you're finished with me." I'm not making this up. That is what she said. The first guy replied that he was going to treat her like champagne and then he was going to chug-a-lug her ... You can figure the rest out for yourself.
My guess is that The Newlywed Game is Chuck Barris's personal favorite of his shows. It combines the maximum amount of double entendre with the least amount of intelligence. "Whoopee" questions are, of course, a staple. But every once in a while it goes off into general interest areas that offer grist for somebody's mill. On one show the women were to guess what their husband's favorite country in South America was. The first bride passed on the grounds that she didn't know what or where South America was, and another guessed his choice would be Africa. Interestingly, one of the husbands, not hers, said his favorite country in South America was Africa. This started me thinking we might have the genesis of a wife-swapping game show on our hands here, but I assume Barris is way ahead of me on that one.
As a matter of fact, Barris is nibbling around the edges of a fun infidelity game show with Three's a Crowd, which pits wives against secretaries in knowing who has more sexual information about the lout they are both serving however indifferently. This is the latest of the Barris shows, and the material has become terribly threadbare even by his standards. I am assuming there that most of the "funny" answers contestants come up with have been written for them. Certainly, they have the same tired gag factory smell about them. When the wife and the secretary had to guess where the husband/boss most liked to be tickled, the best anyone could come up with "south of the border."
I have no idea why people should yearn to go on these shows any more than I understand someone who thinks it's funny to get smashed at a party and dance with a lampshade on his head. But the appeal is undoubtedly strong. Barris himself fired the original emcee of The Gong Show so he could expose himself on television. Is the desire to be on television so powerful that people will submit to any kind of ridicule just to see themselves? What do these media flashers do when their program is aired? Do they gather their loved about them and say, "Now watch Mommy and Daddy make fools of themselves?" I don't know, and, frankly, I don't like to think about it very much.
In an interview, Barris once sounded the traditional schlockmeister's defense for selling garbage. "I produce entertainment for the masses, not for the intelligentsia," he said. "I produce entertainment shows the way Robert Hall makes suits."
I take solace in the knowledge that Robert Hall eventually went bankrupt. Perhaps there is some hope for us.
The Saturday Review, March 29, 1980
Women’s Brains
By Stephen Gould
| |
|IN the prelude to Middlemarch, George Elliot lamented the unfulfilled lives of talented women: |
| |
|Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme |
|Power has fashioned the natures of women; if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the |
|ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. |
| Eliot goes on to discount the idea of innate limitation, but while she wrote in 1872, the leaders of |
|European anthropometry were trying to measure "with scientific certitude" the inferiority of women. |
|Anthropometry, or measurement of the human body, is not so fashionable a field these days, but it dominated the|
|human sciences for much of the nineteenth century and remained popular until intelligence testing replaced |
|skull measurement as a favored device for making invidious comparisons among races, classes, and sexes. |
|Crainometry, or meaurement of the skull, commanded the most attention and respect. Its unquestioned leader, |
|Paul Broca (1824-80), professor of clinical surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, gathered a school of |
|disciples and imitators around himself. Their work, so meticulous and apparently irrefutable, exerted great |
|influence and won high esteem as a jewel of nineteenth-century science. |
| Broca's work seemed particularly invulnerable to refutation. Had he not measured with the most scrupulous|
|care and accuracy? (Indeed, he had. I have the greatest respect for Broca's meticulous procedure. His |
|numbers are sound. But science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts. Numbers, by themselves, |
|specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them.) Broca depicted himself as an apostle of |
|objectivity, a man who bowed before facts and cast aside superstition and sentimentality. He declared that |
|"there is no faith, however respectable, no interest, however legitimate, which must not accommodate itself to |
|the progress of human knowledge and bend before truth." Women, like it or not, had smaller brains than men |
|and, therefore, could not equal them in intelligence. This fact, Broca argued, may reinforce a common |
|prejudice in male society, but it is also a scientific truth. L. Manouvrier, a black sheep in Broca's fold, |
|rejected the inferiority of women and wrote with feeling about the burden imposed upon them by Broca's numbers:|
| |
|Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were |
|opposed by numbers unknown to Condorcer or to John Stuart Mill. These numbers fell upon poor women like a |
|sledge hammer, and they were accompanied by commentaries and sarcasms more ferocious than the most misogynist |
|imprecations of certain church fathers. The theologians had asked if women had a soul. Several centuries |
|later, some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence. |
| Broca's argument rested upon two sets of data: the larger brains of men in modern societies, and a |
|supposed increase in male superiority through time. His most extensive data came from autopsies performed |
|personally in four Parisian hospitals. For 292 male brains, he calculated an average weight of 1,325 grams; |
|140 female brains averaged 1,144 grams for a difference of 181 grams, or 14 percent of the male weight. Broca |
|understood, of course, that part of this difference could be attributed to the greater height of males. Yet he |
|made no attempt to measure the effect of size alone and actually stated that it cannot account for the entire |
|difference because we know, a priori, that women are not as intelligent as men (a premise that the data were |
|supposed to test, not rest upon): |
| |
|We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively upon the small size of her body. |
|Tiedemann has proposed this explanation. But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less |
|intelligent than men, a difference which we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless, real. We are |
|therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her |
|physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority. |
| In 1873, the year after Eliot published Middlemarch, Broca measured the cranial capacities of prehistoric |
|skulls from L'Homme Mort cave. Here he found a difference of only 99.5 cubic centimeters between males and |
|females, while modern populations range from 129.5 to 220.7. Topinard, Broca's chief disciple, explained the |
|increasing discrepancy through time as a result of differing evolutionary pressures upon dominant men and |
|passive women: |
| |
|The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility, and the cares|
|of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the |
|woman whom he must protect and nourish, the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to|
|raise children, love, and be passive. |
| In 1879, Gustave Le Bon, chief misogynist of Broca's school, used these data to publish what must be the |
|most vicious attack upon women in modern scientific literature (no one can top Aristotle). I do not claim his |
|views were representative of Broca's school, but they were published in France's most respected anthropological|
|journal. Le Bon concluded: |
| |
|In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are |
|closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious |
|that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have |
|studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most|
|inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized |
|man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without |
|doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as |
|the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them |
|entirely. |
| Nor did Le Bon shrink from the social implications of his views. He was horrified by the proposal of some|
|American reformers to grant women higher education on the same basis as men: |
| |
|A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a |
|dangerous chimera... The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women |
|leave the home and take part in our battles: on this day, a social revolution will begin, and everything that |
|maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear. |
|Sound familiar?* |
| |
| I have reexamined Broca's data, the basis for all this derivative pronouncement, and I find his numbers |
|sound but his interpretation ill-founded, to say the least. The data supporting his claim for increased |
|difference through time can be easily dismissed. Broca based his contention on the samples from L'Homme Mort |
|alone--only seven male and six female skulls in all. Never have so little data yielded such far ranging |
|conclusions. |
| |
| In 1888, Topinard published Broca's more extensive data on the Parisian hospitals. Since Broca recorded |
|height and age as well as brain size, we may use modern statistics to remove their effect. Brain weight |
|decreases with age, and Broca's women were, on average, considerably older than his men. Brain weight |
|increases with height, and his average man was almost half a foot taller than his average woman. I used |
|multiple regression, a technique that allowed me to assess simultaneously the influence of height and age upon |
|brain size. In an analysis of the data for women, I found that, at average male height and age, a woman's |
|brain would weight 1,212 grams. Correction for height and age reduces Broca's measured difference of 181 grams|
|by more than a third, to 113 grams. |
| |
| I don't know what to make of this remaining difference because I cannot assess other factors known to |
|influence brain size in a major way. Cause of death has an important effect: degenerative disease often |
|entails a substantial diminution of brain size. (This effect is separate from the decrease attributed to age |
|alone.) Eugene Schreider, also working with Broca's data, found that men killed in accidents had brains |
|weighing, on average, 60 grams more than men dying of infectious diseases. The best modern data I can find |
|(from American hospitals) records a full 100-gram difference between death by degenerative arteriosclerosis and|
|by violence or accident. Since so many of Broca's subjects were elderly women, we may assume that lengthy |
|degenerative disease was more common among them than among the men. |
| |
| More importantly, modern students of brain size still have not agreed on a proper measure for eliminating |
|the powerful effect of body size. Height is partly adequate, but men and women of the same height do not share|
|the same body build. Weight is even worse than height, because most of its variation reflects nutrition rather|
|than intrinsic size--fat versus skinny exerts little influence upon the brain. Manouvrier took up this subject|
|in the 1880s and argued that muscular mass and force should be used. He tried to measure this elusive property|
|in various ways and found a marked difference in favor of men, even in men and women of the same height. When |
|he corrected for what he called "sexual mass," women actually came out slightly ahead in brain size. |
| |
| Thus, the corrected 113-gram difference is surely too large; the true figure is probably close to zero and|
|may as well favor women as men. And 113 grams, by the way, is exactly the average difference betwen a 5 foot 4|
|inch and a 6 foot 4 inch male in Broca's data. We would not (especially us short folks) want to ascribe |
|greater intelligence to tall men. In short, who knows what to do with Broca's data? They certainly don't |
|permit any confident claim that men have bigger brains than women. |
| |
| To appreciate the social role of Broca and his school, we must recognize that his statements about the |
|brains of women do not reflect an isolated prejudice toward a single disadvantaged group. They must be weighed|
|in the context of a general theory that supported contemporary social distinctions as biologically ordained. |
|Women, blacks, and poor people suffered the same disparagement, but women bore the brunt of Broca's argument |
|because he had easier access to data on women's brains. Women were singularly denigrated but they also stood |
|as surrogates for other disenfranchised groups. As one of Broca's disciples wrote in 1881: "Men of the black |
|races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white woman." This juxtaposition extended into many other |
|realms of anthropological argument, particularly to claims that, anatomically and emotionally, both women and |
|blacks were like white children--and that white children, by the theory of recapitulation, represented an |
|ancestral (primitive) adult stage of human evolution. I do not regard as empty rhetoric the claim that women's|
|battles are for all of us. |
| |
| Maria Montessori did not confine her activities to educational reform for young children. She lectured on|
|anthropology for several years at the University of Rome, and wrote an influential book entitled Pedagogical |
|Anthropology (English edition, 1913). Montessori was no egalitarian. She supported most of Broca's work and |
|the theory of innate criminality proposed by her compatriot Cesare Lombroso. She measured the circumference of|
|children's heads in her schools and inferred that that the best prospects had bigger brains. But she had no |
|use for Broca's conclusions about women. She discussed Monouvrier's work at length and made much of his |
|tentative claim that women, after proper correction of the data, had slightly larger brains than men. Women, |
|she concluded, were intellectually superior, but men had prevailed heretofore by dint of physical force. Since|
|technology has abolished force as an instrument of power, the era of women may soon be upon us: "In such an |
|epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in |
|sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of women is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological |
|superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honor." |
| |
| This represents one possible antidote to "scientific" claims for the constitutional inferiority of certain|
|groups. One may affirm the validity of biological distinctions but argue that the data have been |
|misinterpreted by prejudiced men with a stake in the outcome, and that disadvantaged groups are truly |
|superior. In recent years, Elaine Morgan has followed this strategy in her Descent of Woman, a speculative |
|reconstruction of human prehistory from the woman's point of view--and as farcical as more famous tall tales by|
|and for men. |
| |
| I prefer another strategy. Montessori and Morgan followed Broca's philosophy to reach a more congenial |
|conclusion. I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it |
|is: irrelevant and highly injurious. George Eliot well appreciated the special tragedy that biological |
|labeling imposed upon members of the disadvantaged groups. She expressed it for people like herself--women of |
|extraordinary talent. I would apply it more widely--not only to those whose dreams are flouted but also to |
|those who never realized that they may dream--but I cannot match her prose. In conclusion, then, the rest of |
|Eliot's prelude to Middlemarch: |
| |
|The limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure |
|and the favorite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the |
|ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. |
|Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an |
|unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances instead of centering in some |
|long-recognizable deed. |
| |
|* When I wrote this essay, I assumed that Le Bon was a marginal, if colorful figure. I have since learned that|
|he was a leading scientist, one of the founders of social psychology, and best known for a seminal study on |
|crowd behavior, still cited today (La psychologie des foules, 1895), and for his work on unconscious |
|motivation. |
Introduction to Argument and Persuasion
Most of us encounter some type of argument every day of our lives. We judge the validity and strength of those arguments almost innately. This AP course is designed to help you analyze both print and non-print arguments more systematically and help you create strong, well-reasoned arguments of your own.
