Mama will not allow her son and herself to be objects of charity; the unnamed white woman will not let them continue in the sleet, shaking with cold and soaking wet. The trip to town on the bus marked “White” and “Colored” represents the real rite de passage for the black youth in white America—the blurring of his sensibilities into gray: “The river is gray. His choices should involve a conscious effort to integrate the extremes. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). For Moon viewing. How is he constrained in that movement? The community, presumably, offers no such model. Taking what she has—her pride and her poverty—she moves toward her goal of inculcating in James a sense of independence and dignity in self undeterred by offers of kindness and generosity. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, because there were no high schools for blacks near his home. She insists that they come inside while she calls the dentist to tell him that they are coming. She's all in black and she's got a long black rag over her head. Look up the phrase “rite of passage.” Does James’s situation fit the definition? Author Biography Characters This did not go unnoticed in the United States, particularly among black leaders who read with interest books like Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya. Coming round that bend down there full speed. James lives with his other siblings, his auntie, and his mother. The boy don’t answer her no more. Further Reading Source: John W. Roberts,. We pass a cafe where the white people in there are eating. That work, like the five stories constituting Bloodline (1968) before it, including "The Sky Is Gray," is an unflinching and powerful study of what it means to grow up black in the American South. 2021
. Twenty-five for me to go, twenty-five for him. Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps, The Sky is Gray by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968. Sources Critics have been kind to Gaines, but his reputation has not risen with such meteoric speed as have the reputations of some of the other contemporary black writers of his generation. James is on the cusp between youth and adolescence, trying to understand what is expected of him by his inscrutable mother as he enters this next phase of his life. It is through these kinds of moderating forces in James’ environment that Gaines sees his salvation. 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 mother’s assertion that he is not a bum, but a man. Though the events in this story take place well before what is commonly called the Civil Rights era, one cannot read “The Sky is Gray” without a keen awareness that the writer is writing at the historical moment during which the Civil Rights movement exploded onto the national stage and that, surprisingly, given this context, the story somehow manages to describe but not to overplay the protagonists’ suffering in terms of prejudice and inequality. Of course, the reader doesn’t follow James all the way from childhood into adulthood, but the central premise of bildungsroman is that the reader watches the protagonist go from innocence to experience—in this case, from being a child whose primary interest is in staying warm and well-fed to a youth who has the first glimmerings of pride in himself and awareness of an important and external reality: that others will judge him not by what he is, but by how he appears to be. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. The two come to blows, and the older man abruptly leaves. But this is a sideways view of the truth: he has not eaten much all the long day (he could not take a stick of gum offered him because if he opened his mouth, the cold air would start his tooth throbbing) and his thin coat, despite the shirt and sweater beneath it, is no match for the weather. (1842–1910) After a long walk, they finally arrive at the dentist’s office, which is already full of people waiting to be treated. The sky is gray But the gray is just clouds And clouds fade away. . Ernest J. Gaines was born on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a hamlet of Pointe Coupee Parish in rural Louisiana. Written during the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, the stories in Bloodline describe a less turbulent but perhaps even more racially raw period: Louisiana in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His publication record is not extensive, but his works have been well received. "You a man.". The power of Ernest Gaines's writing is not so much in his ruthless honesty but in his understanding that in a racially torn society, in Historical Context 414-25. On one hand, Alnest is little more than an offstage voice, the voice of an old man cautioning Helena, his wife, against the cold. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Sky is Gray at Amazon.com. 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. They are shut out into the bitter cold air where, soon, it will begin to sleet heavily. that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assumption that “the eye is final; what it tells us is the last stroke of nature; beyond color we cannot go.” This hyperverbal/hypervisual trauma or rite de passage forms the real theme or subject of both black children’s accounts in “A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray.” . . This is neither a subjective nor an unimportant question. While many argue that the difference between races is less substantive than the difference between the classes, class inequality clearly takes a back seat to racial inequality in Gaines’s fiction. Themes Introduction Personal responsibility, grace under pressure, moral behavior; an image of a strong mother, and a family in which love is expressed often in harsh words or silence rather than in praise or affection. Style A wintry lullaby from The Orbweavers, made in their home studio. 2021 . 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. The family is portrayed as being poor, as were most blacks in those days, and the father was recruited by the army, leaving the mother to be the sole provider for the family. 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. They leave and wander back toward the dentist's office. A song for yearning. The feeling of community which permeates “A Long Day in November”—that sense that whatever happens to Amy and Eddie is everybody’s concern—is conspicuously absent from the second story in Bloodline, “The Sky Is Gray.” James, the eight-year-old narrator of this story, struggles to understand his mother and her conceptions of manhood and dignity without aid from the community. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. Helena tries to give them a larger piece, but James’s mother insists on an accurate measure. What follows is a contest of love and self-respect on both sides of the racial chasm. 