The story begins with James and his mother waiting, on a painfully cold morning, for the arrival of a bus which will take them to nearby Bayonne. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In this transformation, as he puts his collar down, the reader has taken a small but important step with James from childhood to adulthood. Ill take coke, or Ill use any kind of profanity, I dont give a damn. On the other side are the preacher and the other woman the young man speaks to after the preacher departs. Less clear, because less attention has been paid to this question, is how much is left when race is left out or made irrelevant to the readers. Hills Like White Elephants. In her efforts to make James a man, Octavia apparently believes that she has only her own behavior and attitude toward life to offer as a model. It is a testimony to Gaines's skill as a writer and storyteller that many people believe Jane Pittman was a real person. For Babb, Octavias intention is to teach her son a valuable lesson in pride and survival, but she doesnt interrogate the relationship between pride and survival, preferring tacitly to assume that her readers will infer a necessary relationship between the two where none in fact exists. Houston Community College English 1301 Professor Hinchen-Bryan "The Sky is Gray" Discussion Questions Directions: Type your answer to the following questions on this sheet in a different color and submit it canvas by Saturday, October 30, 2021 by 11:59 p.m. 1. Examples of this are shown in the episode of the dentist offices with the poor treatment received to the patients, also in the kindness given to James and his mother by the old couple. Yeah, the sky . With the exception of Auntie and Mr. Bayonne, who attempt to explain his mothers cold, dispassionate treatment of him on one occasion, James is alienated in his effort to come to grips with both the social and personal forces governing his life. Pressure continues to mount on the government over a number of events that allegedly took place in Whitehall and Downing Street while COVID-19 restrictions were in force. Although her relationship with this absent husband is only briefly mentioned, one senses in her attitude and behavior that his departure left her vulnerable. While they wait for the dentist to reopen his office, Octavia must devise ways in which she can keep James from the cold and at the same time carefully adhere to strict rules of racial separation. Jamess vulnerability to this aspect of human nature is illustrated in the episode with an old couple who offer them food during their visit to town. Rather than explaining his position to her in such a way that she will be able to understand it, he raises his argument to a metaphysical level and alienates her: You really dont believe in God? the lady says. She say thats weakness and crybaby stuff. Time and time again, the black youth must simply take itmust see the advantages of the whites or the sufferings of himself and other blackswhile saying nothing and offering no complaints. All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown) And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray) I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk) On a winter's day (on a winter's day) I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm) If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.) California dreamin' (California dreamin') Well, if I cant, to hell with it. Ernest Gaines has written a non-fictional story that has three major characters apart from him as the narrator. Helena tries to give them a larger piece, but Jamess mother insists on an accurate measure. Synopsis. The Sky Is Gray by Ernest J. Gaines is a poignant and thought-provoking short story about a young African American boy named James, who lives in rural Louisiana with his mother and grandmother during the mid-20th century. He is an eight-year-old African American, living in the south during the 1940's before the civil rights movement came into effect. Not added . "The Sky is Gray" should be a required literary experience for both adults and students who share Louisiana's educational complexity. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else.. . James soon finds himself walking through the cold of Bayonne. The narrator is James, an eight-year-old black boy living in rural Louisiana. Jamess mother Octavia is a strong, proud, uncompromising woman largely based on Gainess own mother. A young boy named James comes of age in 1940s Louisiana and grapples with what it means to be black during a time of racism and poverty. But Im not supposed to do that. In such a cultural climate, the spiritual and emotional well-being of both the community and the individual is threatened. New York: Longman, 1997, 511530. Such readings all share a serious, albeit unintentional, flaw; they suggest that one must understand all actions and most events as direct or indirect consequences of race, rather than individual choice. Although he claims to have a solution for the black community, he refuses to consider its level of comprehension. Human existence does not lend itself to such neat categorizing. i love Gaines' use of symbols senses in this story it is one of hope I think. The first volume contains stories about.- A lonely woman who works part-time, and who has crippling social anxiety that leads to misunderstandings.- Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Edited by Eugene Current-Garca and Bert Hitchcock. My baby don't love me no more. Bryant, Jerry H. Politics and the Black Novel, in The Nation, Vol. "The Sky is Gray . How? Through his action, he admits that the emotional or heart position leads to a cul de sac; it cannot be defended rationally. . Reading Gaines first, foremost, always, and only as a black author, an author of race and race issues, rather than primarily as an imaginative author, an author of ideas, delimits the kinds of questions one can ask about his works and necessarily diminishes the readers appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works. Houston Community College English 1301 Professor Hinchen-Bryan "The Sky is Gray" Discussion Questions Directions: Type your answer to the following questions on this sheet in a different color and submit it canvas by Saturday, October 30, 2021 by 11:59 p.m. 1. The sky is gray. From henceforth, Jamess own long day will be comprised of this struggle between black blood and white blood within a cerebral sky of graya terrifying and chilling confrontation with ones own senses and sensibilities. [Chorus 2] All the leaves are brown (All the leaves are brown) And the sky is gray (And the sky is gray) I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk) On a winter's day (On a winter's day) If I didn't tell her (If I didn't tell her) I could leave today (I could leave today) California dreamin' (California dreamin') On such a winter's day (California dreamin') On such a winter's day, (California . The minister accepts God unquestioningly, while the student rejects God because belief in Him alleviates the need to question: Show me one reason to believe in the existence of a God, the boy says. Also in 1964, a white minority in Southern Rhodesia elected as Premiere, Ian Smith, under whose leadership Rhodesia managed to postpone representative government for another two decades. The dramatic conflict endemic to the stories in Bloodline arises out of the efforts of various characters to reconcile their individual needs with community prerequisites. As they ride in the back of the bus reserved for blacks and walk the streets of . Told in a series of thirteen more or less chronological episodes, Jamess narrative is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to past events, each of which provide the reader with a more complete picture of the moral forces pulling at and shaping James. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Gaines is best-known for his novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, published in 1971 and adapted into a television movie starring Cicely Tyson in 1974. Later, the whole family is at hand when Octavia and Jamess aunt count out the cost of a trip to the dentist: She say: enough to get there and get back. The story occurs on a cold winter day in Louisiana, whose gray sky suggests the lack of hope for many African Americans. The importance of this distinction is difficult to overstate: it is nothing less than the difference between a story about people living in perpetual victimhood, on one hand, or a story about a mother trying to teach her son what it will take to become the sort of man she will respect, on the other. The reader is made aware that the act of having the tooth pulled is a large ordeal to the family. The conflict in these two stories further illustrates the importance of the changes taking place within Southern black culture to the development of the social consciousness of children. Awesome bookit wraps within the narrative so many layers of the black's struggle in America, their historymakes the reader think and feel for the characters, as such engaged with their livesgave me goosebumps!! The title of the piece hints to the general dreariness which lingers throughout the story. Clearly, if the environment in which they found themselves was as dangerous as Babb suggests, with every white potentially disposed to do harm, Octavias lesson would be the worst example she could possibly give James, setting him up at some future date for a prideful miscalculation whose outcome could be fatal. Sometimes it just hurt, hurt, hurt. Words, he says, mean nothing. Criticism The action in "The Sky is Gray" is broken up into thirteen short sections which describe a half day or so in the life of James, an eight-year-old black boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. (February 23, 2023). This comment incites a young mana teacher, James thinks, or a studentto join in. The Sky Is Gray Thank you for downloading The Sky Is Gray . (WMG owns this not me)(Lyrics)All the leaves are brown and the sky is greyI've been for a walk on a winters dayI'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.Californi. Next, James discovers that the dentists colored waiting-room is a place of intensified vocality and aurality, where patients are hollering like pigs under a gate and where all round the room people are talking. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, Athens: Georgia University Press, 1994. Although her primary goal is to project a model of strength for James through her own actions, her inability to make her sense of the world comprehensible to him leaves James vulnerable to the very forces from which she would shield him. Gaines was left in the care of his great aunt, Augustine Jefferson, a woman he preferred to call his aunt and whom he considered one of the most powerful influences on the formation of his character. As the argument between the student and minister in the dentists office clearly illustrates, there is a racial dimension present in the story. In one instance Octavia enters a white-owned hardware store and pretends to inspect ax handles for purchase while James heats himself at the wood stove. Eventually they are stopped by an old white lady named Helena who has watched them each time they passed by. For the sky is, indeed, gray in this story. Octavias skepticism and self-imposed isolation place her in a similarly antagonistic stance toward the community. Their meal finished, James and his mother thank the woman for her hospitality. This is puzzling, because a childs perspective is considerably narrower than an adults. James tries to keep silent about his tooth not out of fear, but because he knows how expensive it will be to have a dentist pull it. The Individual and the Community in Two Short Stories by Ernest J. Gaines, in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. "California Dreamin'" is a song written by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips and first recorded by Barry McGuire. . Cane, c. 1917 However, the trip to the dentist is weighty too because of the prejudice that exists outside his little community. Because James is suffering a toothache, symbolic of the festering wounds of racism, he and his mother take the bus into Bayonne to see a dentist. It is both more reasonable and more in keeping with Gainess own views on the importance of dignity to read Octavia as intentionally withholding warmth from James to teach him that the value of their personal dignity is greater than the value of the most basic comfortsbeing warm and well-fed. Where The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman gives us a grand, sweeping epic of a black woman and her slave community, "The Sky Is Gray" zeroes in on a moment in time, one crucial afternoon in a black child's development. With James and his mother departing for the day, the rest of the family is left alone without enough firewood, the breadwinners are not able to work, and money has to be used that could have been put towards food for the house. 