Mama tries to teach James that he is the man of the family now. Furthermore, the story implies that the community can continue to provide the individual with emotional support in his efforts to fulfill his individual needs. The only way that James can truly understand his world is by authoritarian explanationthe tongue and ear forming the eye: Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see (italics mine). Figuratively, it is a metaphor of the collective black experience.. Dollar and a half to have it pulled. Author Biography Source: John W. Roberts,. A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist. But Im not supposed to do that. All the leaves are brown & the sky is gray I've been for a walk On a winter's day I'd be safe & warm If I was in LA California dreamin' On such a winter's day Stopped into a church I passed along the way, Well, I got down on my knees, and I began to pray It is also possible to rent "The Sky Is Gray" on Vudu, Amazon Video online and to download it on Amazon Video, Vudu. This theory is supported by three specific events during the story. THE SKY IS GRAY by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968. A woman tries to engage Jamess mother in conversation, but a man James takes to be a preacher joins in instead. If ones analysis of this scene stops here in attempting to understand this odd end point for the story, the reading which suggests itself is quite straightforward, something like, external appearance is essential because Jamess person will always be identified and understood first by his external blackness, then, perhaps, if he is lucky, by his innate character by the world in which he lives, a world in which the white gaze is the most significant threat a black man faces. This reading is reinforced by other stations in the text, and indeed, most critics have read James and Octavia as Ive suggested. She loves her children, but more important to her than any visible demonstrations of affection are the moral lessons she insists upon teaching James. From Ernest J. Gaines, author of "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," comes a deceptively simple, yet emotionally complex tale of a young boy's discovery of what it's like to be black in Louisiana during the 1940's. On the other, he is one of only two sympathetic white characters in Gainess story (Helena is the other). 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). Ill take coke, or Ill use any kind of profanity, I dont give a damn. On the other side are the preacher and the other woman the young man speaks to after the preacher departs. The title of the story by Ernest Gaines is ironic. It growls so loud you can hear it a mile. Moreover, it soon becomes clear that the black mother and son must accept the fact that they have now become the observed, not the observersthat they are the ones who dearly need to be seen for what they are, cold and hungry. With Olivia Cole, James Bond III, Margaret Avery, Cleavon Little. The force implicit in the story is Octavias individualism, which threatens to deprive James of membership in the human community. "The Sky is Gray"contains many of the themes and images Gaines returns to again and again in his work: themes of personal responsibility, grace under pressure, and moral behavior; images of strong mothers, mysteriously absent fathers, and families in which love is expressed more often in harsh words or silence than in overt praise or affection. Jamess mother opens the door to exit, but turns and asks for twenty-five cents worth of salt meat. 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. Two years later, in 1963, the conflicts began in earnest, with riots and acts of racial brutality against demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating with Martin Luther Kings being jailed in Birmingham. One means nothing more than the other. The first strong character trait James possesses is that he . 3, Fall, 1984, pp. His writings reproduce the communal nature of storytelling in his rural parish while accenting the historicity that joins members of the African-American diaspora to larger American society. In the microcosm of black society represented by the dentists office that morning, he offers an indictment of religion and of its opiate-like effect on the downtrodden that Gaines himself seems to share. New York: Longman, 1997, 511530. Ivan Turgenevs The District Doctor. Gaines himself cites Ivan Turgenev as one of his more important literary sources, saying that he learned form from Turgenev. Pressure continues to mount on the government over a number of events that allegedly took place in Whitehall and Downing Street while COVID-19 restrictions were in force. Can I live here tomorrow? Ernest Gaines story, The Sky Is Grey, is a heartfelt story about James, a black youth living in Louisiana during the Second World War. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. She insists that they come inside while she calls the dentist to tell him that they are coming. The reader is made aware that the act of having the tooth pulled is a large ordeal to the family. Faced with the necessity to act and finding traditional solutions no longer viable, the characters in Gainess stories struggle desperately to restore some semblance of normalcy to their worlds. Octavias skepticism and self-imposed isolation place her in a similarly antagonistic stance toward the community. Being told that he must return after lunch, James goes with his mother out into the sleeting streets of Bayonne. Though still a child, James is on the verge of youth. They are unwilling, or unable, to follow his line of reasoning, for to accept that the signification of green or black has no intrinsic relationship to a Platonic ideal of green or black, but signifies by consensus only, comes perilously close to accepting that the other words about which the young man seems to care even more than Godfreedom and libertyare empty of meaning unless they signify the same thing to speakers both black and white. It made my poor heart skip a beat. acquire the the sky is gray ernest gaines pdf belong to that we provide here and check out . Though he can accurately recall the words of the student in the dentists office that lead up to the student being hit by the preacher, he cannot understand the argument in which they are engaged (She just looks at him like she dont know what hes talking bout. After a long walk, they finally arrive at the dentists office, which is already full of people waiting to be treated. James tries to keep silent about his tooth not out of fear, but because he knows how expensive it will be to have a dentist pull it. Next, James discovers that the dentists colored waiting-room is a place of intensified vocality and aurality, where patients are hollering like pigs under a gate and where all round the room people are talking. 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 overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. But the conflict goes much deeper than that. Consequently, his feelings of isolation cause him to alienate himself from the emotional support and comfort of the members of his community, whom he, in turn, deprives of the benefits of his education. He is a sincerely religious faith healer/musician, but his religion is heavily tinged. But she is important for another reason besides her human decency: it is paradoxically her kind gesture that represents the greatest potential threat to Jamess manhood, at least in his mothers eyes. In Los Angeles, race riots in Watts resulted in 35 deaths, the arrest of 4,000, and $40 million in property damage. Mother and sons odyssey through the dangers and pitfalls of poverty and racism also includes encounters with two kinds of whites: the dentists receptionist, who delays their appointment and then locks them out in the cold, and a woman and her invalid husband, who invite them into their store, offer them a hot meal (in exchange for work, at Octavias proud insistence), and phone the dentist to make sure he takes care of Jamess toothache. At the end of the story, although the sky is still gray, readers sense hope for James with the lessons he has learned from good people, black and white, but from no one more than his strong and principled mother. Babb would have Octavia read as a woman whose prideful dissembling and technique of masking, whatever that entails, are the necessary consequence of living in a dangerous world in which the whim of any white is empowered to affect their destiny. But this is a significant, even inexcusable oversimplification of Octavias motivations. What exemplifies the American national narrative in the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest J. Gaines? I think the message it sends about how people treat each other is important. When aspirin fails to work, Auntie wants to tell Jamess mother; James convinces her not to, so they turn instead to a neighbor, Monsieur Bayonne, for a prayer cure. Because James is suffering a toothache, symbolic of the festering wounds of racism, he and his mother take the bus into Bayonne to see a dentist. [Chorus 1: Barry McQuire, The Mamas & The Papas] All the leaves are brown (All the leaves are brown) And the sky is gray (And the sky is gray) I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk) On a winter's day (On a winter's day) I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm) If I was in L.A (If I was in L.A.) California dreamin' (California dreamin') On such a winter's day [Verse: Barry McQuire, The . His feelings of isolation are clearly illustrated in his conversation with a woman who attempts to take his side in the disagreement. 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. The Sky Is Gray: Directed by Stan Lathan. It is through Jamess eyes that the story is told; consequently, the story is heavily filtered through his sensibilities. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. 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