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. 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. Like James and James’s mother, the source for James’s aunt is drawn from Gaines’s own experience, modeled after his own great aunt, Augustine Jefferson. Baton Rouge is a hundred times bigger than Bayonne") for a short period dispels the pain of James's toothache, one he has repressed from his mother for months lest she call him a crybaby. which class and clan dominate, there is little room for relief and no time or space for lasting amelioration. Plot Summary James’s mother talks at length about how much it will cost while James pretends to sleep. You wait till summer, I say. In the following essay, Meyer describes how “The Sky is Gray” is a coming of age story not just about coming to terms with growing up, but also dealing with the sensual orientation of one’s body. "The Sky is Gray Observing his mother manipulate their environment moves James closer to what will be his particular entry into manhood, the psychic freedom that comes from emotional self-mastery. For Eddie in “A Long Day in November,” the ability to solve the enigma created by Amy’s decision to leave him is compounded by his already established communal world view. Babb seems to approach this realization when she writes that Octavia’s “dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging.” Babb realizes that Octavia’s act is fundamentally about dignity, not about warmth, but she doesn’t think through the implications of the point she has made, here or later. Two years later, in 1963, the conflicts began in earnest, with riots and acts of racial brutality against demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating with Martin Luther King’s being jailed in Birmingham. He recalls when his mother made him kill two harmless redbirds so that they might have some meat, just as he had been forced to eat blackbirds and owls. Babb can’t decide. ." Don't let me die, don't let me die, don't let me die, Lord." Gaines writings about Louisiana have been understood and responded to largely as writings about race. Ernest Gaines, Boston: Twayne, 1991. Action is the only thing. Nothing helps, and one day Mama decides to take him to town. 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. It is because of his absence that Octavia’s moral teachings are both so important and so urgently imparted. This is puzzling, because a child’s perspective is considerably narrower than an adult’s. Being told that he must return after lunch, James goes with his mother out into the sleeting streets of Bayonne. In the microcosm of black society represented by the dentist’s office that morning, he offers an indictment of religion and of its opiate-like effect on the downtrodden that Gaines himself seems to share. 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. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. In the introduction to Ernest Gaines, Valerie Babb’s biography of Gaines through the lens of his work, Babb writes, “taken as a whole, Gaines’s canon represents a blending of Louisiana, African-American, and universal human experience. This Study Guide consists of approximately 53 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Sky Is Gray. 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. she says. In 19…, Writer, educator Alnest’s wife, Helena is the story’s other sympathetic white figure. (April 15, 2021). Characters But she is important for another reason besides her human decency: it is paradoxically her kind gesture that represents the greatest potential threat to James’s manhood, at least in his mother’s eyes. Dependency on the philanthropy and good will of others leads to vulnerability when that support is no longer forthcoming. Retrieved April 16, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/sky-gray-ernest-j-gaines-1968. On the other hand, James in “The Sky Is Gray” will never know the values of communal bonds if Octavia has her way. of adulthood and of being “a man” in the course of the single day. Cane…, Beloved In short, the unfortunate consequence of exclusively race-based readings is that they narrow the reader’s scope of inquiry, inviting the reader to ask fewer questions and questions of a more particular nature than one would ask of an author like James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, or J. M. Coetzee—each of whose writings are intimately concerned with different conceptions of “race” and their ramifications. 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 James’s manhood—his sense of personal dignity and worth, as well as courage and silence in difficulty—will be built. 4, June, 1976, pp. She feels her first duty to her children is to toughen them up and show them how to live and survive. "Come on in," the old lady says. Plot Summary Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Based on Gaines’ own experience, the character of Monsieur Bayonne is a mildly unsympathetic but still dangerous figure—though he acts without malice, his actions keep James from a dentist for several days. The story "The Sky Is Gray" by Ernest Gaines is about a day in the life of a mother and son. Style Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Here, hiding her true feelings and motives, she makes use of the technique of “masking” and teaches her son a valuable lesson in pride and survival. Only now, in the narrative present, as an “almost eight” year-old boy, can James understand why she forced him to do this. As a result, she has made protecting James from becoming vulnerable her primary goal in life. 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. Ain't got but a few other people out there, and all of them's men. Historical Context How does James in "The Sky is Gray" precede towards manhood? This morning when I woke up, her and Auntie was standing 'fore the fireplace. Here, James must learn to balance the words of his black heritage with the visions of white America—must learn to observe his mother’s sadness and poverty while at the same time controlling his words after the fashion of the stoic adult black male: “I want put my arm round her and tell her. Drama, TV Movie. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. . . Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. "We'll warm up when we get there. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Author Biography “Words,” he says, “mean nothing. 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. Source: David Y. Kippen, “An Overview of ‘The Sky is Gray’,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. XIX, No. He just reads in his book. ." Encyclopedia.com. On the other hand, the student maintains a defensible position, but his egotistical stance exposes his feelings of alienation from his community. Dollar and a half to have it pulled. We come up to another store and we stop and look at them dummies, too. However, there are some, and usually only a few, who realize that this ominous society in which they live must not dictate such terms. . Ernest Gaines story, The Sky Is Grey, is a heartfelt story about James, a black youth living in Louisiana during the Second World War. "White beans and no salt meat ain't white beans.". 