Quote Reaction 1 Pg 8 Chap example essay topic

# Quote Reaction 1 pg. 8 Chap. 1:' The sounds of the new morning had been replaced with grumbles about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows. In later years I was to confront the stereotyped picture of gay song-singing cotton pickers with such an inordinate rage that I was told even by fellow blacks that my paranoia was embarrassing. But I had seen the fingers cut by the mean little cotton boils, and I had witnessed the backs and shoulders and arm and legs resisting any further demands. ' The importance of this quote is really integral to the rest of the book. To be able to criticize something you should have experienced it.

This passage shows that Maya has experienced the non-privilege of being a Negro during the thirties, and experienced it at a young age. Maya wrote that she later confronted the stereotype, She had a right to because of her previous position. 2 pg. 14 chap. 2'Bailey and I decided to memorize a scene from The Merchant of Venice, but realized that Momma would question us about the author and that we'd have to tell her that Shakespeare was white, And it wouldn't matter to her whether or not he was dead. So we chose 'The Creation' by James Weldon Johnson ' This excerpt is crucial because it puts yet another facet on segregation. Really the blacks and whites were both afraid of each other equally.

The only difference was that the white folks were in a position to act on those fears. 3 pg. 25 chap 4. ' In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, The worker against the worked for, and the ragged against the well dressed.

I remember never believing that whites were really real. ' The first line really does a good job of summing up the situation in Stamps but the key section of this quotation is the very last line. ' This statement really makes the whole situation clear in that it really brings home how someone can think that an entire race of people don't exist. 4 pg. 48 chap 7'The judge asked that Mrs. Henderson be subpoenaed, and when Momma arrived and said that she was Mrs. Henderson, The judge, the bailiff, and other whites in the audience laughed.

The judge had really made a gaffe calling a black woman Mrs. ' Really, this quote here reflects the depth of whites hatred of blacks. Even something as simple as being called Ms. was considered inappropriate for Negroes and was used to further demoralize. 5 pg. 52 chap 8' The gifts opened the door to questions that neither of us wanted to ask. Why did they send us away? and What did we do so wrong?

So Wrong Why, at three and four, did we have tags put on or arms to be sent by train alone with only the porter to look after us? This passage conveys that even though it was a different time and place, some feeling are always the same. These questions opened up by the presents are the kind every adopted child asks themselves at one time or another. 6 pg. 60 chap 9'Our father left St. Louis a few days later for California, and I was neither glad nor sorry. He was a stranger and if he chose to leave with a stranger it was all of one piece. ' This remark is crucial to a deeper understand of Maya's personality when she was young.

Most people would take the days spent in travel with their father and form a link to him no matter how fragile or temporary. But Maya has made a decision whether she knew it or not to not think about her father because of the pain that would bring. 7 pg 63 chap 10'When we enrolled in Toussaint L'Ouverture Grammar School, we were struck by the ignorance of our schoolmates and the rudeness of our teachers. Only the vastness of the building impressed us; not even the white school in Stamps was as large. ' The communal southern black experience is very evident in this comment. When encountered with something larger than she is used to she bases her comparison on what the 'white folk' have and not what she had.

8 pg. 81 chap 12'Could I tell her now? The terrible pain assured me that I couldn't. What he did to me and what I allowed must have been very bad if already God had let me hurt so much. If Mr. Freeman was gone, did that mean Bailey was out of danger? And if I told him would he still love me? This of course is a pivotal point in the book.

Maya is very distraught at this point. She knows that what happened was wrong but not why or how it was wrong except for the fact that it was. 9 pg 86 chap 13'Obviously I had forfeited my place in heaven forever, And I was as gutless as the doll i had ripped to pieces ages ago. This is yet another example of how Maya doesn't fully understand what's going on. She thought that Mr. Freeman was dead because she had told a lie. She didn't realize he died because of the terrible crime he had committed 10 pg. 92 chap 14'People accepted my unwillingness to talk as a natural outgrowth of a reluctant return to the south.

An indication that I was pinning for the high times I'd had in the big city. ' Going back to Stamps and living there happened to be exactly what Maya needed at that time in her life. She need to be in a place where nobody knew of the atrocity she had been through, not to have it stare her in the face with every pitying look or glance she received. 11 pg. 102 chap 15'When Bailey tried to interpret the words with: 'White folks use 'by the way' to mean while were on the subject,' Momma reminded us that 'white folks' mouths were most in general loose and their words were an abomination before Christ' The reason this quotation is pertinent to the book is that it shows that black people could hate whites just as deeply as the whites hated the blacks. This comment if aimed at black people sounds like something you would here at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. 12 pg. 109 chap 15'Every person I knew had the hellish horror of being 'called out of their name'.

It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks. Here is seen yet another example of how morally important the little things that we take for granted are, such as what you are called. I personally don't take being called a derogatory name badly but if my race had for centuries been humiliated and oppressed with those names I would certainly be more than offended. 13 pg 118-119 chap 17'I laughed too, but not at the hateful jokes made against my people. I laughed because, except that she was white the big movie star looked just like my mother.

Except that she lived in a big mansion with a thousand servants she lived just like my mother. And it was funny to of the white folks not knowing that the star they were adoring could be my mother's twin, except that she was white and my mother was prettier. much prettier. ' This quote reveals just how much Maya's mother had won her over. Having a star look like our mother might not seem like such a big deal to those of us who are with our parents but to Maya this was the only link she had to her mother and unlike the link she refuse make with her father, She clung to this one with all her strength. 14 pg 136 chap 19 Champion of the world. A black boy.

Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world. People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas. Some of the men went behind the store and poured white lightning in their soft drink bottles, and a few of the bigger boys followed them. Those who were not chased away came back blowing their breath in front of themselves like proud smokers. Despite the fight in later years to toss the stereotype of muscular, sports adept Negroes this was a victory back then.

Back then any victory (no matter how small or stereotypical) was grasped at and held like a proverbial newborn. 15 pg 254 chap 30 Odd that the homeless children, the silt of the war frenzy, could initiate me into the brotherhood of man. After hunting down unbroken bottles with a white girl from Missouri, A Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism by our ad how community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for the rest of my life. In this paragraph right here we see Maya Angelou as we now know her. Maya was always mature for age but the month spent with this community was the thing that finally opened her up to become a full adult.

This experience also taught her how she wanted to live her life; with tolerance and acceptance.