Directions: Below are several arguments students both hear and use commonly. Read each dialogue and decide whether the argument is strong or weak. Then provide a reason why.
I. A child wants to extend his/her curfew from 10 PM to 12 AM. The parent has denied the request and is now going to provide the argument.
A. Because I said so.
B. The only thing a teen gets after ten is in trouble.
C. Do as I say not as I do.
D. You’re immature, fail to keep your grades above a 2.0, and never do your chores.
E. Do you want to break my heart?
F. Get out of my face.
G. Do you want to be raped, locked up, addicted to crack, or dead?
II. A teacher asks a student to explain why he/she wants an extension on the unit project that was due today.
A. I didn’t understand the assignment when you gave to it us.
B. No other teacher has a no-late-work policy.
C. Why can’t you just lighten up sometimes?
D. I was in the hospital all night with my dying mother and couldn’t finish it.
E. My baby was sick.
F. I can’t fail this class.
G. My mother said that she would call you.
III. A parent asks his/her child to explain why he/she insists on having his/her prom outfit specially made instead of buying it from a store.
A. No one else is getting a store bought dress.
B. It’s my money. I can do what I want with it.
C. It’s only $200 dollars more.
D. Leave me alone, Mom/Dad!
E. I’m my own person, and I want my outfit to reflect that.
F. Why are you making such a big deal about this? It’s my prom!
G. Do you want me to go down as the biggest lame in Morgan Park history?
Reasoning and Exposition Notes
1) Reasoning and Arguments
a) Reasoning—giving reasons in favor of this or that
b) Argument—a process of reasoning; series of reasons
i) Premises—statements in an argument that give reasons
1) Words such as because, since, and for usually indicate that what follows is a premise of an argument. . Expressions such as “It has been observed that…,” “In support of this…,” and “The relevant data are…” are used to introduce premises.
ii) Conclusions—the claim made by the argument as a result of the reasons
1) Words such as therefore, hence, consequently, and so generally signal conclusions. Expressions such as “The point of all of this is…,” “The implication is…,” and “It follows that…” are used to signal conclusions.
a) Example: Since it is wrong to kill a human being, it follows that capital punishment is wrong, because capital punishment takes the life of a human being.
i) It’s wrong to kill a human being.
ii) Capital punishment takes the life of a human being.
iii) Capital punishment is wrong.
b) Identical twins sometimes have different IQ test scores. Yet these twins inherit exactly the same genes. So environment must play some part in determining a person’s IQ.
i) Identical twins often have different IQ test scores.
ii) Identical twins inherit the same genes.
iii) Environment must play some part in determining a person’s IQ.
1. The first two statements in this argument give reasons for accepting the third. In logic talk, they are said to be the premises of the argument; and the third statement, which asserts the claim made by the argument, is called the argument’s conclusion.
c) The barometer is falling sharply, so the weather is going to change.
i) Premise: The barometer is falling sharply.
ii) Implied Premise: Whenever the barometer falls sharply, the weather changes.
iii) Conclusion: The weather is going to change.
Activity: Identify the conclusions and premises in the following arguments.
• Thomas Szasz: Since there are no mental diseases, there can be no treatments for them.
• Chicago Daily News: If marriages were really falling apart, divorced persons wouldn’t be as eager as they are to find another partner as speedily as possible.
• The Economist: It is difficult to gauge the pain felt by animals because pain is subjective and animals cannot talk.
2) Exposition and Argument
a) Only those groups of statements that provide reasons for believing something form arguments. Thus, anecdotes are not usually arguments, nor are most other forms of exposition or explanation. But even in these cases, arguments often are implied.
i) The point is that explanations and exposition are not generally aimless. A good deal of everyday talk, even gossip, is intended to influence the beliefs and actions of others.
1) Advertisements, for example, often simply provide product information rather than advance explicit arguments, yet clearly every such ad has an implied conclusion—that you should buy the advertised product.
2) Nevertheless, it is important to understand the difference between rhetoric that is primarily expository or explanatory and rhetoric that is basically argumentative.
a) A passage that contains only exposition gives us no reason to accept the “facts” in it, other than the authority of the writer or speaker.
i) Agatha Christie: M. Hercule Poirot, having nothing better to do, amused himself by studying her without appearing to do so. She was, he judged, the kind of young woman who could take care of herself with perfect ease wherever she went….He rather liked the severe regularity of her features and the delicate pallor of her skin. He liked the burnished black head with its neat waves of hair, and her eyes—cool, impersonal, and grey.
b) Passages that contain explicit arguments provide reasons for at least some of their claims and usually call for a different sort of evaluation than merely an assessment of the authority of the writer or speaker.
Activity: Indicate which passages contain arguments and which do not, label the premises and conclusions of those passages that do, and explain why you think the other passages do not contain arguments.
• At the present rate of consumption, the oil will be used up in 20-25 years. And we’re sure not going to reduce consumption in the near future. So we’d better start developing solar power, windmills, and other “alternative energy sources” pretty soon.
• I don’t like big-time college football. I don’t like pro football on TV either. In fact, I don’t like sports, period.
• We’ve had open admission here at KU [the University of Kansas] ever since living memory can remember, and things work swell here, don’t they? I suppose that’s because those who don’t belong here flunk out, or don’t come here in the first place. So who needs restricted enrollment?
• Descartes: Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess.
Validity Notes
I. Cogent Reasoning
a. The point of figuring out the structure of an argument is to determine whether it is cogent (good) or fallacious (bad). If it is cogent, we should be willing to accept its conclusion; if it is bad, we should not.
i. To be cogent, an argument has to satisfy three conditions. It must…
1. start with justified (warranted, believable) premises
a. This first criterion requires that we bring to bear whatever we already know or are justified in believing—our relevant background beliefs—to determine whether we should or should not accept the premises of an argument being evaluated.
b. Background beliefs can be categorized in many ways—for instance, into beliefs about facts and beliefs about values, including moral values.
c. In dealing with most social or political issues, it is important to separate claims that are factual from those that have to do with values, because these two different kinds of claims are defended, or justified, in very different ways.
i. The claim that a given state has a death penalty is verified by examining the relevant government records.
ii. The judgment that the death penalty is or isn’t justified for the commission of heinous crimes is verified by referring to a moral code one accepts or to subjective intuitions of the matter.
2. include all likely relevant information (Satisfying this extremely stringent requirement is usually beyond the ability of most of us most of the time, so the point is to come as close as possible to satisfying it, bearing in mind the seriousness of the problem to be solved and the cost—in time and money—of obtaining or recalling relevant information.)
a. This second criterion of cogent reasoning requires that we not pass over relevant information. In particular, it tells us to resist the temptation to neglect evidence contrary to what we want to believe.
b. Consider this argument: “We absolutely must start cutting down on the use of oil as an energy source. The World Resources Institute estimates that at the present rate of consumption, known reserves will be used up in just a bit more than 30 years.”
i. Even supposing the Institute’s estimate were on target, this argument still would not be cogent because it suppresses relevant information that most knowledgeable people have had all along and which the World Resources Institute experts also ought to have known about.
1. Known reserves continually increase anyway, due to the discovery of new oil fields, in spite of ever-rising consumption.
2. Prospecting for oil is expensive and chancy, so that when oil is a glut on the market, exploration slows down.
3. When reserves become lower relative to demand, exploration increases.
c. Arguments that neglect relevant evidence are not cogent.
d. Those who do not know about the overlooked information, or have simply neglected to bring it to bear, or do not have reason to suspect that relevant information is being suppressed are fair game for more knowledgeable and less principled operators.
3. be valid, or correct, which means that being justified in accepting its premises justifies acceptance of its conclusion—provided we know nothing else relevant to the conclusion. (Note that an argument containing one or more unjustified premises may still be cogent if it also has justified premises that support its conclusion.
a. The third criterion of cogent reasoning requires that the premises of an argument genuinely support its conclusion; or, as logicians would say, it requires that the argument be valid, or correct.
b. There are two fundamentally different ways in which premises may support conclusions.
i. The first way yields deductively valid arguments.