545-58. And by the end of the story, the reader does indeed sense that there has been some change to who James is in that short span, a sense reinforced by his mothers assertion that he is not a bum, but a man. In Gainess words, describing the type of person he depicts in the student to Carl Wooton in an interview reprinted in Porch Talk: you will have this rebellion against authority. "The Sky is Gray"contains many of the themes and images Gaines returns to again and again in his work: themes of personal responsibility, grace under pressure, and moral behavior; images of strong mothers, mysteriously absent fathers, and families in which love is expressed more often in harsh words or silence than in overt praise or affection. You are free to use it for research . . 4, June, 1976, pp. The Sky Is Gray: Directed by Stan Lathan. Burke, William. Here, the key episode occurs between the liberal black student and the conservative black preachera paradoxical conflict between Word and word, between faith and sight. Two of the stories in Bloodline, A Long Day in November and The Sky Is Gray, are particularly illustrative of the conflict between community perspective and individual needs. I've got a real bad feeling. And when, at the storys conclusion, his mother pronounces him a man, the reader who has been inside Jamess subjective world can take measure of both how far he still is from manhood and of what he has learned from the lessons meant to take him the rest of the way there. Theirs is an odyssey or journey that encompasses the major dilemmas blacks faced in this eraincluding a debate between a black preacher who embraces the Christian doctrine of suffering and acceptance and an angry young black man who advocates questioning and action. allivarnell13. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2 nd Edition. For example, he believes that Catholic and non-Catholic prayers heal differently, but one suspects that the distinction between the two would be lost on the clergy of both Catholic and Protestant faiths. From Ernest J. Gaines, author of "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," comes a deceptively simple, yet emotionally complex tale of a young boy's discovery of what it's like to be black in Louisiana during the 1940's. However, his indirect discovery that the community is no longer capable of defining his individual responsibility to his family is potentially important both for him and for Sonny. Du Boiss famous observation, in the Forethought of The Souls of Black Folk, that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line, for it is this color line in all of its manifestations that his work so carefully documents. Being told that he must return after lunch, James goes with his mother out into the sleeting streets of Bayonne. He is the oldest of all the children. What exemplifies the American national narrative in the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest J. Gaines? 212, No. The effect of the storys episodic discontinuity is to emphasize the particular moment James is living, whether he is reliving a memory or moving through present events, while de-emphasizing the storys overarching structure. The action in The Sky is Gray is broken up into thirteen short sections which describe a half day or so in the life of James, an eight-year-old black boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. But what the narrative loses from one hand it gains in the other. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. Babb seems to approach this realization when she writes that Octavias dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging. Babb realizes that Octavias act is fundamentally about dignity, not about warmth, but she doesnt think through the implications of the point she has made, here or later. The best-known version is by the Mamas & the Papas, who sang backup on the original version and released it as a single in 1965.The lyrics express the narrator's longing for the warmth of Los Angeles during a cold winter in New York City. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. In these stories, black folk culture, with its emphasis on community-defined values and behaviors, shows signs of deterioration, while Western individualism and the development of more personally-defined values appear as catalysts in the demise of the black . James also lets it be known that "the sky is gray" and that there isn't much grass. Alnests wife, Helena is the storys other sympathetic white figure. Can I live here tomorrow? Though her presence in The Sky is Gray is minimal, Augustines presence in Gainess life can hardly be overstated: Unless you include her, he says, you cant write about me at all.. The force implicit in the story is Octavias individualism, which threatens to deprive James of membership in the human community. kui. Sold by: Tidal Wave Group . He hears his mother complainWe the wrong colorand he sees for himself the relative comfort of the white people eating in a nearby cafe. Word Count: 1084. Historical Context Author Biography His first bona-fide publicationsThe Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit and The Turtleswere published in San Francisco State Colleges Transfer magazine in 1956. The reader only sees a small part of this process, a few hours one . Bajo el cielo gris y nubes bajas, las olas oscuras ocultan su potencia bajo una aparente tranquilidad. Ernest James Gaines (January 15, 1933 - November 5, 2019) was an American author whose works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Lord, have mercy (italics mine). Ed. The Sky Is Gray. In American Short Stories. 