His choices should involve a conscious effort to integrate the extremes. La traduction est fausse ou de mauvaise qualité. Clearly, if the environment in which they found themselves was as dangerous as Babb suggests, with every white potentially disposed to do harm, Octavia’s 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. His father left his mother when Gaines was a small boy, forcing his mother to move to New Orleans to find work. Themes His publication record is not extensive, but his works have been well received. How does James in "The Sky is Gray" precede towards manhood? Gaines published “The Sky Is Gray” in 1963 when he was thirty and then included it in his 1968 volume of short stories, Bloodline. He could have told it through the eyes of James’s mother Octavia, or Val; he could have told it in epistolary form (as a letter) from James’s mother to his father; or from an omniscient perspective, one that allowed him to describe the sensory and sentient world from all of these vantage points in turn. Ernest J. Gaines was born on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a hamlet of Pointe Coupee Parish in rural Louisiana. . While the action of the stories revolves around, “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.”. It also involves the problem of integrating the individual and the community in a mutually rewarding relationship in the face of dehumanizing individualistic forces. Ernest Gaines, Boston: Twayne, 1991. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. Author Biography By forcing James to sublimate his emotions and accept them as signs of human weakness, she fails to provide him with a means of dealing with the emotional responses of others in a way consistent with her philosophy. This is what the world is to James not black or white oriented but gray,for James is unable to understand why society is so against his kind. His writings reproduce the communal nature of storytelling in his rural parish while accenting the historicity that joins members of the African-American diaspora to larger American society. On one hand, Alnest is little more than an offstage voice, the voice of an old man cautioning Helena, his wife, against the cold. It is because of his absence that Octavia’s moral teachings are both so important and so urgently imparted. The greatest advantage of an episodic form is that it allows the author to follow the protagonist, or main character, from one important event to another without recording all the unimportant events in between. But what the narrative loses from one hand it gains in the other. If one’s analysis of this scene stops here in attempting to understand this odd end point for the story, the reading which suggests itself is quite straightforward, something like, “external appearance is essential because James’s person will always be identified and understood first by his external blackness, then, perhaps, if he is lucky, by his innate character by the world in which he lives, a world in which the white gaze is the most significant threat a black man faces.” This reading is reinforced by other stations in the text, and indeed, most critics have read James and Octavia as I’ve suggested. 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. 212, No. In physical terms, there is motion from one pole to its opposite: from warm, to cold, to warm again; from beyond the outskirts of Bayonne to the city and back again; from the doctor’s office to the street, and to the office again, and so on. The absence of the father—“in the army”—has somewhat prematurely forced James into the role of “the man of the house”; and we first find this young black initiate “looking down the road,” of American hypervisuality. Dependency on the philanthropy and good will of others leads to vulnerability when that support is no longer forthcoming. Synopsis. Cet exemple ne correspond à la traduction ci-dessus. 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. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. Historical Context James’s mother Octavia is a strong, proud, uncompromising woman largely based on Gaines’s own mother. He looks at two contrasting ideas, the African/aural roots—the idea that African Americans express themselves through their music and aural interpretations—and their American/visual reorientation—the idea that America is a country of visual stimulations, that as Emerson said “the eye is final.”. 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 Gaines’s 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. Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of critiques fall into the first camp, and even the structural readings include didactic (instructive) digressions in almost every case. Je remarque qu'au cours de la discussion un, A satellite phone is expensive and has about 500 to 800 milliwatts output, w. that will be sold separately to service providers. 