1. The fundamental property of a deductively valid argument is this: If all of its premises are true, then its conclusion must also be true because the claim asserted by its conclusion already has been stated in its premises, although usually only implicitly. Here is an example:
a. Everything made of copper conducts electricity. (Premise)
b. This wire is made of copper. (Premise)
c. This wire will conduct electricity. (Conclusion)
i. It would be contradictory to assert both of its premises and then deny its conclusion.
2. It is important to see that the deductive validity of an argument has nothing to do with whether its premises are true. Validity has to do with the nature of the connection between premises and conclusion, not the truth or believability of premises.
3. Determining that an argument is deductively valid tells us that if its premises happen to be true, then its conclusion must be true also—it does not tell us whether its premises are true.
ii. The second way yields inductively valid arguments.
1. These arguments, unlike deductive one, have conclusions that go beyond what is contained in their premises.
2. The idea behind a valid induction is that of learning from experience.
3. Valid inductions simply project regularities (patterns or resemblances).
4. We use inductive reasoning so frequently in everyday life that its nature generally goes unnoticed.
5. Induction increases possibility of error because the premises of a perfectly good induction may all be true and yet its conclusion may be false. Here’s an example:
a. A restaurant that has served excellent food many times in the past fails us on a special occasion.
6. Even the best “inductive leap” can lead us astray because the pattern noticed in our experience up to a given point may not turn out to be the exact pattern of the whole universe.
Deductively Valid Arguments and Its Forms (Structures)
Different arguments may have the same form, or structure, as do these two deductively valid arguments:
Argument 1
1. If it’s spring, then the birds are chirping.
2. It is spring.
3. The birds are chirping. (conclusion)
Argument 2
1. If a world government does not evolve soon, then wars will continue to occur.
2. A world government isn’t going to evolve soon.
3. Wars will continue to occur. (conclusion)
Deductively Valid Forms and Examples
Modus Ponens Form:
1. If A then B. (Premise) If it’s spring, then the birds are chirping.
2. A. (Premise) It is spring.
3. B. (Conclusion) The birds are chirping.
Modus Tollens Form:
1. If A then B. (Premise) If it is spring, then the birds are chirping.
2. Not B. (Premise) The birds aren’t chirping.
3. Not A. (Conclusion) It isn’t spring.
Hypothetical Syllogism Form:
1. If A then B. (Premise) If we successfully develop nuclear fusion power, then power will become cheap and plentiful.
2. If B then C. (Premise) If power becomes cheap and plentiful, then the economy will flourish.
3. If A then C. (Conclusion) If we successfully develop nuclear fusion power, then the economy will flourish.
Disjunctive Syllogism Form:
1. A or B. (Premise) Either Bush won the 1992 election or Clinton did.
2. Not A. (Premise) Bush didn’t win.
3. B. (Conclusion) Clinton did.
Other Forms:
1. No F’s are G’s. (Premise) No police officers accept bribes.
2. It’s false that some F’s are G’s. (Conclusion) It’s false that some police officers accept bribes.
1. All F’s are G’s. (Premise) All salamis are tasty.
2. If this is an F, then this is a G. (Conclusion) If this is a salami, then it is tasty.
1. All F’s are G’s. (Premise) All TV evangelists have high moral standards.
2. All G’s are H’s. (Premise) All who have high moral standards live up to those standards.
3. All F’s are H’s. (Conclusion) All TV evangelists live up to high moral standards.
1. All F’s are G’s.(Premise) All elective offices always tell the truth.
2. This is an F. (Premise) Bill Clinton is an elected official.
3. This is a G. (Conclusion) Bill Clinton always tells the truth.
1. All F’s are G’s. (Premise) All males are chauvinist pigs.
2. No G’s are H’s. (Premise) No chauvinist pigs are likeable.
3. No F’s are H’s. (Conclusion) No males are likeable.
1. No F’s are G’s. (Premise) No foreigners can be trusted.
2. Some H’s are F’s. (Premise) Some newborn babies are foreigners.
3. Some H’s are not G’s. (Conclusion) Some newborn babies cannot be trusted.
Deductive Invalidity
Any argument that does not have a deductively valid form is said to be deductively invalid.
Assignment: Invent deductively valid arguments for each of the forms.
Argument Practice
Directions: Identify the premises and conclusions for each of the following.
1. Shakespeare: Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
2. Aristotle: The Earth has a spherical shape. For the night sky looks different in the northern and the southern parts of the earth, and that would be the case if the earth were spherical in shape.
3. No, I was not prepared to take this critical thinking class. How can you expect me to understand the material when I never heard of most of the people and events you talk about in class? And that textbook is just way over my head, talking about people and events I’ve never heard of. What did happen at Watergate and who is Frank Lloyd Wright anyway? Have I proved my point? I was not prepared!
4. Muhammad Ali: There’s no country as great as the smallest city in America. I mean, [here in Zaire] you can’t watch television. The water won’t even run right. The toilets won’t flush. The roads, the cars…there’s nothing as great as America.
5. My summer vacation was spent working in Las Vegas. I worked as a waitress at the Desert Inn and made tons of money. But I guess I got addicted to the slots and didn’t save too much. Next summer my friend Hall and I are going to work in Reno, if we can find jobs there.
Directions: Identify which of the following are deductive and which are inductive. Back up your evaluation. Then, discuss whether or not the arguments are sound.
1. I have noticed previously that every time I kick a ball up, it comes back down, so I guess this next time when I kick it up, it will come back down, too.
2. That is Newton's Law. Everything that goes up must come down. Therefore, if you kick the ball up, it must come down.
3. Time Magazine: “Since tests proved that it took at least 2.3 seconds to operate the bolt on Oswald's rifle, Oswald obviously could not have fired three times--hitting Kennedy twice and Conally once--in 5.6 second or less."
4. The response by Frederick T. Wehr: "Sir…This argument, which has appeared in many publications since the assassination, is faulty, and I am surprised that I haven't seen it refuted before this. Assuming that the bolt of Oswald's rifle can, in fact, be operated in 2.3 seconds, then Oswald definitely could fire 3 shots in less than 5.6 seconds, for a stop watch would be started when the first shot was fired; the second shot would be fired when the stop watch read 2.3 seconds, and the third shot would be fired when the stop watch read 4.6 seconds. You have apparently overlooked the fact that, in the time it takes to fire 3 shots, it is only necessary to operate the bolt twice."
5. Mark Twain's Notebook: "…at bottom I did not believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood, for in all my small experience with guns I had never hit anything I had tried to hit and I knew I had done my best to hit him."
6. Greeks are philosophers, so some Greeks are philosophers.
7. Some Christians are philosophers; therefore, it is false that no Christians are philosophers.
Group 1 Fallacies
All fallacious reasoning falls into one or more of the three broad categories of questionable premise, suppressed evidence, and invalid inference. But other fallacy categories, crosscutting these, have come into common use.
1. Appeal to authority: Accepting the word of alleged authorities when there is not sufficient reason to believe either that (1) they have the information we seek or that (2) they can be trusted to provide it to us, when (3) we don’t have the time, inclination, or ability to figure the matter out for ourselves. Example: Taking the word of power-industry executives that nuclear plants are safe.
a. When it is necessary to appeal to authorities, we should remember that some are more trustworthy than others; and in particular, we should be wary of experts who have an axe to grind. We also should pay attention to the track records of alleged authorities.
2. Inconsistency: Using or accepting contradictory statements to support a conclusion or conclusions. These contradictory assertions may be made (1) by one person at one time, (2) by one person at different times, without explaining the contradiction as a reasoned change of mind, or (3) by different representatives of one institution. While not strictly speaking, a fallacy, we need to note contradictions between what people say and what they do. Example: President Clinton’s campaign promise that he would lift the ban on gays in the military was not consistent with what he actually did on the matter.
3. Straw man: Misrepresenting an opponent’s position or a competitor’s product in order to make it easier to attack them or tout one’s own product as superior, or attacking a weaker opponent while ignoring a stronger one. Example: Candidate George Bush’s TV spots that misrepresented several of Michael Dukakis’ positions.
4. False dilemma: Reasoning from the premise that there are just two plausible solutions to a problem or issue when, in fact, there are at least three. Example: Claiming that either economics or biology (genetic factors) must explain male domination, when there are other likely possibilities.
5. Begging the question: Assuming without proof the question, or a significant part of the question, at issue. Example: Why hasn’t the prize committee considered Galbraith’s work good enough for a Nobel Prize? Because they judged it not sufficiently original to merit laureateship?
a. One way to beg a question is to evade it entirely while pretending to have addressed it. Example: An elected official who answers queries about what will be done for the homeless by speaking instead about the need to provide adequate housing for everyone.
6. Questionable premise: Accepting a less than believable premise. Note that the five fallacies just described are species of this broader fallacy but that not all variations on it have special names. Example: Accepting the claim that Budweiser is the best beer as a reason for deciding to switch to Bud.
7. Suppressed evidence: Failing to bring relevant evidence to bear on an argument. Example: Those opposed to legalization of marijuana suppress evidence that marijuana use is rarely followed by addiction to heroin and evidence that studies health hazards from marijuana are flawed.
8. Slippery slope: Objecting to an action on the grounds that once it is taken, it will lead to similar but less desirable actions until some horror is reached down the road. We commit this fallacy when we accept the slipperiness of the slope in the absence of sufficient supporting evidence or reasons. Example: The fear that allowing gays to serve in the military will lead to legalization of homosexual marriages.
9. Lack of proportion: The failure to see things in proper perspective or proportion. Example: Failing to address the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia because all sides are guilty of atrocities.
a. A variation of the fallacy of lack of proportion is that of tokenism, in which a token gesture is taken for the genuine article. Example: Giving a wife “permission” to go braless when she wants equal treatment in the home.
