Assignment for ID#2

ID #2. Short essay: Compare / contrast excerpts from Bread Givers and Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano as immigrant vs. minority experience. (4-5 paragraphs)

Assignment: Review the passages below from Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) and Equiano’s Narrative (1789) and compare and contrast them as a means of explaining this course’s definition of a minority group versus the dominant immigrant culture.

Use of webpage lecture notes: We compared-contrasted these texts in class on January 29 and reviewed on February 5. You’re welcome to review the web notes as well as your personal notes, but avoid straight copying from those notes. Write your own essay with its own priorities and insights in addition to those the class developed together.

Other Details:

These passages are already “identified,” so your job is to make them “signify” by defining the minority versus the immigrant experience in terms primarily from our course objective 1, “the American Dream” or immigrant story as the narrative of the dominant culture, and how minorities may differ from that narrative. You are welcome to involve additional objectives.

Objective 1

To define the “minority concept" as a power relationship modeled primarily by some ethnic groups’ historical relation to the dominant American culture. 

1a. Involuntary participation—the American Nightmare

Unlike the dominant immigrant culture, ethnic minorities did not choose to come to America or join its dominant culture. Thus the original "social contract" of Native Americans and African Americans contrasts with that of European Americans, Asian Americans, or most Latin Americans, and the consequences of "choice" or "no choice" echo down the generations, particularly in terms of assimilation or separation.

1b.  “Voiceless and choiceless”; “Voice = Choice”

Contrast the dominant culture’s self-determination or choice through self-expression or voice, as in "The Declaration of Independence."

Passages for comparison and contrast:

Selection from Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925)

. . . “Is this the way you talk to girls the minute you meet them?" I laughed back at him.

With a swift glance he took in everything in my room. "Your sister was making excuses for the way you live. I think more of you for standing on your own feet. I lived worse when I ran away from home. You and I are so much alike, because I, too, wanted to make my own way in the world. And you remind me of my own beginning.". . .

"Tell me about your running away." I edged my chair nearer to him, in my excited eagerness. . . .

"I still see that first day when I got off the ship with my little bundle on my back. I was almost lost in the blowing snow of a freezing blizzard. Then I came upon a gang of men clearing the street with great shovels. At once, I saw that these men must be paid for their work. So I pushed myself in among them and begged for a shovel. The big, fat foreman looked down on the poor little greenhorn, wondering should he take pity on me. But before waiting for an answer, I snatched up a shovel from the stack and dug into the snow. At the end of that day, when I was paid a dollar, I felt the riches of all America in my hand. . . .

"This first money, I had to pay down for a week's lodging. The next day, there was no more snow shovelling. I was hungry. I had to get work, and I didn't know where. I just walked the streets, searching people's faces, driven by hunger. Then I saw an old man struggling with his pushcart over the frozen snow. I rushed up to him, begging him with my eyes and my hands to let me help him. So he gave me the job to drive his pushcart and holler for him, 'Pay cash clothes."'

"How could you manage the English words that first day P" I asked.

A humorous twinkle leaped into Max's eyes. "That man knew as much about English as I. What I hollered was, 'Pay cats coals.' But my boss couldn't tell the difference. To me it was only sing­ing a song. I didn't understand the words, but my voice was like dynamite, thundering out into the air all that was in my young heart, alone in a big city."

The rest of the storv flowed on like magic. At the end of the week he was in business for himself. He cried the streets, "Pay cats coals," without even a pushcart. From all the windows, people began to look with wonder at the strange greenhorn singer. Every day he came back to his lodging loaded full . . .

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Selection from The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, the African (1789)

“The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, that was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, and much more the then feelings of my mind when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief.  Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with the meanest slave in my own country.  When I looked round the ship too, and saw . . . a multitude of black people, of every description, changed together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted my fate . . . .

“Soon after we landed, there came to us Africans of all languages. . . .  I now totally lost the small remains of comfort I had enjoyed in conversing with my countrymen . . . .  We were landed up a river a good way from the sea, about Virginia country, where we saw few of our native Africans, and not one soul who could talk to me.  . . .  I was now exceedingly miserable, and thought myself worse off than any of the rest of my companions, for they could talk to each other, but I had no person to speak to that I could understand. . . .  When I came into the room where [my master] was, I was very much affrighted at some things I saw, and the more so, as I had seen a black woman slave as I came through the house, who was cooking the dinner, and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak . . . which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle.”