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. The Sky is Gray ( 44 ) IMDb 7.4 46min 1980 13+ 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. the bulletin of the Federation on an off-set machine. Robillard, the good dentist who takes care of the teeth of Bayonne’s whites. To see “gray” merely as the integration of black and white on a literal level, and as a metaphor for racial integration on a symbolic level is, I think, to misunderstand Gaines’s real intent in the story. One means nothing more than the other. Lord, have mercy (italics mine). The fog blurs the edges. The text of “The Sky Is Gray” subtly brings out this painful aurality: I’d just lay there and listen to them, and listen to that wind out there, and listen to that fire in the fireplace. I know I don’t.”). two young boys, the resolution of the conflict resides with their parents. Sources Retrieved April 15, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray. Consequently, his feelings of isolation cause him to alienate himself from the emotional support and comfort of the members of his community, whom he, in turn, deprives of the benefits of his education. The problem in the story arises not so much from her efforts to make James a “man” as from her approach to and definition of manhood. The source of James’s isolation is his mother Octavia, who moves through the world of the story with a calm and control which always seem on the verge of eruption. From a larger, more global viewpoint, these motions support and underscore James’s own transformation. And when, at the story’s conclusion, his mother pronounces him a man, the reader who has been inside James’s 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. 15 Apr. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, Athens: Georgia University Press, 1994. In 1964, for example, Zanzibar and Tanganyika came together to form Tanzania, expelling a sultinate, while Zambia was formed out of Northern Rhodesia’s ashes by Kenneth Kaunda the same year that Kenya became a republic under Jomo Kenyatta. Consequently, the reader is limited to what James observes and understands. Because his fiction focuses on the peculiar plight of black Americans in the South, Gaines must consider an additional level of significance—the strong communal bonds characteristic of Southern black folk culture. She has cut herself completely off from the community which conceivably could have provided her with support while her husband does his tour of duty in the army. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. JAMES, WILLIAM It is not possible, within the scope of this essay, to survey all of Gaines’s works, or to make more than a cursory pass through “The Sky is Gray.” It is also not possible, in a discussion of what I’m calling moral readings, to avoid some necessary oversimplifications of the complex issues surrounding and clouding the idea of race. But James’s narration creates a rationale for reading the story as a moral story. Drama, TV Movie. James’s mother talks at length about how much it will cost while James pretends to sleep. Here, the key episode occurs between the “liberal” black student and the “conservative” black preacher—a paradoxical conflict between Word and word, between faith and sight. Her dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging the proprietor to allow her son use of the stove. The Sky is Gray Research Papers discuss a book by Ernest Gaines about the life of a mother and son and the lessons she teaches him. In 1968, the same year that Gaines’s Bloodline was published, Reverend Martin Luther King himself was assassinated in a Memphis hotel. 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. Movie Info. . The distinction his mother makes between men and bums is both subtle and significant: bums pull their coat collars up, while men don’t. I’ll take coke, or I’ll use any kind of profanity, I don’t give a damn.” On the other side are the preacher and the other woman the young man speaks to after the preacher departs. Action is the only thing. When James has a toothache she takes him to the dentist although they really can't afford it. James’s thoughts then turn to the memory of two redbirds he and his brother, Ty, had trapped, and to his mother’s inexplicable insistence that he kill them and her equally inexplicable fury when he couldn’t. The boy don’t answer her no more. If that is the reading one chooses, the more important, more striking, more interesting story disappears, while James and his mother become nothing more than sympathetic but uninteresting racial stereotypes about the lives of poor blacks long ago. It is through James’s eyes that the story is told; consequently, the story is heavily filtered through his sensibilities. jaune), la couverture du sol, et celle des autres surfaces environnantes. What might be complex, three-dimensional people with equally complex motivations threaten to become two-dimensional caricatures with obscure, even uninteresting motivations when seen through the eyes of a child. Summary: “The Sky Is Gray”. The story’s protagonist, or main character, James is a young boy of about eight who lives with his mother, aunt, and their immediate family in the outskirts of Bayonne, Louisiana. Un des facteurs dont on entend parler, et je. 18, No. The only way that James can truly understand his world is by authoritarian explanation—the tongue and ear forming the eye: “Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see” (italics mine). Babb would have Octavia read as a woman whose prideful “dissembling” and “technique of ‘masking’,” whatever that entails, are the necessary consequence of living in a dangerous world in which “the whim of any white is empowered to affect their destiny.” But this is a significant, even inexcusable oversimplification of Octavia’s motivations. Small-town Louisiana is harshly marked by Jim Crow laws, which keep them out of restaurants and force them to walk the town’s streets in the grim weather as they wait for the dentist’s office to reopen after lunch. The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. It is in probing the underlying community attitudes, values, and beliefs to discover the way in which they determine what an individual will or has become that Gaines gives poignancy to the pieces in his short-story collection Bloodline. ." comfortably warm, though the road was swaying between snowy mountains and white pastures. In Gaines’s 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. On the other hand, James in “The Sky Is Gray” will never know the values of communal bonds if Octavia has her way. D'autres ne parviennent même pas à prendre leurs nouveautés en. When aspirin fails to work, Auntie wants to tell James’s mother; James convinces her not to, so they turn instead to a neighbor, Monsieur Bayonne, for a prayer cure. Monsieur Bayonne at the story’s beginning is the superstitious complement to the preacher in the middle section. 