In Your Own Words Group 1
Directions: Paraphrase the definition for each of the fallacies in group 1. Then create an example of each fallacy.
|FALLACY |PARAPHRASED DEFINITION |EXAMPLE |
|Appeal to Authority | | |
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|Inconsistency | | |
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|Straw Man | | |
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|False Dilemma | | |
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|Begging the Question | | |
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|Questionable Premise | | |
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|Suppressed Evidence | | |
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|Slippery Slope | | |
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|Lack of Proportion or | | |
|Tokenism | | |
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Group 2 Fallacies
1. Ad hominem argument: an irrelevant attack on an opponent rather than on the opponent’s evidence or argument. Example: Senator Jennings Randolph responds to proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment by calling them “braless bubbleheads.” Note, however, that not all character attacks are fallacious, an example being a challenge to the integrity of an allegedly expert witness.
a. A variation on this fallacy is that of guilt by association, in which we judge someone guilty on the basis of the company that person keeps. Of course, whether judging someone in this way is, or is not, fallacious depends on the particular facts concerning each case.
2. Two wrongs make a right: Defending a wrong by pointing out that our opponents have acted in the same (or an equally bad) manner. Example: The Soviets responded to a British accusation that they were selling supersonic bombers to Libya by point out that Britain had sold arms to Middle Eastern countries. Note, however, that when fighting fire with fire, what would otherwise be a wrong often is not, as when someone kills in self-defense. Although there is an air of hypocrisy to a charge coming from an equally guilty party, this does not make an accurate charge any less on target. The fallacies common practice and traditional wisdom are two variations on the fallacy of two wrongs make a right.
3. Irrelevant reason: Trying to prove something using evidence that is or comes close to being irrelevant. (Some other term, such as ad hominem argument, may also apply.) Example: Countering the claims of antiwar protesters by arguing that antiwar talk tells the enemy we do not have the resolve to fight.
4. Equivocation: Using a term or expression in an argument in one sense in one place an in another sense somewhere else. Example: The TV evangelist’s use of the expression “son of God” to refer to Jesus Christ and to a parishioner. Note, however, that intentional ambiguity, even equivocation—metaphor, for example—is not always fallacious.
5. Appeal to ignorance: Arguing that the failure to find evidence supporting a claim proves that claim is false. Example: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s holding to his claim that eighty-one State Department employees were Communists because there was no proof that they were not. (Note, however, that the failure of appropriate searches sometimes does support rejection of a claim.)
6. Composition: Assuming that an item has a certain property because all of its parts have that property. Example: Assuming a washing machine is inexpensive overall because it only costs 50 cents a day to buy one.
a. The fallacy of division is committed when we assume all of the parts of an item have a property because the item as a whole has it. Example: Assuming the rooms in a large hotel are large.
7. Common gambling fallacies: Gamblers are notorious suckers for certain kinds of fallacies, in particular two: (1) the “doubling the bet after a loss” method and (2) the method based on the idea that when a number has failed to show in recent plays, it is “overdue” and thus more likely to come up than usual.
In Your Own Words Group 2 Fallacies
Directions: Paraphrase the definition for each of the fallacies in group 2. Then create an example of each fallacy.
|FALLACY |PARAPHRASED DEFINITION |EXAMPLE |
|Ad Hominem | | |
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|Guilt by Association | | |
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|Two Wrongs Make a Right | | |
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|Irrelevant Reason | | |
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|Equivocation | | |
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|Appeal to Ignorance | | |
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|Composition | | |
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|Division | | |
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|Common Gambling | | |
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Group 3 Fallacies
1. Bandwagon: a threat of rejection by one's peers (or peer pressure) is substituted for evidence in an "argument."
2. Snob Appeal: The fallacy of snob appeal usually follows a strange but predictable path: agree with me and buy my product because hardly anybody else is.
a. While it may sound like a lousy call for pity for a floundering business, it is really an appeal to everybody's natural urges to distinguish themselves from all the rest. It is an appeal to your inner snob.
3. Red-Herring: an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.
4. Small Sample: using too small a sample. If the sample is too small to provide a representative sample of the population, and if we have the background information to know that there is this problem with sample size, yet we still accept the generalization upon the sample results, then we commit the fallacy.
a. This fallacy is the fallacy of hasty generalization, but it emphasizes statistical sampling techniques.
5. Unrepresentative Sample: If the means of collecting the sample from the population are likely to produce a sample that is unrepresentative of the population, then a generalization upon the sample data is an inference committing the fallacy of unrepresentative sample.
a. A kind of hasty generalization. When some of the statistical evidence is expected to be relevant to the results but is hidden or overlooked, the fallacy is called suppressed evidence. There are many ways to bias a sample.
b. Knowingly selecting atypical members of the population produces a biased sample.
6. Spotlight Fallacy: when a person uncritically assumes that all members or cases of a certain class or type are like those that receive the most attention or coverage in the media.
7. Appeal to Novelty: occurs when it is assumed that something is better or correct simply because it is new.
In Your Own Words Group 3 Fallacies
Directions: Paraphrase the definition for each of the fallacies in group 3. Then create an example of each fallacy.
|FALLACY |PARAPHRASED DEFINITION |EXAMPLE |
|Bandwagon | | |
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The Allegory of the Cave (The Republic , Book VII)
Plato
Socrates
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:, Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
Glaucon
I see.
Socrates
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
Glaucon
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
Glaucon
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Socrates
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Glaucon
Yes, he said.
Socrates
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy, when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
Glaucon
No question, he replied.
Socrates
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
Glaucon
That is certain.
Socrates
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,, what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing And when to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Glaucon
Far truer.
Socrates
And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
Glaucon
True, he said.
Socrates
And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities?
Glaucon
Not all in a moment, he said.
Socrates
He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?
Glaucon
Certainly.
Socrates
Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
Glaucon
Certainly.
Socrates
He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Glaucon
Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about it.
Socrates
And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Glaucon
Certainly, he would.
Socrates
And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Glaucon
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Socrates
Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
Glaucon
To be sure, he said.
Socrates
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
Glaucon
No question, he said.
Socrates
This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed, whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
Glaucon
I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
Socrates
Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.
Glaucon
Yes, very natural.
Socrates
And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, when they returned to the den they would see much worse than those who had never left it. himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
Glaucon
Anything but surprising, he replied.
Socrates
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he has a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.
Glaucon
That, he said, is a very just distinction.
Socrates
But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes?
Glaucon
They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
Socrates
Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
Glaucon
Very true.
Socrates
And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?
Glaucon
Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.
Socrates
And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue, how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?
Glaucon
Very true, he said.
Socrates
But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below, if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.
Glaucon
Very likely.
Socrates
Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or Neither rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able educated ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest.
Glaucon
Very true, he replied.
Socrates
Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all, they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.
Glaucon
What do you mean?
Socrates
I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.
Glaucon
But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better?
Socrates
You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.
Glaucon
True, he said, I had forgotten.
Socrates
Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. That is why each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State, which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.
Glaucon
Quite true, he replied.
Socrates
And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light?
Glaucon
Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State.
Socrates
Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.
Glaucon
Most true, he replied.
Socrates
And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?
Glaucon
Indeed, I do not, he said.
Socrates
And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.
Glaucon
No question.
Socrates
Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of the state.
On The Pleasure Of Hating (c.1826)
by William Hazlitt
THERE is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well allegorised in the admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the same edifying breed); he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops -- he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe -- but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on with mingled cunning, impudence and fear. As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death-my philosophy has got beyond that -- I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little animal in question (that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic horror and superstitious loathing. It will ask another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of the prejudice and make us feel towards this ill-omened tribe with something of "the milk of human kindness," instead of their own shyness and venom.
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do we not see this principle at work everywhere? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so, but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our passions rather than with our understandings. Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke observes, the theater would be left empty. A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set upon and baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits. How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever nature was supposed to do. Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and head strong humours into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Fawx in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in every village in England once a year. Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch Novels is much the same-they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people-to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. "Off, you lendings!" The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full swing, or goes to the Devil his own way. Here are no Jeremy Bentham Panopticons, none of Mr. Owen's impassable Parallelograms1 (Rob Roy would have spurred and poured a thousand curses on them), no long calculations of self-interest -- the will takes its instant way to its object, as the mountain-torrent flings itself over the precipice: the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour: that is charming, and finds a sure and sympathetic chord in every breast! So Mr. Irving2, the celebrated preacher, has rekindled the old, original, almost exploded hell-fire in the aisles of the Caledonian Chapel, as they introduce the real water of the New River at Sadler's Wells, to the delight and astonishment of his fair audience. 'Tis pretty, though a plague, to sit and peep into the pit of Tophet, to play at snap-dragon with flames and brimstone (it gives a smart electrical shock, a lively filip to delicate constitutions), and to see Mr. Irving, like a huge Titan, looking as grim and swarthy as if he had to forge tortures for all the damned! What a strange being man is! Not content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, "upon this bank and shoal of time," where one would think there were heartaches, pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the yawning gulf of penal fire; his speculative malice asks eternity to wreak its infinite spite in, and calls on the Almighty to execute its relentless doom! The cannibals burn their enemies and eat them in good-fellowship with one another: meed Christian divines cast those who differ from them but a hair's-breadth, body and soul into hellfire for the glory of God and the good of His creatures! It is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with their wills: indeed it is from the sense of their weakness and inability to control the opinions of others, that they thus "outdo termagant," and endeavour to frighten them into conformity by big words and monstrous denunciations.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to the French or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a most universal application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it inclines us to resent the wrongs of others, it impels us to be as impatient of their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay benefits with ingratitude. Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn. "That which was luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida;" and love and friendship melt in their own fires. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.
