Norton Anthology of Literature, 7th Edition: Short Answer Quiz

Since 1945: Short Answer Quiz

Here are the last words of the protagonist’s grandfather, which afterwards he comes to regard as a curse: “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (2305 [full ed.] 2430 [shorter ed.]). Paraphrase what his grandfather is telling him to do, and why it is so shocking to his family.

Before the battle royal, the leading white citizens of the town present the fighters with a naked white woman who dances in front of them: “The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt. I felt a desire to spit upon her as my eyes brushed slowly over her body. Her breasts were firm and round as the domes of East Indian temples, and I stood so close as to see the fine skin texture and beads of pearly perspiration glistening like dew around the pink and erected buds of her nipples. I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to lover her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V” (2307 [full ed.] 2432 [shorter ed.]). Consider the horribly public nature of this description: the protagonist is gazing on the dancer while drunken whites leer at his gazing. Then interpret the language of this passage: why does he feel so many conflicting emotions? Why do both “East Indian” and “American” appear in the passage? What do the leading white citizens hope will happen as a result of taunting the fighters with this dancer?

After the battle royal, the protagonist and the other fighters are made to scramble for coins on an electrified rug. At one point he grabs hold of a chair leg on which a white he recognizes is seated: “It was Mr. Colcord, who owned a chain of movie houses and ‘entertainment palaces.’ Each time he grabbed me [to throw him on the rug] I slipped out of his hands. It became a real struggle. I feared the rug more than I did the drunk, so I held on, surprising myself for a moment by trying to topple him upon the rug. It was such an enormous idea that I found myself actually carrying it out” (2311-12 [full ed.] 2437 [shorter ed.]). This is only one of a number of “accidental” actions that he takes during the chapter. Using what you know of those other actions, interpret what he means by “enormous” in this passage, and what these accidents have to do with his grandfather’s dying words.

“That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my briefcase and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. ‘Them’s years,’ he said. ‘Now open that one.’ And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. ‘Read it,’ my grandfather said. ‘Out loud!’ ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ I intoned. ‘Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.’ I awoke with the old man’s laughter ringing in my ears” (2314 [full ed.] 2440 [shorter ed.]). Provide an explanation for each element of the protagonist’s dream: clowns, envelopes, document, message. Why does his grandfather want him to read the message “Out loud!”?

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