Unit 2 Multicultural Class part 2

The struggle with identity is the major theme of the characters of three short stories. “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, “The Death of Horatio Alger” by LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka, and “Elethia” by Alice Walker all have characters that strain with racial identity.

In “The Lesson,” young black youths are brought out of the “slums” and into an upper class toy store. Their homes are called the slums by their teacher Miss Moore, a black woman that has a college degree and is seen as “presentable” to the other blacks. Some of the kids look upon Miss Moore as something other than their regular neighbors. She speaks better and dresses better. She takes them to the toy store where the kids see such outrageous prices for toys that they immediately equate with eating for a year. In this story, the reader can see the kids struggle with the fact that Miss Moore fits into this environment. Should they also try to fit in and be like Miss Moore? They also see Miss Moore as disrespectful to their cultural background. If Miss Moore acts like this, has she been in a sense tamed? Has she left their culture behind for a society that thinks they should be spending $1000 for a toy sailboat? Do they want to be a part of that?

In “The Death of Horatio Alger,” a black youth gets into an escalating confrontation with a white youth. As this confrontation escalates into a physical confrontation, the black youth doesn’t fight back. As the white youth continues to hit him relentlessly, the black youth’s family arrives. Somehow, he seems to become the epitome of black culture fighting against white. He is egged on by his family to fight back, even against his nature, but by then it is too late. He pitifully falls because of his “frozen hands,” his inability to fight white culture. His mother wonders what she has made him and his father thinks of how pitiful he is.

In “Elethia,” a black girl steals the prize in a restaurant window of an actual stuffed black man named “Uncle Albert.” She does this because she knows that Albert would not want to be the stuffed trophy in a white restaurant window, and she cremates him and saves his ashes. She does not want him to be the beacon of black culture as perceived by whites. As we have “Uncle Ben’s rice” and “Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup,” this is how blacks are seen by whites, this smiling face in the window that somehow erases that blacks work in the kitchen feeding the whites and never dine there themselves. She did not want this false representation to stand for her, and she did the only thing she could to properly eradicate the injustice of it.

There is a metaphorical link to Mickey’s “frozen hands” and “Uncle Albert’s restaurant.” This stems from the inability to completely integrate cultures. Mickey’s frozen hands show his inability to fight but on a larger level show how he did not want to stoop to fighting. He was above it but was brought down to it by another boy. By his hands freezing, he is unable to see why he must integrate into this type of society that would do something like this. Uncle Albert’s restaurant shows that whites were trying to bring blacks into some type of integration, but all they did was put a stuffed black man, and a false representation of a black man with him not being an uncle and not having teeth. The older blacks felt gratitude of a type that their culture had made it into a white restaurant while they main character Elethia realized that only the stuffed man was inside, not other blacks. If this was integration, Elethia wanted no part of it.