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 reader’s appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works. He is a sincerely religious faith healer/musician, but his religion is heavily tinged. Estes, David C., editor. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, was born in New York City to Mary Robertson Walsh James and Henr…, Cane 14, April 5, 1971, pp. 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. The bus arrives and, while his mother pays, James moves to the back of the bus, where the blacks are made to sit. O Say, Can YOU See that in one’s “bloodline” one may indeed rediscover the “wise blood” of his or her deepest cultural and aesthetic self? Plot Summary défavorables sur des parties en béton pour faire croire à un bunker en béton, et pourtant, ce bâtiment cubique s'inscrit d'une manière harmonique et élégante dans le paysage. The Sky Is Gray Themes Life During Jim Crow Without ever mentioning the year in which the story takes place, or using the terms “segregation” or “Jim Crow,” Gaines illustrates that his story is set during that era. She insists that they come inside while she calls the dentist to tell him that they are coming. Critical Overview "The Sky is Gray James’s mother accompanies her son to town to see about the boy’s nagging toothache, and his journey soon becomes an eye-opening odyssey. missing from the current crop of responses to Gaines is a moral reading, one that doesn’t look for causes and effects in a two-dimensional equation of character and color, but rather, in the quality of the characters’ thoughts and actions, regarding the characters not as caricatures of different types, but as fully formed people with their own—to borrow a phrase from Joyce—“individuating rhythms.” If Gaines is indeed an imaginative writer of canonical status, his works will reward such readings. Cane…, c. 1917 Each of the first two stories in Ernest J. Gaines’s Bloodline—“A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray” —describes a black boy or youth attempting to come to terms not just with the world in which he lives, his parents’ problems, and the racism which circumscribes him but, more importantly, with the sensory orientation of his own body, the struggle between what William Faulkner called a “black blood and white blood.” It is this private or internal struggle more than any public or external debate that creates the real identity crisis for the young black and for the artist or writer who would contend with an America which has “painted the senses white!” Both Sonny in “A Long Day in November” and James in “The Sky Is Gray” have to resolve the conflict between their African/aural roots and their American/visual reorientation—between James Baldwin’s declaration that “it is only in his music . The limitations imposed on the narrative by an eight-year-old narrator are more obvious when he tries, unsuccessfully, to understand his mother’s frequent mood changes or her mysterious decisions to fight or flee at each of the stations of mood the narrative visits. The book, “The Sky is Gray” written by Ernest Gaines, is the story of young James and his mother, Octavia, and their trip into town to see a dentist. After graduating from high school, Gaines attended Vallejo Junior College, did a stint in the Army, and then returned to the Bay Area to take a degree from San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). Gaines’s story is meant as more than an entertainment; it is meant as a critique of the racial injustice he experienced as a boy made vivid again by a visit to Louisiana in 1968. Here, as elsewhere, Gaines writes about the world he knew intimately from his upbringing. Source: David Y. Kippen, “An Overview of ‘The Sky is Gray’,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. With more than an hour to go before the doctor’s office will reopen and sleet starting to fall, James’s mother decides to spend their bus money on something to eat and walk home. “‘My heart tells me.’ Sure, ‘My heart tells me.’ And as long as you listen to what your heart tells you, you will have only what the white man gives you and nothing more. Release Date November 11, … Directed by. Doing. Start studying The sky is gray. The community, presumably, offers no such model. 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. How? . But the sky is gray not just because of the cold and sleet but also because James and Octavia must confront Bayonne during the pre-Civil Rights era of World War II. Can I live here tomorrow? The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else.”. James’s 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. Par exemple, l'aide pourrait se justifier, Pour les jeunes habitations ou pour l'équipement des chambres, d'enfants colorées, Witex propose une gamme de, I could add to that and say that the major issue, Je pourrais ajouter quelque chose à cela et dire. 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. Though the motivation for their careful charity is not described, it is ultimately accepted, the suggestion being that. 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. 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