I have observed that few of those whom I have formerly known most intimate, continue on the same friendly footing, or combine the steadiness with the warmth of attachment. I have been acquainted with two or three knots of inseparable companions, who saw each other "six days in the week;" that have been broken up and dispersed. I have quarrelled with almost all my old friends' (they might say this is owing to my bad temper, but) they have also quarrelled with one another. What is become of "that set of whist-players," celebrated by Elia in his notable Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq.3 (and now I think of it - that I myself have celebrated in this very volume4) "that for so many years called Admiral Burney friend?" They are scattered, like last year's snow. Some of them are dead, or gone to live at a distance, or pass one another in the street like strangers, or if they stop to speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible. Some of us have grown rich, others poor. Some have got places under Government, others a niche in the Quarterly Review. Some of us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst others remain in their original privacy. We despise the one, and envy and are glad to mortify the other. Times are changed; we cannot revive our old feelings; and we avoid the sight, and are uneasy in the presence of, those who remind us of our infirmity, and put us upon an effort at seeming cordiality which embarrasses ourselves, and does not impose upon our quondam associates. Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them. Either constant intercourse and familiarity breed weariness and contempt; if we meet again after an interval of absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish, for us; and we wonder we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit of one, or tired to death of the dullness of another. The good things of the first (besides leaving strings behind them) by repetition grow stale, and lose their startling effect; and the insipidity of the last becomes intolerable. The most amusing or instructive companion is best like a favorite volume, that we wish after a time to lay upon the shelf; but as our friends are not willing to be laid there, this produces a misunderstanding and ill-blood between us. Or if the zeal and integrity of friendship is not abated, or its career interrupted by any obstacle arising out of its own nature, we look out for other subjects of complaint and sources of dissatisfaction. We begin to criticize each other's dress, looks, general character. "Such a one is a pleasant fellow, but it is a pity he sits so late!" Another fails to keep his appointments, and that is a sore that never heals. We get acquainted with some fashionable young men or with a mistress, and wish to introduce our friend; but be is awkward and a sloven, the interview does not answer, and this throws cold water on our intercourse. Or he makes himself obnoxious to opinion; and we shrink from our own convictions on the subject as an excuse for not defending him. All or any of these causes mount up in time to a ground of coolness or irritation; and at last they break out into open violence as the only amends we can make ourselves for suppressing them so long, or the readiest means of banishing recollections of former kindness so little compatible with our present feelings. We may try to tamper with the wounds or patch up the carcase of departed friendship; but the one will hardly bear the handling, and the other is not worth the trouble of embalming! The only way to be reconciled to old friends is to part with them for good: at a distance we may chance to be thrown back ( in a waking dream) upon old times and old feelings: or at any rate we should not think of renewing our intimacy, till we have fairly spit our spite or said, thought, and felt all the ill we can of each other. Or if we can pick a quarrel with some one else, and make him the scape-goat, this is an excellent contrivance to heal a broken bone. I think I must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a piece of his mind! I don't know what it is that attaches me to H---so much, except that he and I, whenever we meet, sit in judgment on another set of old friends, and "carve them as a dish fit for the Gods". There with L [Leigh Hunt], John Scott, Mrs. [Montagu], whose dark raven locks make a picturesque background to our discourse, B---, who is grown fat, and is, they say, married, R[ickman]; these had all separated long ago, and their foibles are the common link that holds us together.5 We do not affect to condole or whine over their follies; we enjoy, we laugh at them, till we are ready to burst our sides, "sans intermissions for hours by the dial." We serve up a course of anecdotes, traits, master-strokes of character, and cut and hack at them till we are weary. Perhaps some of them are even with us. For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about. "Then," said Mrs. [Montagu], " you will cease to be a philanthropist!" Those in question were some of the choice-spirits of the age, not "fellows of no mark or likelihood'; and we so far did them justice: but it is well they did not hear what we sometimes said of them. I care little what any one says of me, particularly behind my back, and in the way of critical and analytical discussion: it is looks of dislike and scorn that I answer with the worst venom of my pen. The expression of the face wounds me more than the expressions of the tongue. If I have in one instance mistaken this expression, or resorted to this remedy where I ought not, I am sorry for it. But the face was too fine over which it mantled, and I am too old to have misunderstood it!...I sometimes go up to -----'s; and as often as I do, resolve never to go again. I do not find the old homely welcome. The ghost of friendship meets me at the door, and sits with me all dinner-time. They have got a set of fine notions and new acquaintances. Allusions to past occurrences are thought trivial, nor is it always safe to touch upon more general subjects. M. does not begin as he formerly did every five minutes, "Fawcett used to say," &c. That topic is something worn. The girls are grown up, and have a thousand accomplishments. I perceive there is a jealousy on both sides. They think I give myself airs, and I fancy the same of them. Every time I am asked, "If I do not think Mr. Washington Irving a very fine writer?" I shall not go again till I receive an invitation for Christmas Day in company with Mr. Liston. The only intimacy I never found to flinch or fade was a purely intellectual one. There was none of the cant of candour in it, none of the whine of mawkish sensibility. Our mutual acquaintance were considered merely as subjects of conversation and knowledge, not all of affection. We regarded them no more in our experiments than "mice in an air-pump:" or like malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the dissecting-knife. We spared neither friend nor foe. We sacrificed human infirmities at the shrine of truth. The skeletons of character might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air like flies in cobwebs; or they were kept for future inspection in some refined acid. The demonstration was as beautiful as it was new. There is no surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen. We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
We take a dislike to our favourite books, after a time, for the same reason. We cannot read the same works for ever. Our honey-moon, even though we wed the Muse, must come to an end; and is followed by indifference, if not by disgust. There are some works, those indeed that produce the most striking effect at first by novelty and boldness of outline, that will not bear reading twice: others of a less extravagant character, and that excite and repay attention by a greater nicety of details, have hardly interest enough to keep alive our continued enthusiasm. The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them: - we as little like to have to drag others from their unmerited obscurity, lest we should be exposed to the charge of affectation and singularity of taste. There is nothing to be said respecting an author that all the world have made up their minds about: it is a thankless as well as hopeless task to recommend one that nobody has ever heard of. To cry up Shakespear as the god of our idolatry, seems like a vulgar national prejudice: to take down a volume of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Ford, or Marlowe, has very much the look of pedantry and egotism. I confess it makes me hate the very name of Fame and Genius, when works like these are "gone into the wastes of time," while each successive generation of fools is busily employed in reading the trash of the day, and women of fashion gravely join with their waiting-maids in discussing the preference between the Paradise Lost and Mr. Moore's Loves of the Angels. I was pleased the other day on going into a shop to ask, "If they had any of the Scotch Novels?" to be told - "That they had just sent out the last, Sir Andrew Wylie!" - Mr. Galt will also be pleased with this answer! The reputation of some books is raw and unaired: that of others is worm-eaten and mouldy. Why fix our affections on that which we cannot bring ourselves to have faith in, or which others have long ceased to trouble themselves about? I am half afraid to look into Tom Jones, lest it should not answer my expectations at this time of day; and if it did not, I would certainly be disposed to fling it into the fire, and never look into another novel while I lived. But surely, it may be said, there are some works that, like nature, can never grow old; and that must always touch the imagination and passions alike! Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favourites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:
---"Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!"
A passage like this, indeed, leaves a taste on the palate like nectar, and we seem in reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables: but if we repeat it often in ordinary moods, it loses its flavour, becomes vapid, "the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees remain." Or, on the other hand, if we call in the air of extraordinary circumstances to set it off to advantage, as the reciting it to a friend, or after having our feelings excited by a long walk in some romantic situation, or while we
---"play with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair"---
we afterwards miss the accompanying circumstances, and instead of transferring the recollection of them to the favourable side, regret what we have lost, and strive in vain to bring back "the irrevocable hour" - wondering in some instances how we survive it, and at the melancholy blank that is left behind! The pleasure rises to its height in some moment of calm solitude or intoxicating sympathy, declines ever after, and from the comparison and conscious falling-off, leaves rather a sense of satiety and irksomeness behind it... "Is it the same in pictures?" I confess it is, with all but those from Titian's hand. I don't know why, but an air breathes from his landscapes, pure, refreshing, as if it came from other years; there is a look in his faces that never passes away. I saw one the other day. Amidst the heartless desolation and glittering finery of Fonthill, there is a portfolio of the Dresden Gallery. It opens, and a young female head looks from it; a child, yet woman grown; with an air of rustic innocence and the graces of a princess, her eyes like those of doves, the lips about to open, a smile of pleasure dimpling the whole face, the jewels sparkling in her crisped hair, her youthful shape compressed in a rich antique dress, as the bursting leaves contain the April buds! Why do I not call up this image of gentle sweetness, and place it as a perpetual barrier between mischance and me? - It is because pleasure asks a greater effort of the mind to support it than pain; and we turn after a little idle dalliance from what we love to what we hate!
As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd, that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream. Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief, "to every good work reprobate." I have seen all that had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men, "of whom the world was not worthy," and that promised a proud opening to truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with just glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but not to comprehend how he could be king of a free people! I have seen this triumph celebrated by poets, the friends of my youth and the friends of men, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that, setting in from a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I have seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage on humanity proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a byword of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow- man. "This was some time a mystery: but the time gives evidence of it." The echoes of liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the mornings of human hope dawned again: but that dawn has been overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving sounds stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition - man yielding (as it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to the innate perversity and dastard spirit of his own nature which leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment. And England, that arch-reformer, that heroic deliverer, that mouther about liberty, and tool of power, stands gaping by, not feeling the blight and mildew coming over it, nor its very bones crack and turn to a paste under the grasp and circling folds of this new monster, Legitimacy! In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is "the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!" What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, - seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy - mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; - have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Panopticons was the name given by Bentham to a proposed form of prison of circular shape having cells built round and fully exposed towards a central well, from which the jail keepers could at all times observe the prisoners. Robert Owen was the first in a line of 19th century socialists who in fact carried out experiments at his cotton mills at New Lanark mill where he erected a block of buildings in the form of a parallelogram to house the workers.
[2] Hazlitt refers to Edward Irving (1792-34), the Scottish divine and mystic who took over the Caledonian Church, Hatton Garden, London, and where he enjoyed a phenomenal success as a preacher.
[3] Lamb's Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq., was published in the London Magazine, Oct. 1823. See my page on Robert Southey.
[4] "On the Conversations of Authors" by Hazlitt and which first appeared in Sep. of 1820, and which was in his book of essays, The Plain Speaker (1826).
[5] Hazlitt seems to be referring to most of those who gathered at Lamb's house, c. 1808, more Lamb's friends than Hazlitt's: Captain Burney, Martin, his son; Wm. Ayrton, musician; James White, treasurer at Christ's Hospital; John Rickman, clerk to the speaker; Edward "Ned" Phillips, another clerk and Rickman's successor; Geo. Dyer; Joseph Hume; et al. One could have seen them at the residence of Charles and Mary Lamb where they met every Wednesday night; for discussion, cribbage and whist.
Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space
By Brent Staples
My first victim was a woman--white, well-dressed, probably in her late twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man--a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket--seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds, she disappeared into a cross street.
