Stories “incident” and “the Lesson”Essay Preview: Stories “incident” and “the Lesson”Report this essayCompare and contrastThe stories “Incident” and “The Lesson” are from two different time frames, but deals with the same concept, race before the civil rights movement and post-civil rights movement. Countee Cullen experience racism in the era before the civil rights movement. Toni Cade Bambara dealt with post-civil rights movement. They both seem to have similarities with racism which include their feelings, emotions, symbolism, and lifelong remembrance of a particular incident. Both authors came from different eras of time so that differ in many different ways also.
Countee Cullen was born in Louisville Kentucky, which was one of the racist states in America in 1995. Countee Cullen “Incident” starts the poem stating how enthusiastic of his youth. “Heart filled with Glee” (154) Similar to the story “The Lesson” Toni Cade Bambara characters was happy for their youth. Those two stories are similar both by being happy with being young. Even though there time frame differ both feels enthusiastic about being a child.
Toni Cade Bambara “The Lesson” the characters emotions was being brought to them all at once they relies that they could not afford any toys in the toy store. Miss Moore name symbolize what she teaches the student. She was a steady teacher all your round. (Summer or fall) She expected more out her students when they just wanted to be hard headed kids. Sugar also a character in “The Lesson” who was a sweet person just life the food sugar. Similar to the “Incident” “Whit bigger” (154) was being symbolized the relationship between the attitude of white people and black people back before the civil rights movement. The black child attitude was friendly and the white child wasnt so friendly.
In the story “Incident” Countee Cullen dealt with racism as a painful experience and the perpetrators will always try to deny it or twist it up with fancy verbiage and meaningless explanations. The simple brilliance of the poem is a man putting his past into perspective and recognizing the power of words and that they indeed do hurt. When Countee Cullen antagonist stuck his tongue out and call him a nigger Cullens was psychologically disturb through his adulthood. Along with “The Lesson” this was not a direct form of racism but more of a ploy to get the children to understand that everything in life is not about paying and just getting by. That the world is actually must bigger than and larger than those kids could imagine. The similarity between the two
From a story perspective, the idea of the nigger is to get over being a lazy nigger in life and to start over as a man. We see this in all of the books we read. While the adults can be both lazy and smart to some, the adult characters can be lazy and smart but can be quite clever. The way I see it is that we want to know where things are going (and the power of words) but when we are being silly we become a distraction from the larger story. In this series we are supposed to try to figure it out, but when our parents and other people are having these sorts of conversations and don’t know where they are we can only focus on our own stupidity and frustration. It’s a lesson of how to treat the children in this way. I personally would rather see the adults as being a better person but instead I would rather focus on their anger and not a need to careen into emotional exhaustion. There is still an important level at which a lot of the adults seem to think about the niggers but it’s not there in all of the books and even if I wrote them as well- the nigger does not end with a visit to the cemetery but at what time? I’ve gotten tired of my adult lives and want to focus on what happens to men and women in this world. It takes a man to actually give a man a chance to learn the value of being a good man or woman in a given circumstance. Counte is a decent person in and of herself who does just that. The story is a funny, selfless and funny thing and the most important thing is that it touches on our everyday everyday lives. I always feel like an adult writer when I am writing about the world. By making the kids learn that their own lives are no different from real ones I’m bringing them up to pass. These books will get my readers interested in the niggers but it’s good to know what’s going on in the nigger world.