Literature of the South

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Literature of the South

"Battle Royal" | O'Connor

For this assignment, which leads to our second essay, we'll be reading several works by two well known and regarded Southern writers: Ralph Ellison and Flannery O'Connor.

I've set up both general information and lesson plans on this page which should assist your understanding of the works.

Terms to Know

Scottsboro Case. The Scottsboro Case, a cause célèbre in modern American race relations, began in April of 1931 with a brawl between whites and blacks riding a freight train through northern Alabama. When Jackson County officials stopped the train near Scottsboro, two white women -- Victoria Price and Ruby Bates -- accused nine black teenagers of raping them.

A Scottsboro jury quickly convicted eight of the nine boys and sentenced them to death. The U.S. Communist party took up the case, mobilizing mass protests across America and in Europe and mounting an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Supreme Court ordered a new trial on the grounds that defendants in capital cases were entitled to more than a pro forma defense. (The two attorneys for the nine youths had been given less than thirty minutes to prepare their case; one was drunk, the other senile).

In a 1933 retrial, Ruby Bates recanted her accusation, and new evidence strongly contradicted Victoria Price. The jury nevertheless convicted. When the presiding judge James Edwin Horton ordered yet another trial, state officials removed him from the case, found a more amenable judge, and pushed through convictions and death sentences for two defendants, Haywood Patterson and Clarence Morris.

In Norris v. Alabama (1934), the Supreme Court ruled that the two defendants had been denied a fair trial because of Alabama's systematic exclusion of African Americans from its jury rolls. In 1937, with the Communist party no longer in the case, the defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz brokered a deal whereby four of the defendants were released and state prosecutors tacitly promised that the others would be paroled once publicity had died down. Not for thirteen years, however, did Alabama release the last of the Scottsboro defendants.

Bibliography
Dan T. Carter , Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. ed., 1979.
James Goodman , Stories of Scottsboro, 1994.

Carter, Dan T. "Scottsboro Case." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Ed. Paul S. Boyer. Oxford University Press 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Ocean County College. 11 June 2011.

Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a racial caste system of laws, customs, and etiquette designed to segregate and disenfranchise African Americans during the post-Reconstruction years between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow laws regulated all social interactions between the races and imposed prohibitions on African Americans, relegating them to an inferior societal status. Examples of Jim Crow segregation could be found in the forms of separate housing, schooling, and bathroom facilities. Jim Crow laws denied blacks the rights to vote and to serve on juries. Etiquette prescribed a system of subordinate behaviors. For instance, white motorists had the right of way at all intersections, and courtesy titles such as "Mr." and "Miss" were required of blacks when referring to any white person. Violence was a constant underpinning of Jim Crow. Blacks who violated the laws were beaten and had little legal recourse. Lynchings were the most extreme form of violence associated with this era.

Bibliography
Finkelman, Paul, ed. The Age of Jim Crow: Segregation from the End of Reconstruction to the Great Depression. New York: Garland, 1992.
The History of Jim Crow. www.jimcrowhistory.org.
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was. Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990.
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.: The Laws, Customs, and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities as Second-Class Citizens. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Hernández, Tanya Katerí. "Jim Crow." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Eds. Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González. Oxford University Press 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 11 June 2011

Segregation, Racial,   the southern social, economic, and political system that enforced the separation of races from the post- Reconstruction era to the mid-twentieth century. Racial segregation was also called “Jim Crow,” an expression derived from the caricatured portrayal of blacks in antebellum minstrel shows. By the 1890s, however, “Jim Crow” had come to describe the segregation, social control, and political and economic subjugation of black people in the South. Upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and other decisions, segregation persisted until challenged by the anti-colonialist politics of World War II and the postwar civil rights movement.

While C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) launched a debate over the origins and nature of racial segregation in the South, comparative studies of segregation in South Africa and the American South by John W. Cell and George Frederickson linked the phenomenon to a broader white-supremacist ideology and demonstrated its variation over space and time. In America, restrictive customs and practices designed to separate the races were first devised by whites of the antebellum North in the 1840s. As historian Leon Litwack has noted, many abolitionist newspapers used the term “segregation” to describe separate facilities for blacks and whites in northern cities.

Segregation Imposed.
After the Civil War, southern whites unwilling to accept the social and political equality of freedmen adopted the practice. The earliest postwar southern legislatures passed restrictive laws to maintain the prewar racial hierarchy and secure a cheap labor force perpetually tied to the land. These so-called Black Codes were overturned as Radical Republicans took charge of Reconstruction, but in their place arose a system of sharecropping, crop lien, disfranchisement, and violent repression. African Americans struggled against the poverty and degradation born of tenancy and sharecropping, but as northern attitudes shifted, federal troops left, the southern Democratic Party revived, and the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations inaugurated a reign of terror, conditions very similar to slavery took root.