That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman's footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I'd come into--the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken--let alone hold one to a person's throat--I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians--particularly women--and me. And I soon gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet--and they often do in urban America--there is always the possibility of death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver--black, white, male, or female--hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals before there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an avid nightwalker. In central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere--in Soho, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky--things can get very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist-fights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too. They were babies, really--a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties--all gone down in episodes of bravado played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow--timid, but a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor. The most frightening one of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor's door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew me.
Another time I was on assignment for a local newspaper and killing time before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on the city's affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried to book him. Black men trade tales like this all the time.
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when I've been pulled over by the police.
And on late evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn't be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my equivalent to the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.
The Sheriff’s Children
By Charles Chesnutt
BRANSON COUNTY, North Carolina, is in a sequestered district of one of the staidest and most conservative States of the Union. Society in Branson County is almost primitive in its simplicity. Most of the white people own their own farms, and even before the War there were no very wealthy families to force their neighbors, by comparison, into the category of "poor whites."
To Branson County, as to most rural communities in the South, the War is the one historical event that overshadows all others. It is the era from which all local chronicles are dated--births, deaths, marriages, storms, freshets. No description of the life of any Southern community would be perfect that failed to emphasize the all-pervading influence of the great conflict.
And yet the fierce tide of war that had rushed through the cities and along the great highways of the country, had, comparatively speaking, but slightly disturbed the sluggish current of life in this region remote from railroads and navigable streams. To the north in Virginia, to the west in Tennessee, and all along the seaboard the war had raged; but the thunder of its cannon had not disturbed the echoes of Branson County, where the loudest sounds heard were the crack of some hunter's rifle, the baying of some deep-mouthed hound, or the yodel of some tuneful Negro on his way through the pine forest. To the east, Sherman's army had passed on its march to the sea; but no straggling band of "bummers" had penetrated the confines of Branson County. The war, it is true, had robbed the county of the flower of its young manhood; but the burden of taxation, the doubt and uncertainty of the conflict, and the sting of ultimate defeat, had been borne by the people with an apathy that robbed misfortune of half its sharpness.
The nearest approach to town life afforded by Branson County is found in the little village of Troy, the county-seat, a hamlet with a population of four or five hundred.
Ten years make little difference in the appearance of these remote Southern towns. If a railroad is built through one of them, it infuses some enterprise; the social corpse is galvanized by the fresh blood of civilization that pulses along the farthest ramifications of our great system of commercial highways. At the period of which I write, no railroad had come to Troy. If a traveler, accustomed to the bustling life of cities, could have ridden through Troy on a summer day, he might easily have fancied himself in a deserted village. Around him he would have seen weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the shingled roofs in many instances covered with a rich growth of moss. Here and there he would have met a razor-backed hog lazily rooting his way along the principal thoroughfare; and more than once be would probably have had to disturb the slumbers of some yellow dog, dozing away the hours in the ardent sunshine, and reluctantly yielding up his place in the middle of the dusty road.
On Saturdays the village presented a somewhat livelier appearance, and the shade-trees around the court-house square and along Front Street served as hitching-posts for a goodly number of horses and mules and stunted oxen, belonging to the farmer-folk who had come in to trade at the two or three local stores.
A murder was a rare event in Branson County. Every well-informed citizen could tell the number of homicides committed in the county for fifty years back, and whether the slayer, in any given instance, had escaped, either by flight or acquittal, or had suffered the penalty of the law. So, when it became known in Troy early one Friday morning in summer, about ten years after the war, that old Captain Walker, who had served in Mexico under Scott, and had left an arm on the field of Gettysburg, had been foully murdered during the night, there was intense excitement in the village. Business was practically suspended, and the citizens gathered in little groups to discuss the murder, and speculate upon the identity of the murderer. It transpired from testimony at the coroner's inquest, held during the morning, that a strange mulatto had been seen going in the direction of Captain Walker's house the night before, and had been met going away from Troy early Friday morning, by a farmer on his way to town. Other circumstances seemed to connect the stranger with the crime. The sheriff organized a posse to search for him, and early in the evening, when most of the citizens of Troy were at supper, the suspected man was brought in and lodged in the county jail.
By the following morning the news of the capture had spread to the farthest limits of the county. A much larger number of people than usual came to town that Saturday--bearded men in straw hats and blue homespun shirts, and butternut trousers of great amplitude of material and vagueness of outline; women in homespun frocks and slat-bonnets, with faces as expressionless as the dreary sandhills which gave them a meagre sustenance.
The murder was almost the sole topic of conversation. A steady stream of curious observers visited the house of mourning, and gazed upon the rugged face of the old veteran, now stiff and cold in death; and more than one eye dropped a tear at the remembrance of the cheery smile, and the joke--sometimes superannuated, generally feeble, but always good-natured--with which the captain had been wont to greet his acquaintances. There was a growing sentiment of anger among these stern men, toward the murderer who had thus cut down their friend, and a strong feeling that ordinary justice was too slight a punishment for such a crime
Toward noon there was an informal gathering of citizens in Dan Tyson's store.
"I hear it 'lowed that Square Kyahtah's too sick ter hole co'te this evenin'," said one, "an' that the purlim'nary hearin' 'll haf ter go over tel nex' week."
A look of disappointment went round the crowd.
"Hit 's the durndes', meanes' murder ever committed in this caounty," said another, with moody emphasis.
"I s'pose the Nigger 'lowed the Cap'n had some greenbacks," observed a third speaker.
"The Cap'n," said another, with an air of superior information, "has left two bairls of Confedrit money, which he 'spected 'ud be good some day er nuther."
This statement gave rise to a discussion of the speculative value of Confederate money; but in a little while the conversation returned to the murder.
"Hangin' air too good fer the murderer," said one; "he oughter be burnt, stidier bein' hung."
There was an impressive pause at this point, during which a jug of moonlight whiskey went the round of the crowd.
"Well," said a round-shouldered farmer, who, in spite of his peaceable expression and faded gray eye, was known to have been one of the most daring followers of a rebel guerrilla chieftain, "what air yer gwine ter do about it? Ef you fellers air gwine ter set down an' let a wuthless Nigger kill the bes' white man in Branson, an' not say nuthin' ner do nuthin', I 'll move outen the caounty."
This speech gave tone and direction to the rest of the conversation. Whether the fear of losing the round-shouldered farmer operated to bring about the result or not is immaterial to this narrative; but, at all events, the crowd decided to lynch the Negro. They agreed that this was the least that could be done to avenge the death of their murdered friend, and that it was a becoming way in which to honor his memory. They had some vague notions of the majesty of the law and the rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the moment these sunk into oblivion; a white man had been killed by a Negro.
"The Cap'n was an ole sodger," said one of his friends, solemnly. "He 'll sleep better when he knows that a co'te-martial has be'n hilt an' jestice done."
By agreement the lynchers were to meet at Tyson's store at five o'clock in the afternoon, and proceed thence to the jail, which was situated down the Lumberton Dirt Road (as the old turnpike antedating the plank-road was called), about half a mile south of the court-house. When the preliminaries of the lynching had been arranged, and a committee appointed to manage the affair, the crowd dispersed, some to go to their dinners, and some to quietlysecure recruits for the lynching party.
It was twenty minutes to five o'clock, when an excited Negro, panting and perspiring, rushed up to the back door of Sheriff Campbell's dwelling, which stood at a little distance from the jail and somewhat farther than the latter building from the court house. A turbaned colored woman came to the door in response to the egro's knock.
"Hoddy, Sis' Nance."
"Hoddy, Brer Sam."
"Is de shurff in," inquired the Negro.
"Yas, Brer Sam, he's eatin' his dinner," was the answer.
"Will yer ax 'im ter step ter de do' a minute, Sis' Nance?"
The woman went into the dining-room, and a moment later the sheriff came to the door. He was a tall, muscular man, of a ruddier complexion than is usual among Southerners. A pair of keen, deep-set gray eyes looked out from under bushy eye-brows, and about his mouth was a masterful expression, which a full beard, once sandy in color, but now profusely sprinkled with gray, could not entirely conceal. The day was hot; the sheriff had discarded his coat and vest, and had his white shirt open at the throat.
"What do you want, Sam?" he inquired of the Negro, who stood hat in hand, wiping the moisture from his face with a ragged shirt-sleeve.
"Shurff, dey gwine ter hang de pris'ner w'at's lock' up in de jail. Dey 're comin' dis a-way now. I wuz layin' down on a sack er corn down at de sto', behine a pile er flour-bairls, w'en I hearn Doc' Cain en Kunnel Wright talkin' erbout it. I slip' outen de back do', en run here as fas' as I could. I hearn you say down ter de sto' once't dat you wouldn't let nobody take a pris'ner 'way fum you widout walkin' over yo' dead body, en I thought I'd let you know 'fo dey come, so yer could pertec' de pris'ner."
The sheriff listened calmly, but his face grew firmer, and a determined gleam lit up his gray eyes. His frame grew more erect, and he unconsciously assumed the attitude of a soldier who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face to face.
"Much obliged, Sam," he answered. "I'll protect the prisoner. Who 's coming?"
"I dunno who-all is comin'," replied the Negro. "Dere's Mistah McSwayne, en Doc' Cain, en Maje' McDonal', en Kunnel Wright, en a heap er yuthers. I wuz so skeered I done furgot mo'd'n half un em. I spec' dey mus' be mos' here by dis time, so I'll git outen de way; fer I doan want nobody fer ter think I wuz mix' up in dis business." The Negro glanced nervously down the road toward the town, and made a movement as if to go away.
"Won't you have some dinner first?" asked the sheriff.
The Negro looked longingly in at the open door, and sniffed the appetizing odor of boiled pork and collards.
"I ain't got no time fer ter tarry, Shurff," he said, "but Sis' Nance mought gin me sump'n I could kyar in my han' en eat on de way."
A moment later Nancy brought him a huge sandwich, consisting of split corn-pone, with a thick slice of fat bacon inserted between the halves, and a couple of baked yams. The Negro hastily replaced his ragged hat on his head, dropped the yams in the pocket of his capacious trousers, and taking the sandwich in his hand, hurried across the road and disappeared in the woods beyond.
The sheriff re-entered the house, and put on his coat and hat. He then took down a double-barreled shot-gun and loaded it with buckshot. Filling the chambers of a revolver with fresh cartridges, he slipped it into the pocket of the sack-coat which he wore.
A comely young woman in a calico dress watched these proceedings with anxious surprise.
