Page 78 - The Language of Composition 4e Teacher Edition Sample.indd

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within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my stately carriage, knees knocking together in a
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head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me.
DIFFERENTIATION Identity am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race
My face is painted red and yellow and my nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its
Connections to Text body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing string of beads.
Poet Morgan Parker has a grimmer take on like a war drum. I want to slaughter some - I have no separate feeling about being an 15
“being colored,” as he describes in his thing — give pain, give death to what, I do not American citizen and colored. I am merely a
poem “I Feel Most Colored When I Am know. But the piece ends. The men of the fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the
Thr own against a Sharp White Backgr ound: orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Thrown against a Sharp White Background:
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.
An Elegy.” You can remind students that an I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civili - Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but
elegy is a lament for the dead, and point zation with the last tone and find the white it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes
their attention to Parker’s reference to Hur- friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure
ston at the poem’s beginning. What spe- calmly. of my company? It’s beyond me.
cific images contribute to Parker’s grittier “Good music they have here,” he remarks, But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of
tone? Students could compare Parker’s drumming the table with his fingertips. miscellany propped against a wall. Against a
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
and Hurston’s reflections on being Black Music. The great blobs of purple and red wall in company with other bags, white, red,
in a society fraught with ongoing racial emotion have not touched him. He has only and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is
prejudice and tensions. heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him discovered a jumble of small things priceless
but dimly across the ocean and the continent and worthless. A first-water diamond, an
that have fallen between us. He is so pale with empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of
his whiteness then and I am so colored. string, a key to a door long since crumbled
away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for
• • •
a road that never was and never will be, a nail
DIFFERENTIATION At certain times I have no race, I am me. When bent under the weight of things too heavy for
I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fra -
Connections to Self down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as grant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the
You could have students create their own snooty as the lions in front of the Forty- Second ground before you is the jumble it held — so
“bag of miscellany” (par. 17) as an exercise Street Library, for instance. So far as my feel - much like the jumble in the bags, could they
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to help explore Hurston’s concluding para- ings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on be emptied, that all might be dumped in a sin -
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graph. First, you might have small groups the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, gle heap and the bags refilled without altering
discuss what the objects in Hurston’s bag the content of any greatly. A bit of colored
suggest about her identity, perhaps by cre- 3 African spear. — Eds. glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps
American actress known for her extravagant lifestyle, including a
ating a chart of each item and its corre- 4 famous million-dollar shopping spree in 1920. — Eds. that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled
sponding implications. Then, each student 5 Boulevard Saint-Michel, one of the main streets in Paris’s Latin them in the first place — who knows?
could create a similar chart of items, focus- Quarter. — Eds. 1928
ing on small keepsakes or symbolic objects
ing on small keepsakes or symbolic objects
that have personal relevance rather than on
prized possessions with extrinsic value.
You might ask them to look around their Understanding and Interpreting
homes to find objects. You could print the
lists, without student names, and share 1. Rhetorical Situation. Why would the people of Eatonville have responded differently to
them with the class, and ask students to Northerners than to Southerners? What does Zora Neale Hurston’s response to them
guess which list is whose (though this exer- convey about her?
cise would rely on students’ mutual respect
cise would r ely on students’ mutual r espect
and maturity). Some follow-up questions: 184
How important is racial identity in the list of
items? What do the lists, collectively, sug-
gest about “the Great Stuffer of Bags,” as
Hurston says in the last sentences?
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TRM Suggested Responses DIFFERENTIATION
Suggested responses to the questions for
this reading can be found in the Teacher’s Connections to Text
Resource Materials. Students might also find Lisa Respers
France’s CNN opinion piece “Breonna
Taylor’s death reminds me this country
doesn’t love me as much as I love it” to be
a thought-provoking read. How do Parker
(see previous annotation) and France feel
alienated in a different way than Hurston
describes? How might Hurston respond to
France’s concerns? Can students relate to
France’s assertions? Consider a whole-class
discussion that maintains focus on specific
textual references, perhaps starting with
Hurston’s claims in paragraphs 15 and 16.

184 chapter 4 / Identity

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