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lecture notes |
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Kindred
Tracy K. Smith, Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?
How much is a minority or African American identity still
identifiable in the poem? If not for the photo of Smith, would anyone without
previous knowledge assume hers is an African American voice?
If not, what does it say about an evolving cosmopolitan,
multicultural, or global identity that may replace or over-ride America’s
inherited ideas or identities concerning minorities?
Midterm response > final exam
need for minority definition
literary device? symbols
not teaching course again, so . . .
final exams, literary device working for some, not for others
but minority meaning Course Objectives
individual responsibility + historical / environmental determinism
teaching and learning Literature
1. Literature as meaning, identity and escape > humanity? [language, fiction as human creations that create meaning]
2. literary devices [how]
3. literary and cultural history
science fiction attracts non-majors [literature of ideas]
science fiction meets students' needs in rapidly changing world
us-them? humans as social creatures, but primal, fundamental impulse to divide to social groups
23 April
1. Discuss the use of science fiction / time travel as a literary device for discussing a historical event like slavery.
1a. How is slavery a defining historical instance of minority status? How does that minority status continue for Dana in the 20th century?
1b. Continuing the sexual dimension of slavery, how does gender identity play into or against the racial or ethnic dimensions of slavery or minority status? Compare and contrast the relations between Kevin and Weylin, Dana and Margaret, Dana and Sarah, and Dana and Rufus.
2. Most people don't like history (except as self-affirming), but how does history help us avoid fiction's tendency to divide people into heroes and villains, victims and victimizers? Or flip: how does fiction simplify history?
2a. How does fiction "personalize" slavery or make us care and see its consequences for blacks and whites? How does fiction complicate our ideas or visions about history?
2b. How does understanding slavery as a foundation of American history help understand not just black America but white America?
3. For literary purposes or devices, how and why does Kindred introduce two leading characters who are writers, a past character (Miss Hannah) who was a reader, and Rufus as a character with a reading disorder? What are the consequences for identity from being able to read and write well?
4. For what makes us human, how is slavery dehumanizing, especially in its destruction or distortion of black and white families?
5. Watch for references to Frederick Douglass.
6. History as conditioning, deterministic; environmental influences on character, humanity—how much can we escape or redirect history?
The Fall
52 casual labor market x slave market
52 [realism] one shoe
+ shorted potato chips
53 nonpeople rented
53 working on my novels
54 unusual-looking white man
54 Compton
54-55 writer’s life (1970s)
56 parents dead, auto accident (romance hero)
57 a kindred spirit
57 Kevin and I / me
58 Kevin lay beside me
[accelerates plot]
59 broken leg, Nigel
60 whether anyone’s made Daddy mad
61 learned to talk that way
61 cf. nigger, trash
62 California of 1976 / 1819
62 real . . . how? . . . don’t know
63 time travel was science fiction
63 1820
Missouri Compromise
64 coins > bicentennial quarter [realism]
65 play the roles
65 broken leg . . . cost me
65 black man look of disgust
66 19c medicine
68 Rufus becoming his father
70 people didn’t like, wasn’t just racial
71 look of pity [human]
72 cf FD, children fed
72 utensils [realism]
73 [psych]
75 Carrie; Rufus defended
Sensitive
76 only baby kept
76 slave children . . . didn’t know they were slaves
77 place would rub off on him
79 need friends [human]
79 [Kevin as writer, inventive]
80 Weylin x-education, resents
80 find humanity in him [human]
80 class
81 You call that human
81 red-haired version of father
83 environment influencing
83 survive
84 your theory [sf]
84 family moreal woman x chases me
85 slave kids look like Weylin
85 Kevin’s limits
86 Aunt Sarah x-Mammy
86 Daddy sold [my friend]
87
Crusoe,
slave trading
87 a castaway myself
87 books belonged to Miss Hannah
88 learning disability?