"Where are you goin’, Pa," she asked. She had not heard the conversation with the Negro.
"I am goin' over to the jail," responded the sheriff. "There's a mob comin' this way to lynch the Nigger we've got locked up. But they won't do it," he added, with emphasis.
"Oh, Pa! don't go!" pleaded the girl, clinging to his arm; "they'll shoot you if you don't give him up."
"You never mind me, Polly," said her father re-assuringly, as he gently unclasped her hands from his arm. " I'll take care of myself and the prisoner, too. There ain't a man in Branson County that would shoot me. Besides, I have faced fire too often to be scared away from my duty. You keep close in the house," he continued, "and if any one disturbs you just use the old horse-pistol in the top bureau drawer. It 's a little old-fashioned, but it did good work a few years ago."
The young girl shuddered at this sanguinary allusion, but made no further objection to her father's departure.
The sheriff of Branson was a man far above the average of the community in wealth, education and social position. His had been one of the few families in the county that before the war had owned large estates and numerous slaves. He had graduated at the State University at Chapel Hill, and had kept up some acquaintance with current literature and advanced thought. He had traveled some in his youth, and was looked up to in the county as an authority on all subjects connected with the outer world. At first an ardent supporter of the Union, he had opposed the secession movement in his native State as long as opposition availed to stem the tide of public opinion. Yielding at last to the force of circumstances, he had entered the Confederate service rather late in the war, and served with distinction through several campaigns, rising in time to the rank of colonel. After the war he had taken the oath of allegiance, and had been chosen by the people as the most available candidate for the office of sheriff, to which he had been elected without opposition. He had filled the office for several terms, and was universally popular with his constituents.
Colonel. or Sheriff Campbell, as he was indifferently called, as the military or civil title happened to be most important in the opinion of the person addressing him, had a high sense of the responsibility attaching to his office. He had sworn to do his duty faithfully, and he knew what his duty was, as sheriff, perhaps more clearly than he had apprehended it in other passages of his life. It was, therefore, with no uncertainty in regard to his course that he prepared his weapons and went over to the jail. He had no fears for Polly's safety. [End Page 30]
The sheriff had just locked the heavy front door of the jail behind him when a half-dozen horsemen, followed by a crowd of men on foot, came round a bend in the road and drew near the jail. They halted in front of the picket fence that surrounded the building, while several of the committee of arrangements rode on a few rods farther to the sheriff's house. One of them dismounted and rapped on the door with his riding-whip.
"Is the sheriff at home?" he inquired.
"No, he has just gone out," replied Polly, who had come to the door.
"We want the jail keys," he continued.
"They are not here," said Polly. "The sheriff has them himself." And then she added, with assumed indifference, "He is at the jail now."
The man turned away, and Polly went into the front room, from which she peered anxiously between the slats of the green blinds of a window that looked toward the jail. Meanwhile the messenger returned to his companions and announced his discovery. It looked as tho the sheriff had got wind of their design and was preparing to resist it.
One of them stepped forward and rapped on the jail door.
"Well, what is it?" said the sheriff, from within.
"We want to talk to you, Sheriff," replied the spokesman.
There was a little wicket in the door, this the sheriff opened, and answered through it.
"All right, boys, talk away. You are all strangers to me, and I don't know what business you can have." The sheriff did not think it necessary to recognize anybody in particular on such an occasion; the question of identity sometimes comes up in the investigation of these extra-judicial executions.
"We're a committee of citizens and we want to get into the jail."
"What for? It ain't much trouble to get into jail. Most people are anxious to keep out."
The mob was in no humor to appreciate a joke, and the sheriff's witticism fell dead upon an unresponsive audience.
"We want to have a talk with the Nigger that killed Cap'n Walker."
"You can talk to that Nigger in the court-house, when he 's brought out for trial. Court will be in session here next week. I know what you fellows want; but you can't get my prisoner to-day. Do you want to take the bread out of a poor man's mouth? I get seventy-five cents a day for keeping this prisoner, and he’s the only one in jail. I can't have my family suffer just to please you fellows."
One or two young men in the crowd laughed at the idea of Sheriff Campbell's suffering for want of seventy-five cents a day; but they were frowned into silence by those who stood near them.
"Ef yer don't let us in," cried a voice, "we'll bu's' the do' open."
"Bu'st away," answered the sheriff, raising his voice so that all could hear. "But I give you fair warning. The first man that tries it will be filled with buckshot. I'm sheriff of this county, and I know my duty, and I mean to do it."
"What's the use of kicking, Sheriff," argued one of the leaders of the mob. "The Nigger is sure to hang anyhow; he richly deserves it; and we 've got to do something to teach the Niggers their places, or white people won't be able to live in the county."
"There 's no use talking, boys," responded the sheriff. "I'm a white man outside, but in this jail I'm sheriff; and if this Nigger's to be hung in this county, I propose to do the hanging. So you fellows might as well right-about-face, and march back to Troy. You've had a pleasant trip, and the exercise will be good for you. You know me. I've got powder and ball, and I've faced fire before now, with nothing between me and the enemy, and I don't mean to surrender this jail while I 'm able to shoot." Having thus announced his determination the sheriff closed and fastened the wicket, and looked around for the best position from which to defend the building.
The crowd drew off a little, and the leaders conversed together in low tones.
The Branson County jail was a small, two-story brick building, strongly constructed, with no attempt at architectural ornamentation. Each story was divided into two large cells by a passage running from front to rear. A grated iron door gave entrance from the passage to each of the four cells. The jail seldom had many prisoners in it, and the lower windows had been boarded up. When the sheriff had closed the wicket, he ascended the steep wooden stair to the upper floor. There was no window at the front of the upper passage, and the most available position from which to watch the movements of the crowd below was the front window of the cell occupied by the solitary prisoner.
The sheriff unlocked the door and entered the cell. The prisoner was crouched in a corner, his yellow face, blanched with terror, looking ghastly in the semi-darkness of the room. A cold perspiration had gathered on his forehead, and his teeth were chattering with affright.
"For God's sake, Sheriff," he murmured hoarsely, "don't let 'em lynch me; I didn’t kill the old man."
The sheriff glanced at the cowering wretch with a look of mingled contempt and loathing.
"Get up," he said sharply. "You will probably be hung sooner or later, but it will not be to-day, if I can help it. I will unlock your fetters, and if I can't hold the jail, you will have to make the best fight you can. If I am shot, I will consider my responsibility at an end."
There were iron fetters on the prisoner's ankles, and handcuffs on his wrist. These the sheriff unlocked, and they fell clanking to the floor.
"Keep back from the window," said the sheriff. "They might shoot if they saw you."
The sheriff drew toward the window a pine bench which formed a part of the scanty furniture of the cell, and laid his revolver upon it. Then he took his gun in hand, and took his stand at the side of the window where he could with least exposure of himself watch the movements of the crowd below.
The lynchers had not anticipated any determined resistance. Of course they had looked for a formal protest, and perhaps a sufficient show of opposition to excuse the sheriff in the eye of any stickler for legal formalities. But they had not come prepared to fight a battle, and no one of them seemed willing to lead an attack upon the jail. The leaders of the party conferred together with a good deal of animated gesticulation, which was visible to the sheriff from his outlook, tho the distance was too great for him to hear what was said. At length one of them broke away from the group, and rode back to the main body of the lynchers, who were restlessly awaiting orders.
"Well, boys," said the messenger, "we'll have to let it go for the present. The sheriff says he'll shoot, and he's got the drop on us this time. There ain't any of us that want to follow Cap'n Walker jest yet. Besides, the sheriff is a good fellow, and we don't want to hurt 'im. But," he added, as if to re-assure the crowd, which began to show signs of disappointment, "the Nigger might as well say his prayers, for he ain't got long to live."
There was a murmur of dissent from the mob, and several voices insisted that an attack be made on the jail. But pacific counsels finally prevailed, and the mob sullenly withdrew.
The sheriff stood at the window until they had disappeared around the bend in the road. He did not relax his watchfulness when the last one was out of sight. Their withdrawal might be a mere feint, to be followed by a further attempt. So closely, indeed, was his attention drawn to the outside, that he neither saw nor heard the prisoner creep stealthily across the floor, reach out his hand and secure the revolver which lay on the bench behind the sheriff, and creep as noiselessly back to his place in the corner of the room.
A moment after the last of the lynching party had disappeared there was a shot fired from the woods across the road; a bullet whistled by the window and buried itself in the wooden casing a few inches from where the sheriff was standing. Quick as thought, with the instinct born of a semi-guerrilla army experience, he raised his gun and fired twice at the point from which a faint puff of smoke showed the hostile bullet to have been sent. He stood a moment watching, and then rested his gun against the window, and reached behind him mechanically for the other weapon. It was not on the bench. As the sheriff realized this fact, he turned his head and looked into the muzzle of the revolver.
"Stay where you are, Sheriff," said the prisoner, his eyes glistening, his face almost ruddy with excitement.
The sheriff mentally cursed his own carelessness for allowing him to be caught in such a predicament. He had not expected anything of the kind. He had relied on the Negro's cowardice and subordination in the presence of an armed white man as a matter of course. The sheriff was a brave man, but realized that the prisoner had him at an immense disadvantage. The two men stood thus for a moment, fighting a harmless duel with their eyes.
"Well, what do you mean to do?" asked the sheriff, with apparent calmness.
"To get away, of course," said the prisoner, in a tone which caused the sheriff to look at him more closely, and with an involuntary feeling of apprehension; if the man was not mad, he was in a state of mind akin to madness, and quite as dangerous. The sheriff felt that he must speak the prisoner fair, and watch for a chance to turn the tables on him. The keen-eyed, desperate man before him was a different being altogether from the groveling wretch who had begged so piteously for life a few minutes before.
At length the sheriff spoke:
"Is this your gratitude to me for saving your life at the risk of my own? If I had not done so, you would now be swinging from the limb of some neighboring tree."
"True," said the prisoner, "you saved my life, but for how long? When you came in, you said Court would sit next week. When the crowd went away they said I had not long to live. It is merely a choice of two ropes."
"While there's life there's hope," replied the sheriff. He uttered this commonplace mechanically, while his brain was busy in trying to think out some way of escape. "If you are innocent you can prove it."