Many historians hold that Jim Crow was already so firmly entrenched by custom that the rise of de jure segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merely ratified the prevailing situation. Historian Howard Rabinowitz, for example, has found that Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham, and other southern cities excluded free blacks from militias, education, and welfare services in the antebellum and immediate post–Civil War eras. While radical legislators, Reconstruction officials, and black political leaders favored racially integrated facilities, fears of further antagonizing white southerners inhibited their efforts, and neither Republicans nor black legislatures proposed constitutional or legislative measures for achieving that goal. Indeed, as black churches, fraternal organizations, and mutual-aid societies proliferated, patterns of voluntary racial separation arose. Government, political, and judicial bodies were often the only integrated institutions in the Reconstruction South.

By the 1880s, however, railroads and streetcars, involving close contact between black and white passengers, became the focus of challenges to segregation. Amid growing racial tensions, exacerbated by urbanization and industrialization, southern state legislatures enacted railroad separate-car laws that reshaped the region's social and political landscape. Blacks vigorously resisted. Prominent African-American business and professional leaders staged boycotts and sued railroads, insisting on equal access, but to little avail. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 sharply restricted the 1875 Civil Rights Act (see Civil Rights Cases) and sanctioned the separate-but-equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, a torrent of segregation laws increasingly regulated all black-white contact throughout the South, banning or sharply restricting black access to public and private facilities including schools, theaters, hotels, parks, libraries, and the like. Simultaneously, employers and labor leaders blocked blacks’ access to skilled jobs, limiting them to unskilled, semi-skilled, or domestic occupations.

The spread of segregation and deteriorating race relations in the 1890s arose from southern white fears of racial mixing and miscegnation and from a desire to curb black aspirations for education and property. It coincided with an epidemic of lynchings; antiblack riots in Atlanta, New Orleans, East St. Louis, Tulsa, and other cities; discrimination against black soldiers, as in the Brownsville incident; and the propagation of racist ideas by politicians like Benjamin Tillman, James K. Vardaman, and Thomas Watson, and writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, whose 1905 novel The Clansman inspired D.W. Griffith's racist movie The Birth of a Nation. The legal imposition of strict racial segregation was also paralleled by a campaign of black disfranchisement through intimidation and terror; state constitutional amendments (in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia); and poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements, and other devices intended to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment.

Segregation Challenged.
Black southerners responded to these developments in a variety of ways. Some embraced Booker T. Washington's strategy of conciliation, racial uplift, and group solidarity. Others, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. Du Bois, advocated militant challenges to the racist assumptions underpinning segregation. Still others, like Bishop Henry M. Turner (1834–1915) of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, West African chief Alfred Sam, and Marcus Garvey, stressed racial solidarity, ethnic pride, and emigration to Africa. While novelists from Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932) to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, along with a host of African-American ragtime, blues, and jazz musicians, implicitly challenged segregation by underscoring African Americans’ cultural contribution to the nation as a whole, millions of southern blacks voted with their feet by moving north.

Amid black migration northward, the growing importance of the black vote, and the rising political awareness of African peoples worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans fashioned a viable critique of the South's white-supremacist and segregationist ideology. The international and domestic politics developed from this transformed perspective underlay the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, and fueled the black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. By 1965 racial segregation had been all but dismantled throughout the South. The promise of economic, social, and political equality in the region—and the nation—however, has yet to be fulfilled.

See also African American Religion; Antislavery; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Movement; Gilded Age; King, Martin Luther Jr.; Minstrelsy; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era; Race and Ethnicity; Race, Concept of; Racism; Randolph, A. Phillip; Scottsboro Case; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Trotter, William Monroe; Twenties, The.

"Battle Royal"
Ralph Ellison from "The Art of Fiction" interview "The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life"

Narrator

• What meanings (note plural) can the title have?
• Why does the narrator call himself "invisible"?
• Why is the narrator nameless?
• What's narrator's speech about? How is it ironic in the context of the story? Why is he so interested in giving his speech?
• Has the narrator learned from this experience? If so what? If not, why?

Character

• Ellison writes in "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,"that "seldom conceive Negro characters possessing the full, complex ambiguity of the human. Too often what is presented as the American Negro (a most complex example of Western man) emerges an oversimplified clown, a beast or an angel. Seldom is he drawn as that sensitively focused process of opposites, of good and evil, of instinct and intellect, of passion and spirituality, which great literary art has projected as the image of man" (qtd. in Biley)
• What's the background of the grandfather? Why does the grandfather call himself a "traitor" (244)? How can "meekness" be a "dangerous activity" – and to whom? Why does the narrator feel "safe" from this grandfather at the end of the story (253)?
• Class: why does Tatlock want to knock out the narrator? Why refuse the money? Why does Ellison include this?

Setting

• Who from the town attends "the Battle"? Why these people?
• Consider the setting: review material on lesson plans, then discuss connection to story.
  • Localized setting: hotel ballroom – what's it like in there?

