Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “Of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” is a very undetailed but good poem. It’s a story of a dead boy on his way to the cemetery. She calls this boy, “nothing but a plain black boy,” whether she really felt he was insignificant or if she was sad and showing that others didn’t really care about him or his death. She also says that he is, “blind within his casket, but maybe he will know,” I think she’s saying he is dead and obviously cannot see out of the casket but maybe he will know because he is watching from somewhere else, whether she believes that is heaven or not. She talked of the places he loved to go and the things he loved to do, now we could take this two different ways as well, 1: She’s showing that he is a real person and that people should care about his death or 2: He is just like everyone else, average. He’s just a plain black boy. I’d like to think that giving more detail into his life was her way of showing that this was a real person who loved to do things just like everyone else, but he is now gone, and it is sad.

Brooks other poem, “The Boy Died in My Alley” is much more detailed and conversational than her last. This is a poem about how a boy came to die in the alley behind someone’s home. Whether or not this is supposed to connect with the first poem, I don’t know. I think it’d be great if they did. First, we learn about a “plain black boy” that sounds like no one cared much, then we see how the boy died and all the hardships that he had endured during his time. It starts with the police telling the person the boy had died and asking if they had anything to do with it or if they had seen anything. The person says they knew the boy but not by their face, they heard him a lot but also heard his pain. It sounds like this person is almost blaming themselves for the murder of this boy. Like if they had stepped in to help the boy things would’ve turned out differently.

The differences between these two poems are huge. She grew in her writing so much after the Second Black Writers’ Conference. Before the conference we see a story where she and no one else seems to care for this boy who had died and was never to be seen again. In the second story we see someone mourn for the dead boy and wishing they could’ve fixed things. They are sorry that the boy is gone, unlike the first story. They heard his cries and did nothing for him. They show the hardships this boy had endured and that no one was there for him. As he yelled for his father, mother, brother, and sister, no one came… I think she now was catering to her black community by showing the suffering and sadness from a black boy’s death, even though she never specifically says he was a black boy.

I think that the most beautiful thing about reading black art is attempting to see the world through their eyes. So, I think they should want to share their experiences with everyone. It’s very sad to me that Countee Cullen is so ashamed of his own life that he would rather be seen as a catering to the white population kind of person. What I got from Cullen’s poem, “Yet I Do Marvel,” is that he wants his poems to be beautiful but believes that his struggles / sharing his life experiences cannot be beautiful. In Langston Hughes “Weary Blues,” he is suggesting that listening to this man’s story is beautiful to him. This is an acknowledgement in art of the beauty of their suffering. He enjoyed sitting and listening to this man’s song of his blues. Another one of Hughes writings, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain” counters back to Cullen’s poem. Something he said that I’m sure stood out to everyone else as well was, “But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” He believes that black artists shouldn’t be “racing towards whiteness,” as he would say. You know this especially because of his last paragraph, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” Hughes wants to faithfully represent his black community in everything he does. He is proud of who he is and the art he can make based on his life.

Slave owners at this time were all Christians. It was very looked down upon to not be openly Christian. Now, it is not like that at all. Everyday Christians are afraid to use their voice in case of being picked on. Back then, you had to be Christian, go to church, and pray every day as a white, male slave owner. It was expected of you. How does this make sense? Well, it looks terrible for us Christians to have believers who beat, raped, and demeaned slaves. According to Frederick Douglass, he cannot make sense of it. As Christians we are supposed to love everyone. Is that showing love? No. Douglass believes that slave owners put on the face of Christianity each morning to cover up their horrid acts. I’m going to be honest, there are people today who still do this. Everyday people wake up and pretend to be something they are not so others cannot see how horrible they actually are. We call these people hypocrites. But, technically we are all hypocrites. No one can live a perfect life so when we preach to live like Jesus everyday, we are being hypocrites. But, we should try to be like Jesus and as long as you are not hiding that your mistakes or sins, it’s okay because no one is perfect. Now whether or not we can prove what was going on in the slave owners’ heads, I don’t know. My guess is some of them were conscious their actions were causing them to put on a huge show of Christianity and some were not. Maybe they knew they were horrible people to “their” slaves and unconsciously tried to make it better. Douglass mentions that out of all of his masters, the religious were the most harsh. This leads me to believe that it was all a show and that they never actually knew God. A real Christian would never do that.

After reading The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I can easily see where Nina Baym is coming from. He doesn’t see the woman in the story with hatred, instead with love, beauty, and infatuation. It is very easy to tell that the woman in the story is hurt by the person she loves. If I had a husband who was disgusted by something that I couldn’t change, I know I would be deeply hurt. He is showing how men hurt women by wishing all of us to be perfect in every way. It starts as a subtle mention of the mark on her face and if she wanted to remove it, then it became such a big deal that he became more and more repulsive to her husband. He was so focused on removing it to make his wife perfect that he did not even care about her feelings and how bad he was hurting her. Women go through this everyday. They are put down for gaining weight, ect. by their significant others. They are really hurt by the words coming from someone they care for. So, they change. They work hard to lose the weight that their boyfriend/husband did not approve of. But in my opinion, if someone can say something awful to you like that and not care, they will find something else to complain about. If someone is making you feel that way, depressed or disappointed with your body, you can find someone else who can love all of you. In the end Aylmer kills his wife while trying to make her perfect. I think what Hawthorne is trying to say is nobody is perfect and nobody can fix someone else’s imperfections. However, I do not think he was a feminist. He may have respect for women, their feelings, and their desires to be loved for who they are. But, that does not make him a feminist.

I’ve never been really good at dissecting a passage, but I feel like I might can relate to this one some. I feel like maybe Emerson was trying to say that he felt like he was disappearing into the world. He is just a “transparent eyeball,” walking around. He is seeing everything but not interacting with anything. Everything is distancing from him and he is just watching as it happens. Then it seems as if he stops caring about the people and the streets where they gather. He seems to only care about the scenery around him. He takes in all of the beauty of it and he seems to be learning from it. I think something that I found strange about the passage or maybe something that I did not quite understand is this sentence, “I am part or particle of God.” Did he mean something deeper than just a particle of God. I am a Christian so I do believe we are all of God, but is that what he meant by that? Or did he mean something bigger and deeper than that. I cannot think of a way to dissect that one. Have I had any moments that are similar to Emersons? Of course, I think everyone has. I can relate to being so lost in the world that I just melt away into the scenery around me. We become people watchers and just watch everyone around us and their behaviors. In high school psychology we had an assignment where we had to go to the mall and then sit and watch everyone walking around and their behaviors. Some people noticed we were looking at everyone, but most people were too preoccupied on their phones. I can relate in another way at the end of the passage where he is staring into the beautiful horizon. I look when I am at the beach and I get up early just to go watch the sunrise above the ocean and in that moment I am lost. I am lost for words at how beautiful the world that our God made truly is.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

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