90 Weylin’s eyes like Kevin’s
90-1 my fertility none of his business [1970s x 1810s]
91 I played the slave
92 making an example
92 preserve a little 1976
93 a Christian house
93 Margaret little or nothing to do [human, cf. Avila]
94 duties as master
94 prepared me to survive
95 sell babies > furniture, china, fancy things
[dehumanize]
95 Miss Hannah a real lady [class]
95 you work [human]
95 Matters what is
Dialogue of black women
96 don’t argue with white folks
96 black overseer
96 ignored, continued, nothing happened
95-6 [passive resistance]
97 became part of household, disturbed me
97 acclimatize
97 go west—Indians cf blacks
Kevin looked strangely
98 observers watching history, actors
98 everybody smelled
99 imitating what seen adults doing
Preparing for future
100 Kevin-Dana dialogue > action?
101 I can’t maintain the distance
101 how people trained to accept slavery
102 talking back, so don’t say much
104 a smaller replica of his father
105 more rational
The Fight
108 independence (personal income)
110 sisters husband a good Nazi
111 x-whites > light blacks
111 marry someone who looks like him
112 married
in Vegas, clock from Atlantic
I awoke [sub-chapter]
113 Kevin in 1819
115 memory no place at home
115 Friday, June 11, 1976
2 months = 1 day
116 all over, write about it
116 books about slavery and nonfiction
Gone with the Wind
117 Nazis, antebellum whites
118 cf. Sarah, holding self back
120 Kevin gone north
123 right to say no x rights
Her own fault
124 a little humanity?
Shame in loving a black woman
124 in your time, married her
125 x-lie to each other
126 “Home at last”
127 smoothed out time-distorted reality
129 Nigel, another Luke
130 Weylin gives Dana a choice
132 Sarah could have been his mother
133 slaves’ marriage ceremonies
134 He’s a fair man
Monster > ordinary man + society
135 explain x describe
[time sequence]
137 twins’ infant mortality]
138 mean low white trash [Jake]
138 Luke to New Orleans
139 free black papers torn up, sold
You sound like a slaveholder
140 abolitionist, book, century since, why still
complaining
140 that’s history . . . offends you or not
J D B DeBow
F Douglass, S Truth, H Tubman
141 Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey
142 desperation x- whimsy, anger
143 North Star x map
You’re home [creepy? Uncaring?]
143 Isaac, Alice 4 days of freedom
144 why should they work hard?
People watch
145 North cf. heaven, none come back
145 Sarah held in contempt in 1960s
147 Aunt Mary + herbs
147 keloids [scars w/ built-up cellulose, more common in
African descent]
148 Isaac overland to Michigan
149 Rufus got possession . . . made no sense
149 cut off Isaac’s ears
140 Rufus drunk + rape
140 Kevin x black and white
Like that when married
151 Sarah’s oldest son < Miss Hannah’s father
150-1 Sarah knows Rufus
Rufus helped
154 return to reality when strong
enough (cf.
Round House)
154 Carrie + baby
155 Nigel’s work on cabin = investment for Rufus
155 Alice + work [human]
156 Alice doesn’t realize she’s a slave (cf. Jacobs, FD)
151 Alice a slave because helped a slave
159 Weylin taking Tess to bed
160 doctor nigger, reading-nigger, white nigger
160 why not let me die?
160 cries of a baby
161 one nigger richer
162 welcome hard work [human]
163 involve me in that rape
163 Rufus: you want Kevin like I want Alice [human?]
163 . . . be with his own kind
164 think you’re white, don’t know your place
164 all the low cunning of his class
165 white nigger, turning against your own people
165 Liza, potential enemy
167 It’s your body.
Not mine. His.
167 > women’s dialogue
168 only one I can hurt and not get hurt back
169 cf.
prep in P of
S
170 two letters, my handwriting
170 become a boy
171 overplanning
173 someone betrayed me
176 [reciprocation; human]
177 Harriet Tubman
177 how easily slaves are made
178 Liza, sewing woman
Alice: to get at me
179 Weylin writes to Kevin, fairer than Rufus
179-80 destructive single-minded love
180 Rufus younger brother, Alice sister
181 [code of honor] my word to black or white
Respect [human]
181 Tess to Jake and fields
182 slavery long precess of dulling [cf. FD]
183 Methodist minister
184 [compassion, pity, defense] [human]
187 your keep x you people owe me [cf. prisons]
187 voice gone hard [x-human]
