"Let's hope that the ones who come after will have your faith-- if not in God, then in something else, something definitely that they can lean on. I haven't anything. For me, the wind is pink, the grass is black" (Gaines, 102).
The boy in the dentist's waiting room makes this statement after challenging the preacher's unfettered faith in God's ability to restore black civil rights in America. He feels that he doesn't have anything except for his mind to trust, because all other methods of attaining freedom, (i.e., religion, blind trust in justice, etc) have failed to deliver him and his people from the prison of segregation, brutality, and systemic terror. He exists during a time when young men and young women, seeing that their future would be bleak without some kind of societal change, had to make a crucial decision between maintaining the status quo and hoping for deliverance beyond the grave, and risking their lives to question a system they knew was unjust and giving themselves a chance for a better life. At this point, however, there is no foundation on which any of them can stand, because they have not been united... the movement has not yet taken shape. And so, the boy's method of faith in some ways is a reliance on his mind's ability to question his world... and this, he hopes, will lead someday to the creation of a society in which people can realistically trust in other things, like religion and justice to live through difficult times.
Emmett Till
Murdered at 14 years old in Money, Mississippi. The spectacle surrounding Till's murder was one of the precipitating events leading to the Civil Rights Movement.
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3 comments:
The boy is trying to believe in somehing else other than segregation and the brutality of the south and the jim crow laws. The boy ia makin people question themselves. He is makin them question about colors, but thats only the little part about it. He is trying to get african americans to question, why things have to be the way they are? why do they have to listen to white people and go by what they say is right. The questioning the boy is doing on society is makin people think outside the box, and start thinking not only what the're supposed to think, but what is right to think....
I believe that since the young man didn't have the the support of family members he had to find his own way of seeing the world, he wasn't trained like others were,the young boy in this story is told by his mother how to behave, what he saw was education and because of his perspective on things are very different then others.
I have a different reaction to this quote. I see it from the prospective that as individuals we seek for differetn resources of belief. Religion/faith were the black people sort of consolation to survive in such environment. However, other people see things differently and have differnt beliefs. as well, that often times one see what one wants to see and does not give the mind the freedom to see beyond the obvious; like the color of the sky, the grass or the wind.
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