The mulatto kept his eye upon the sheriff. "I didn't kill the old man," he replied; "but I shall never be able to clear myself. I was at his house at nine o'clock. I stole from it the coat that was on my back when I was taken. I would be convicted, even with a fair trial, unless the real murderer were discovered beforehand."
The sheriff knew this only too well. While he was thinking what argument next to use, the prisoner continued:
"Throw me the keys--no, unlock the door."
The sheriff stood a moment irresolute. The mulatto's eye glittered ominously. The sheriff crossed the room and unlocked the door leading into the passage.
"Now go down and unlock the outside door."
The heart of the sheriff leaped within him. Perhaps he might make a dash for liberty, and gain the outside. He descended the narrow stair, the prisoner keeping close behind him.
The sheriff inserted the huge iron key into the lock. The rusty bolt yielded slowly. It still remained for him to pull the door open.
"Stop!" thundered the mulatto, who seemed to divine the sheriff's purpose. "Move a muscle, and I 'll blow your brains out."
The sheriff obeyed; he realized that his chance had not yet come.
"Now keep on that side of the passage, and go back up-stairs."
Keeping the sheriff in front of him, the mulatto followed the other up the stairs. The sheriff expected the prisoner to lock him into the cell and make his own escape. He had about come to the conclusion that the best thing he could do under the circumstances was to submit quietly, and take his chances of recapturing the prisoner after the alarm had been given. The sheriff had faced death more than once upon the battle-field. A few minutes before, well armed, and with a brick wall between him and them he had dared a hundred men to fight; but he felt instinctively that the desperate man in front of him was not to be trifled with, and he was too prudent a man to risk his life against such heavy odds. He had Polly to look after, and there was a limit beyond which devotion to duty would be quixotic and even foolish.
"I want to get away," said the prisoner, "and I don't want to be captured; for if I am, I know I will be hung on the spot. I am afraid," he added somewhat reflectively, "that in order to save myself I shall have to kill you."
"Good God!" exclaimed the sheriff, in involuntary terror; "you would not kill the man to whom you owe your own life."
"You speak more truly than you know," replied the mulatto. "I indeed owe my life to you."
The sheriff started. He was capable of surprise, even in that moment of extreme peril. "Who are you?" he asked in amazement.
"Tom, Cicely's son," returned the other. He had closed the door and stood talking to the sheriff through the grated opening. "Don't you remember Cicely--Cicely, whom you sold, with her child, to the speculator on his way to Alabama?"
The sheriff did remember. He had been sorry for it many a time since. It had been the old story of debts, mortgages and bad crops. He had quarreled with the mother. The price offered for her and her child had been unusually large, and he had yielded to the combination of anger and pecuniary stress.
"Good God!" he gasped, "you would not murder your own father?"
"My father?" replied the mulatto. "It were well enough for me to claim the relationship, but it comes with poor grace from you to ask anything by reason of it. What father's duty have you ever performed for me? Did you give me your name, or even your protection? Other white men gave their colored sons freedom and money, and sent them to the free States. You sold me to the rice swamps."
"I at least gave you the life you cling to," murmured the sheriff.
"Life?" said the prisoner, with a sarcastic laugh. "What kind of a life? You gave me your own blood, your own features--no man need look at us together twice to see that--and you gave me a black mother. Poor wretch! She died under the lash, because she had enough womanhood to call her soul her own. You gave me a white man's spirit, and you made me a slave, and crushed it out."
"But you are free now," said the sheriff. He had not doubted, could not doubt, the mulatto's word. He knew whose passions coursed beneath that swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes opposite his own. He saw in this mulatto what he himself might have become had not the safeguards of parental restraint and public opinion been thrown around him.
"Free to do what?" replied the mulatto. "Free in name, but despised and scorned and set aside by the people to whose race I belong far more than to that of my mother."
"There are schools," said the sheriff. "You have been to school." He had noticed that the mulatto spoke more eloquently and used better language than most Branson County people.
"I have been to school and dreamed when I went that it would work some marvelous change in my condition. But what did I learn? I learned to feel that no degree of learning or wisdom will change the color of my skin and that I shall always wear what in my own country is a badge of degradation. When I think about it seriously I do not care particularly for such a life. It is the animal [End Page 31] in me, not the man, that flees the gallows. I owe you nothing," he went on, "and expect nothing of you; and it would be no more than justice if I were to avenge upon you my mother's wrongs and my own. But still I hate to shoot you; I have never yet taken human life--for I did not kill the old captain. Will you promise to give no alarm and make no attempt to capture me until morning, if I do not shoot?"
So absorbed were the two men in their colloquy and their own tumultuous thoughts that neither of them had heard the door below move upon its hinges. Neither of them had heard a light step come stealthily up the stair, nor seen a slender form creep along the darkening passage toward the mulatto.
The sheriff hesitated. The struggle between his love of life and his sense of duty was a terrific one. It may seem strange that a man who could sell his own child into slavery should hesitate at such a moment when his life was trembling in the balance. But the baleful influence of human slavery poisoned the very fountains of life, and created new standards of right. The sheriff was conscientious; his conscience had merely been warped by his environment. Let no one ask what his answer would have been; he was spared the necessity of a decision.
"Stop," said the mulatto, "you need not promise. I could not trust you if you did. It is your life for mine; there is but one safe way for me; you must die."
He raised his arm to fire, when there was a flash--a report from the passage behind him. His arm fell heavily at his side, and the pistol dropped at his feet.
The sheriff recovered first from his surprise, and throwing open the door secured the fallen weapon. Then seizing the prisoner he thrust him into the cell and locked the door upon him; after which he turned to Polly, who leaned half-fainting against the wall, her hands clasped over her heart.
"Oh, Pa, I was just in time!" she cried hysterically, and, wildly sobbing, threw herself into her father's arms.
"I watched until they all went away," she said. "I heard the shot from the woods and I saw you shoot. Then when you did not come out I feared something had happened, that perhaps you had been wounded. I got out the other pistol and ran over here. When I found the door open, I knew something was wrong, and when I heard voices I crept up-stairs, and reached the top just in time to hear him say he would kill you. Oh, it was a narrow escape!"
When she had grown somewhat calmer, the sheriff left her standing there and went back into the cell. The prisoner's arm was bleeding from a flesh wound. His bravado had given place to a stony apathy. There was no sign in his face of fear or disappointment or feeling of any kind. The sheriff sent Polly to the house for cloth, and bound up the prisoner's wound with a rude skill acquired during his army life.
"I will have a doctor come and dress the wound in the morning," he said to the prisoner. "It will do very well until then, if you will keep quiet. If the doctor asks you how the wound was caused, you can say that you were struck by the bullet fired from the woods. It would do you no good to have it known that you were shot while attempting to escape."
The prisoner uttered no word of thanks or apology, but sat in sullen silence. When the wounded arm had been bandaged, Polly and her father returned to the house.
The sheriff was in an unusually thoughtful mood that evening. He put salt in his coffee at supper, and poured vinegar over his pancakes. To many of Polly's questions he returned random answers. When he had gone to bed he lay awake for several hours.
In the silent watches of the night, when he was alone with God, there came into his mind a flood of unaccustomed thoughts. An hour or two before, standing face to face with death, he had experienced a sensation similar to that which drowning men are said to feel--a kind of clarifying of the moral faculty, in which the veil of the flesh, with its obscuring passions and prejudices, is pushed aside for a moment, and all the acts of one's life stand out, in the clear light of truth, in their correct proportions and relations--a state of mind in which one sees himself as God may be supposed to see him. In the reaction following his rescue, this feeling had given place for a time to far different emotions. But now, in the silence of midnight, something of this clearness of spirit returned to the sheriff. He saw that he had owed some duty to this son of his--that neither law nor custom could destroy a responsibility inherent in the nature of mankind. He could not thus, in the eyes of God at least, shake off the consequences of his sin. Had he never sinned, this wayward spirit would never have come back from the vanished past to haunt him. And as he thought, his anger against the mulatto died away, and in its place there sprang up a great, an ineffable pity. The hand of parental authority might have restrained the passions he had seen burning in the prisoner's eyes when the desperate man spoke the words which had seemed to doom his father to death. The sheriff felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit from the slough of slavery; that he might have sent him to the free North, and given him there, or in some other land, an opportunity to turn to usefulness and honorable pursuits the talents that had run to crime, perhaps to madness; he might, still less, have given this son of his the poor simulacrum of liberty which men of his caste could possess in a slave-holding community; or least of all, but still something, he might have kept the boy on the plantation, where the burdens of slavery would have fallen lightly upon him.
The sheriff recalled his own youth. He had inherited an honored name to keep untarnished; he had had a future to make; the picture of a fair young bride had beckoned him on to happiness. The poor wretch now stretched upon a pallet of straw between the brick walls of the jail had had none of these things--no name, no father, no mother--in the true meaning of motherhood--and until the past few years no possible future, and then one vague and shadowy in its outline, and dependent for form and substance upon the slow solution of a problem in which there were many unknown quantities.
From what he might have done to what he might yet do was an easy transition for the awakened conscience of the sheriff. It occurred to him, purely as a hypothesis, that he might permit his prisoner to escape; but his oath of office, his duty as sheriff, stood in the way of such a course, and the sheriff dismissed the idea from his mind. But he could investigate the circumstances of the murder, and move Heaven and earth to discover the real criminal, for he no longer doubted the prisoner's innocence; he could employ counsel for the accused, and perhaps influence public opinion in his favor. An acquittal once secured, some plan could be devised by which the sheriff might in some degree atone for his neglect of what he now clearly perceived to have been a duty.
When the sheriff had reached this conclusion he fell into an unquiet slumber, from which he awoke late the next morning.
He went over to the jail before breakfast and found the prisoner lying on his pallet; his face turned to the wall: he did not move when the sheriff rattled the door.
"Good-morning," said the latter, in a tone intended to waken the prisoner.
There was no response. The sheriff looked more keenly at the recumbent figure; there was an unnatural rigidity about its attitude.
He hastily unlocked the door and, entering the cell, bent over the prostrate form. There was no sound of breathing; he turned the body over, it was cold and stiff. The prisoner had torn the bandage from his wound and bled to death during the night. He had evidently been dead several hours.
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CONTEXT AI PURPOSE,
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CLAIM
GENRE
TEXT
AUDIENCE
SPEAKER/ WRITER Persona—Mask
SUBJECT
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