The Storm
190 Kevin a slight accent
190 as though he were
191 Kevin and I lived here only 2 days
191 losing place here in my own time
191 women die in childbirth
191 cut finers for writing
191 a good breeder
192 everything here so soft, easy
192 Denmark Vesey?
193 5 years longer than it sounds
193 [electric] typewriter
194 something closed and ugly (x-human)
195 sonit boom, jet
195 antiseptic, Excedrin
196 chops still frosty, how long gone
Only hours; K 8 days
196 South Africa cf. 19c
196 a few hours, 2 months
198 tripped over Rufus, drunk or sick
199 Weylin bent and old
199 he took offense so easily [x-human]
199 look as young as you ever did
200 he had done at least one decent thing
200 one human being to another, grateful
201 x-beating > help son
201 [figure of speech] > literally
203 ague > malaria
204 trying to kill yourself
206 Sarah, everybody getting older
207 Alice looked harder [dehumanized]
207 white babies, red hair
210 Alice blamed Rufus [Rufus blamed Dana]
211 Fowler as animal
212 Kill self today > every day
213 cf. Rufus’s and Kevin’s words
214 Rufus sounded, looked like his father
216 laudanum for Margaret
217 Alice another baby, Hagar?
219 > women’s dialogue
220 time to myself; stopped acting?
221 be my own master
221 coffle
222 How do it? My property
[Dana suspected of assimilating?]
223 If Tom dies, all sold
223 more white than black
224 it doesn’t come off
225 dengue fever?
226 Daddy left debts.
227 persuasive letters
227 Rufus didn’t like working
228 Alice and Dana “one woman”
228 shorthand as cypher
229 like, contempt, fear
230 teach Joe to read and write
231 the boy captured him
233 Hagar!
234 names symbolic
234 more give, more wants
x-what people call me
235 white nigger you are
236 a common enemy to unite us
236 Methodist minister: reading > disobedient
237 Sam James
237 do things they don’t like to say alive and whole
238 Sam > coffle
238 he hit me—breaks agreement
239 cut my wrists
The Rope
240 [cutting wrists] got me home
241 Louis George, nonfiction
[suppression of labor]
241 3 hours = 8 months
242 tied to my denim bag
J
242 how do well at owning and trading slaves?
242 a man of his time
242 breeding [violation of privacy]
243 real now, isn’t it?
What do?
243 15 full days together June 29-July 3
243 reverse symbolism: July 4
243 I wouldn’t rest easy till I knew Rufus was dead
244 intervals no meaning
Rufus 25
245 hasn’t raped me = Rufus’s suiide
246 Tess could be me
256 accept limits
247 power mine, or something in him
247 Rufus no older but something wrong
248 Alice dead
249 sold her babies . . . his children?
What he care about that?
251 two certificates of freedom
252 minister coal-black freedman
Literate . . . Job
252 big dinner after funeral
[slave culture > black culture]
252 Court House, certificates of freedom [cf. Douglass]
253 lonely people sharing [human]
x-barriers
253 Rufus: master > father [human]
254 away three months
254 freeing more . . . in his will
Civil War still 30 years away
254 motive to kill Rufus
254 you leaving me
255 help me or notes you chose
255 trust both ways [human]
255 you confuse everybody [new American]
255 black who watches, thinks, makes trouble
257-8 “I’m sorry” first time [human?]
258 lonely: words touched me. I knew . . .
258 Aunt Mary . . . come over from Africa
258 grief, loneliness, uncertainty
260 not his father, had bathed
260 accept as ancestor, brother, friend; not as master,
lover
261 still caught, joined to wall [symbol?]
Spot Rufus’s fingers grasped
Epilogue
262 flew to Maryland
Steamship > bridge
262 schools with black and white kids
Older people looked at Kevin and me
262 house was dust, like Rufus
262 newspaper, fire, slave sale
263 Margaret and grandchildren or slaves?
263 14th
Amendment
263 why he couldn’t make well
264 scar, empty left sleeve
Reader’s guide
265 neo-slave narrative
266 Edana [naming]
267 arm as emblem, symbol
267 cf.
Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
268 past researched
268 human relationships
269 “grim fantasy” x sf
270 life experience > extend through fiction
271 1940s-50s sf “colorblind”
272 Ursula K. Le Guin
273 speculative fiction
274 metaphors
275 black community, white aliens
276 pretending > reality
277 Frederick Douglass
278 fantastic travelogue + slave narrative
278 cf. Jacobs’s ethics of compromise
10.6 confuses all principles of morality