The boy dont answer her no more. have chosen to tell the story from a number of different perspectives. View Cart . This comment incites a young mana teacher, James thinks, or a studentto join in. It is a testimony to Gaines's skill as a writer and storyteller that many people believe Jane Pittman was a real person. The overarching theme in this story is change and transformation. Whatever the narrative gains by being told through Jamess eyes would need to add a great deal to offset these drawbacks. Furthermore, the story implies that the community can continue to provide the individual with emotional support in his efforts to fulfill his individual needs. On the other hand, the student maintains a defensible position, but his egotistical stance exposes his feelings of alienation from his community. "The Sky is Gray" should be a required literary experience for both adults and students who share Louisiana's educational complexity. Short Stories for Students. The Sky Is Gray: Directed by Stan Lathan. This poor, Negro boy, James, lives with his mother and five other relatives while his father is away. The woman wonders why the Lord allows people to suffer, saying that she doesnt understand it, but the preacher concludes that its something no human can understand. And by the end of the story, the reader does indeed sense that there has been some change to who James is in that short span, a sense reinforced by his mothers assertion that he is not a bum, but a man. The fact that neither story offers a resolution to the underlying conflict apparent in the situations is indicative of the contemporary nature of the issue which Gaines raises. She has cut herself completely off from the community which conceivably could have provided her with support while her husband does his tour of duty in the army. Action is the only thing. He could have told it through the eyes of Jamess mother Octavia, or Val; he could have told it in epistolary form (as a letter) from Jamess mother to his father; or from an omniscient perspective, one that allowed him to describe the sensory and sentient world from all of these vantage points in turn. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. James is sympathetic without being an object of sympathy; the reader feels his cold, his confusion, his hunger directly, authentically, without the intrusion of another character or narrators impressions or observations. Not surprisingly, the lions share of critiques fall into the first camp, and even the structural readings include didactic (instructive) digressions in almost every case. Though still a child, James is on the verge of youth. The conflict in these two stories further illustrates the importance of the changes taking place within Southern black culture to the development of the social consciousness of children. My students, of multi-ethnicities, enjoyed following along in . The gray of the sky which hangs threateningly over the action of the story symbolizes the dangers inherent in the extremes which James must reconcile. 1. . It suggests at first the bleak mood of the story but also hints at hope in the future. Again, Gaines is shrewd enough not to let James end his ordeal at this point but forces him to confront the obstacles of bitter cold and hunger in order to accomplish his sensory rite de passage. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, because there were no high schools for blacks near his home. Characters Publication date 1979 Topics Feature films, Feature films, Short Stories., Blacks. Cane, c. 1917 Jamess mother Octavia is a strong, proud, uncompromising woman largely based on Gainess own mother. In this case, consciousness raising of blacks should not lead to an alienation from the community as it has for the student and Octavia; it should provide the basis for bettering the community. Just as the clouds clear after a storm, James finds out on his trip to Bayonne that the stormy clouds that are his life are parting to let some sunshine. The story occurs on a cold winter day in Louisiana, whose gray sky suggests the lack of hope for many African Americans. James's mother accompanies her son to town to see about the boy's nagging toothache, and his journey soon becomes an eye-opening odyssey. As the narrative opens, James and his mother, Octavia, are waiting by the roadside for the bus that will carry them to . 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. The Sky is Gray is a bildungsroman, a story describing the growth of a child into adulthood. . Reading Gaines first, foremost, always, and only as a black author, an author of race and race issues, rather than primarily as an imaginative author, an author of ideas, delimits the kinds of questions one can ask about his works and necessarily diminishes the readers appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works. With the exception of Auntie and Mr. Bayonne, who attempt to explain his mothers cold, dispassionate treatment of him on one occasion, James is alienated in his effort to come to grips with both the social and personal forces governing his life. THE SKY IS GRAY by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968. Understanding The Sky is Gray requires that one not only understand something about the Louisiana of the 1930s and 1940s but also understand what was happening with regard to race in the United States during the 1960s, because the events of what later came to be called the Civil Rights era made a substantial and lasting impression on Gaines, one that can be seen not too far beneath the surface of The Sky is Gray in the person of the student and in the storys preoccupation with racial inequality. With Olivia Cole, James Bond III, Margaret Avery, Cleavon Little. Octavia overcomes the hardships of segregation and poverty while doing so. It suggests at first the bleak mood of the story but also hints at hope in the future. 