Symbolism

• Why have the scene with the naked dancer?
• What are some connections between the dancer and the boys?
• Why is the money on an electrified mat? And what do we find out about this money?
• The critic Liz Brent argues that "The central figurative motif of Ellison's story is that of war." Is this true? Is there more than one war?
• Liz Brent also notes the circus and animal symbolism: how do each of these function in the story – both separately and together.
• Symbolic language: why is the boy blindfolded? Why is he later able to see dimly through the blindfold?
• Why so many mentions of him swallowing his blood? 251-252. What can blood symbolize here?
• At least one critic notes the name of the shop where the narrator gets his briefcase from: Shad Whitemore: symbolism?

Inference

• Odd incident on page 247: what's going on with the man named "Jackson"? What does he want to do? What's the response of the other men?

Style

• What's ironic about the difference between social responsibility and social equality: why do the whites laugh at one and freeze on the other?

Group work "Battle Royal" - Remember to include quotes from the story:
Answer the questions on page 255 and 256 in this order
1. Question 2
2. Question 7
3. Question 8
4. Question 10
5. Question 11
6. Question 1
7. Ellison states that "The major flaw in the hero's character is his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success, and this was the specific form of his "innocence."" (Art of fiction). How is this true?

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

• What scenes are humorous in this story? Why include them?
• How is the grandmother described? How does this set out her character?
• Why have the grandmother so much the cause of the accident?
• Literal and figurative question: Why does the Grandma say that that Misfit is "one of my babies?" (377).
• What does the Misfit mean when he says "She would have been a good woman [ . . . ] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (377).
• What do you make of the choices set out by the Misfit: because of Jesus "it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left be best way you can – by killing somebody or burning [377] down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness" (376-77)?
• What do you make of the title of the story? Ironic?
• Why does the monkey climb into the tree when it sees the kids (369)?
• What about the kids – particularly June Star 370, 371;
• What foreshadowing of their deaths do you note in the story? What's the name of the town where they turn off of the main road? ; what kind of car are the criminals driving?
  

"Revelation"

For O’Connor, insight has distinctly religious qualities. A devout Catholic, she firmly believed that god did indeed manifest himself on earth through a human medium. In a 1960 letter O'Connor noted both the prevalence of grace in her work and its effect: "There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected" (373). The problem, thought O'Connor, was that we are now too jaded/anesthetized/irreligious to recognize it. She believed that our senses were too dulled to recognize the manifestation of grace; the only way to cut through the layers of apathy, ignorance, and plain stupidity, she felt, was violence. Connecting this violence to grace made religious sense to O'Connor. As she noted in a letter, "This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring" (411). This religious version of the pain and pleasure principle results in fiction peopled with serial murders, kindly (if meddlesome) grandmothers, assorted bigots, freaks, and hypocrites. In other words, a good read.

• What is Mary Grace so angry about?
• Why is Mrs. Turpin so content?
• Does Mrs. Turpin feel she is prejudiced? How can you tell?
• How are blacks depicted in this story?
• How are both the grandmother in "Good" and Mrs. Turpin similar? How are they different?
• What does this story reveal about Southern values? What does it reveal about the change in Southern values
• How does the bible say the world will world end? Which book of the bible says this? How is this end both good and bad? How is fire both good and bad? How does this connect to the story?
• Does Mrs. Turpin believe she is prejudiced? How can you tell? Is she?
• In paragraph 138, Mrs. Turpin is compared to Job – is the comparison apt? Why?
• Why does O'Connor have Mrs. Turpin say "Thank you Jesus" right before she's hit with Human Development? Is it only ironic, or does it have deeper meaning?
• Why does Mary Grace strike Mrs. Turpin – and not the "white-trash woman"?
• What mystery does Mrs. Turpin find in the hogs (para 190) – and why does she look to hogs to find it?
• Who is Mrs. Turpin speaking to in paras 180-186? Is this the way you usually talk to this person? What is this person's answer?
• What's the climax of the story? What's the crisis? What is the conclusion?
• Does Mrs. Turpin ultimately accept or reject the offering of Grace?
• What is the narrator's attitude toward Mrs. Turpin at the beginning and end of the story? Point to specific examples that show this. Does it change?
  

Group Questions: O'Connor -- Quotes please

1. What's the role of violence in O'Connor's fiction? How does it play into Southern values, as explained in the section "Literature of the South" in the textbook?
2. What do the stories (both Ellison's and O'Connor's suggest about race relations in the American South in the mid twentieth century? Develop several different ideas or statements on this.
3. All of these stories (Ellison's and O'Connor's) involve an epiphany or initiation of some kind (see "What is an Initiation Story?" page 254). For each story, state what the main character learns, explain how the story shows this.
4. O'Connor often uses religious themes -- grace, salvation, redemption, sin -- in her work. How does she move from the sacred to the secular? How do the religious ideas in her work connect to broader, more generally humanist ideas.

© David Bordelon