James, the narrator, is a young boy in a poor African American family in Louisiana during World . . 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. Babb, Valerie Melissa. The sky is Gray. Education: The Richard Pulling Jenks School, New York; traveled with his family in Europe from an early, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. In The Sky is Gray, by Ernest J. Gaines and Mr. Parker, by Laurie Colwin, James and Janie are no exception. 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. Source: John W. Roberts,. The argument between the men focuses on the existence of God. The story occurs on a cold winter day in Louisiana, whose gray sky suggests the lack of hope for many African Americans. 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. ." Unfortunately, I was born too late to believe in your God. kayeeaugust17. THE SKY IS GRAY by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968. But assume for a moment that Octavias world is not so simple. New & Pre-owned (11) from $4.90 + $3.99 shipping. 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. She insists that they come inside while she calls the dentist to tell him that they are coming. Gainess 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. For Eddie in A Long Day in November, the ability to solve the enigma created by Amys decision to leave him is compounded by his already established communal world view. 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 ones body. Moreover, while an adult may be judged on the basis of his or her thoughts and actions, a child is still too completely a product of his or her parents to evaluate as an independent being. The blacks then leave the store under the kindly but acute genius in America, with tyrannous eye: James recounts how shes still there watching us (italics mine). James, the narrator in Ernest Gaines' "The Sky is Gray" is an eight-year-old African American male who is still a child but being the oldest male in the household he faces more responsibility than a normal young boy would. In the introduction to Ernest Gaines, Valerie Babbs biography of Gaines through the lens of his work, Babb writes, taken as a whole, Gainess canon represents a blending of Louisiana, African-American, and universal human experience. His first bona-fide publicationsThe Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit and The Turtleswere published in San Francisco State Colleges Transfer magazine in 1956. Yeah, the sky . Young James (8 years old) mind is weighted down with guilt knowing his tooth has a big effect on the familythey might not be able to feed the family because of his tooth. The Sky Is Gray: Directed by Stan Lathan. (18421910) He hears his mother complainWe the wrong colorand he sees for himself the relative comfort of the white people eating in a nearby cafe. 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" Jamess mother opens the door to exit, but turns and asks for twenty-five cents worth of salt meat. The woman wonders why the Lord allows people to suffer, saying that she doesnt understand it, but the preacher concludes that its something no human can understand. Though it is indeed difficult, particularly for Americans, to step far enough back from the late 20th century American present to see the world Gaines describes with the same dispassionate clarity as one might see the Ireland, India, or South Africa that Joyce, Rushdie, and Coetzee respectively describe, nothing is lostand much is gainedif one makes the effort. https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray, "The Sky is Gray During the exchange between the men, the minister exposes the weakness of his position when he becomes frustrated and strikes the student. It also refers to the complexity of the time in which James's character livesthe mid- to late-1950s or early-1960sand how previous values will no longer hold as the South shifts toward modernity. James lives with his other siblings, his aun. (55) 7.4 46min 1980 13+. "The Sky is Gray.". 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. This time the trial is so severe that the verbal command is ineffectual: Mama tells me keep my eyes in front where they belong, but I cant helpfrom seeing (italics mine). Lowe, John., editor. His father left his mother when Gaines was a small boy, forcing his mother to move to New Orleans to find work. Twenty-five for me to go, twenty-five for him. Why does he later say that grass is black? Further Reading On the other, he is one of only two sympathetic white characters in Gainess story (Helena is the other). 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. It is through these kinds of moderating forces in James environment that Gaines sees his salvation. His narrative begins as he and his mother wait for a bus to take them to a dentists office where James is to have his tooth pulled and ends that same day, sometime shortly before (the reader presumes) that tooth is finally pulled. They briefly duck into a hardware store to warm up, but must soon leave. $18.75 + $3.99 shipping. Jamess mother talks at length about how much it will cost while James pretends to sleep. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, was born in New York City to Mary Robertson Walsh James and Henr, Cane Alnests wife, Helena is the storys other sympathetic white figure. 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. whatever their motivation may be, their small generosity will only be accepted as kindness, not as charity. Helena tries to give them a larger piece, but Jamess mother insists on an accurate measure. 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. 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. It is through Jamess eyes that the story is told; consequently, the story is heavily filtered through his sensibilities. 28 terms. The absence of the fatherin the armyhas 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. The bus arrives and, while his mother pays, James moves to the back of the bus, where the blacks are made to sit. Subsequent publications included the short stories A Long Day in November (1959), Just Like a Tree (1962), and The Sky is Gray (1963), and the novels Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), In My Fathers House (1978) A Gathering of Old Men (1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). 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). 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. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. He is an eight-year-old African American, living in the south during the 1940's before the civil rights movement came into effect. . Lord, have mercy (italics mine). Me, I dont listen to my heart. These days, we know how to bring summer closer.<br><br>A plate of hot cherries, juicy, smelling berries, here it is summer on ! Publication date 1979 Topics Feature films, Feature films, Short Stories., Blacks. Sometimes itd stop long enough to let me get little rest. The Sky Is Gray has been added to your Cart . He just reads in his book. 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. Hills Like White Elephants. 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. The sky is gray, the clouds are low and the dark waves are hiding their power under a more neutral appearance. Are the two related? The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. In 1964, for example, Zanzibar and Tanganyika came together to form Tanzania, expelling a sultinate, while Zambia was formed out of Northern Rhodesias ashes by Kenneth Kaunda the same year that Kenya became a republic under Jomo Kenyatta. 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. The narrator, James, has developed a toothache resulting in him needing to go to the dentist. 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. 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. The Sky is Gray. 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. BIBLIOGRAPHY But Jamess narration creates a rationale for reading the story as a moral story. 10 terms. With James' toothache at the central point of the plot, the story takes us through the obstacles this black family faces in terms of safety, racism, hunger, cold and money. It made my poor heart skip a beat. He could have told it through the eyes of Jamess mother Octavia, or Val; he could have told it in epistolary form (as a letter) from Jamess 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. In the gloomiest days, when the calendar suggests that winter is over, but the St. Petersburg weather is still unrelenting, the sky is gray, snow and wind are underfoot all over the world . 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. Add a gift receipt for easy returns. Themes 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. Source: William E. H. Meyer, Jr., Ernest J. Gaines and the Black Childs Sensory Dilemma, in College Language Association Journal, Vol.34, No. Octavia overcomes the hardships of segregation and poverty while doing so. It is because of his absence that Octavias moral teachings are both so important and so urgently imparted. Reviews The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, describing it as an epic poem. The critic writes: Literally, it is an account of Janes life. The Sky is Gray is fundamentally a story about the process of coming of age, of going from one state to another. Indeed, one of the storys more disturbing episodes, during which his mother tries to make James kill two captured birds, is drawn from Gainess own experience. 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. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. table<br>We make dumplings from a thin but durable dough so that it . But if one decides to read the story as a more complex critique, not of racial relations, but of the valueand the costof dignity, one sees that even as an eight-year-old James understands her, Octavia is an interesting, fully-realized character. But assume for a moment that Octavias moral teachings are both so important and so imparted..., describing it as an epic poem ; Pre-owned ( 11 ) from $ +. 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