414-25. Lessons of Tough Love in The Sky is Gray Ernest Gaines' short story, The Sky is Gray, was published in 1963, towards the end of the Civil Rights Movement. 964 Likes, 78 Comments - Juha (@rough_curiosity) on Instagram: " when the sky is gray cold wind blow and raindrops play you bring sunshine in my day" I think the message it sends about how people treat each other is important. Plot Summary Reviews The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, describing it as an epic poem. The critic writes: Literally, it is an account of Janes life. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray, "The Sky is Gray In Ernest Gaines's "The Sky is Gray", James is the protagonist and main character. They briefly duck into a hardware store to warm up, but must soon leave. One might therefore argue that the real story is yet to be told, that it cannot be told until we see the boy as a man. but should you say the sky is gray well, it still looks blue to me i know the road is light and i've known this all along but should you say the sky is gray then i won't say that you're wrong [chorus] because today, i love everybody everybody i see today, i think that all folks are great and everybody here loves me ooh, today, i'd give . The reader only sees a small part of this process, a few hours one morning, a few more that afternoon, but these hours are important: they form some of the bedrock upon which the foundation of Jamess manhoodhis sense of personal dignity and worth, as well as courage and silence in difficultywill be built. And a reading focussed exclusively on the storys racial dynamic misses this completely. Characters The Sky is Gray is a heartbreaking story of James and his Mama. However, because she never explains her motives to him, she presents James with a world filled with extremes which endangers his realization of the manhood she attempts to force prematurely on him. The trip to town on the bus marked White and Colored represents the real rite de passage for the black youth in white Americathe blurring of his sensibilities into gray: The river is gray. James, in The Sky is Gray, is a somewhat older black youth who rightly faces a more complex dilemma concerning his ear and eye. RT @BuddhistCeo: Morning meditation The first day of Spring I look from the zendo window Hoping the world has changed Alas no There is frost on the ground And the sky is gray As I sit zazen I dream of summer flowers The bell rings I smile I bow #thebuddistceo #buddhism #poetry #meditation . The experiences of his early years, particularly the experience of paternal abandonment, provided the bedrock on which his fiction would later be built. The Sky Is Gray is a great portrayal of racial differences. It is also clear that race, racial injustice, the years of segregation, and the particular way these things play themselves out in rural Louisiana are central to Gainess writing and therefore are central to understanding his works. Thats the thing. In the communal microcosm of the doctors office he represents the defiance, the nonviolent non-cooperation of the Civil Rights movement that would sweep through the South thirty years later. Publisher Chicago : Perspective Films Language English. Jamess mother opens the door to exit, but turns and asks for twenty-five cents worth of salt meat. So it's probably not coincidental that I began planning another northern California trip a few weeks ago. ''The Sky is Gray'' is fundamentally a story about the process of coming of age, of going from one state to another. Gravel crunches under the tires of the Rolls Royce as it trundles up the country road. The gray of the sky which hangs threateningly over the action of the story symbolizes the dangers inherent in the extremes which James must reconcile. Source: John W. Roberts,. . The Sky is Gray is a bildungsroman, a story describing the growth of a child into adulthood. The narrator, James, has developed a toothache resulting in him needing to go to the dentist. It is my belief that Gaines' "The Sky is Gray" depicts the possible roots of a public leader, in the way the nature of the young narrator James is portrayed it illuminates the character traits in civil leader. However, the date of retrieval is often important. But the American consciousness was jolted away from these events by Kennedys assassination on November 22, 1963, and by events abroad, principal among these being the escalation of what would become the Viet Nam war. Ernest J. Gaines was thirty in 1963, the year in which "The Sky is Gray" was first published, but it was not until five years later, in 1968, that the story was published as the second story in Bloodline, the thematically interwoven collection with which readers associate it today. The sky is Gray. Put another way, if Gainess stories were set in the India of 1946, two years before partition, if the primary groups described were Muslim and Hindu, rather than black and white, would the stories still merit reading? Their thought process, social standing, and personality are the key aspects that influence their pathway to maturity. And since his stories are set in the past, his African-American characters appear subservient and are not placed in the revolutionary poses favored by some of Gainess contemporaries such as James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, John O. Killins, John Wideman, or David Bradley., In sum, while Gaines may not have had the wide recognition of other African-American writers early in his career, there is a broad critical consensus that he is an important writer, a good writer, and a writer who has perhaps been undervalued and may continue to gain increasing recognition in the years to come, in part because he was somewhat overshadowed by his contemporaries during his early years, in part because of the increasing importance of studies of masculinity in the literary canon. . $18.75 + $3.99 shipping. In The Sky is Gray, by Ernest J. 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