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 folk world view. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. Critical Analysis of the Story The Sky is Gray by Ernest Gaines The title of the story “The Sky is Gray” by Ernest Gaines is ironic. Faced with the necessity to act and finding traditional solutions no longer viable, the characters in Gaines’s stories struggle desperately to restore some semblance of normalcy to their worlds. Octavia’s skepticism and self-imposed isolation place her in a similarly antagonistic stance toward the community. In this transformation, as he puts his collar down, the reader has taken a small but important step with James from childhood to adulthood. If so, James grew up that day. 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. Washington Irving, The Slavery Issue: Western Politics and the Compromise of 1850. “The Sky is Gray” is episodic in form—that is, the story is not told as a sequence of events, but as a sequence of events punctuated by narrative flashbacks and broken up into numbered segments. Are the two related? Lord, have mercy (italics mine). For staying inside. 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. During the exchange between the men, the minister exposes the weakness of his position when he becomes frustrated and strikes the student. He's got on brown shoes, too. She uses her new awareness to structure her world into clear-cut oppositional units. Published in 1918 A strong offstage presence, James’s father is most profound in his absence. But this cure fails, too. 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. What is the allegorical meaning of the student turning the other cheek when the preacher hits him? Shortly thereafter the nurse enters the room and announces that the doctor will not treat anyone until one o’clock. Walking real slow. They briefly duck into a hardware store to warm up, but must soon leave. On the street again, James turns his collar up to keep his neck warm; his mother tells him not to, because only bums turn their collars up, and he is not a bum, he is a man. But James’s narration creates a rationale for reading the story as a moral story. But if one decides to read the story as a more complex critique, not of racial relations, but of the value—and the cost—of dignity, one sees that even as an eight-year-old James understands her, Octavia is an interesting, fully-realized character. This is particularly useful in a story limited by the narrative point of view to the description of a young person’s inner life. Her dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging the proprietor to allow her son use of the stove. What makes the fact of James’s narration worth remarking upon is that Gaines could, “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.”. Available on Prime Video, Tubi TV. Style The Harlem Renaissance was a period between World War I and the Great Depression when black artists and writers flourished in the United Stat…, Sweat Animated Music Video for The Sky Is Gray by Company of the Girl on the HillCreated by Tyler Higleyhttp://itunes.apple.com/us/album/alien-nation/id348600693 However, the date of retrieval is often important. 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. James does not betray the kind and heartfelt offer of the couple although his mother would want him to. Guess I get little piece of salt meat with that." ." Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. 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. There is fear that his family might not have enough wood to keep them warm, but a new concern of a toothache has come about and now how will … 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 don’t believe in God?” the lady says. The sky is gray.” From henceforth, James’s own “long day” will be comprised of this struggle between “black blood” and “white blood” within a cerebral “sky” of “gray”—a terrifying and chilling confrontation with one’s own senses and sensibilities. He was born on a plantation near Baton Rouge, and by the time he was nine years of age, he was working the cotton fields. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York and outbreaks of anti-black violence occurred in Selma, Alabama, including Ku Klux Klan shootings and Martin Luther King leading a procession of 4,000 in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. have chosen to tell the story from a number of different perspectives. Now begins James's longest and most terrible odyssey. Can I live here tomorrow? . ." While the prejudice James and his mother encounter is real and unarguable, the response of James’s mother presages the essence of Martin Luther King’s message that salvation begins in the person of the oppressed, not the oppressor. 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. 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. Why does he later say that grass is black? Eventually they are stopped by an old white lady named Helena who has watched them each time they passed by. Education: The Richard Pulling Jenks School, New York; traveled with his family in Europe from an early…, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. However, for the moment, James is literally and figuratively caught in the middle of a storm in which both social and personal forces threaten his well-being. It is through James’s eyes that the story is told; consequently, the story is heavily filtered through his sensibilities. Conversations with Ernest Gaines, Mississippi: Mississippi University Press, 1995. “The Sky is Gray” is a bildungsroman, a story describing the growth of a child into adulthood. I was born too late to believe in your God.” What the student desires is a new age for American blacks—one which can blend “faith” with “sight,” the “ear” with the “eye,” one’s internal “blackness” with the surrounding “whiteness” into “The Sky Is Gray.” James is acute enough to sense a kindred dilemma and thinks to himself: “When I grow up I want to be just like him.”. A woman tries to engage James’s mother in conversation, but a man James takes to be a preacher joins in instead. Introduction . 212, No. 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. Criticism If one reverts to the easiest sort of race-based reading, one will invariably decide to read the story as one about victimhood. "Stop," she says. After we go a little piece I look back, and she's still watching us. 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