545-58. Put another way, if Gainess stories were set in the India of 1946, two years before partition, if the primary groups described were Muslim and Hindu, rather than black and white, would the stories still merit reading? Conversations with Ernest Gaines, Mississippi: Mississippi University Press, 1995. How? These days, we know how to bring summer closer.<br><br>A plate of hot cherries, juicy, smelling berries, here it is summer on ! On the other hand, James in The Sky Is Gray will never know the values of communal bonds if Octavia has her way. Unfortunately, I was born too late to believe in your God. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Gaines was left in the care of his great aunt, Augustine Jefferson, a woman he preferred to call his aunt and whom he considered one of the most powerful influences on the formation of his character. In Ernest J. Gaines "The Sky Is Gray", Octavia finds out the hard way. 414-25. As they ride in the back of the bus reserved for blacks and walk the streets of . In such a cultural climate, the spiritual and emotional well-being of both the community and the individual is threatened. 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. If one reverts to the easiest sort of race-based reading, one will invariably decide to read the story as one about victimhood. There he developed a keen interest in reading, and he wrote his first novel the next year; on news of its rejection, he destroyed the only manuscript copy he possessed. Consider, for example, the contradiction in Babbs representation of Octavia as on the one hand trying to keep James from the cold while adher[ing] to strict rules of racial separation, but on the other being enabled by her dissembling to keep him warm without compromising her dignity. Exactly what is keeping James cold, one wondersstrict rules of racial separation, or Octavias uncompromised dignity? Author Biography The minister accepts God unquestioningly, while the student rejects God because belief in Him alleviates the need to question: Show me one reason to believe in the existence of a God, the boy says. His narrative begins as he and his mother wait for a bus to take them to a dentists office where James is to have his tooth pulled and ends that same day, sometime shortly before (the reader presumes) that tooth is finally pulled. At the end of the story, the narrator has not reached the dentists chair, and the problem of the toothache, which motivates the present action, has not yet been solved(Bell) The setup of this story is based on the premise of James having horrible tooth pain which needs attention. It is not possible, within the scope of this essay, to survey all of Gainess works, or to make more than a cursory pass through The Sky is Gray. It is also not possible, in a discussion of what Im calling moral readings, to avoid some necessary oversimplifications of the complex issues surrounding and clouding the idea of race. In short, the unfortunate consequence of exclusively race-based readings is that they narrow the readers scope of inquiry, inviting the reader to ask fewer questions and questions of a more particular nature than one would ask of an author like James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, or J. M. Coetzeeeach of whose writings are intimately concerned with different conceptions of race and their ramifications. Lowe, John., editor. Their thought process, social standing, and personality are the key aspects that influence their pathway to maturity. Subsequent publications included the short stories A Long Day in November (1959), Just Like a Tree (1962), and The Sky is Gray (1963), and the novels Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), In My Fathers House (1978) A Gathering of Old Men (1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). The title of the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest Gaines is ironic. The argument between the men focuses on the existence of God. I know I dont.). Nor is it likely a coincidence that I . Historical Context The action in The Sky is Gray is broken up into thirteen short sections which describe a half day or so in the life of James, an eight-year-old black boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. Doing. Gaines's prose is stark, spare, unrelenting in its precision and honesty. RT @BuddhistCeo: Morning meditation The first day of Spring I look from the zendo window Hoping the world has changed Alas no There is frost on the ground And the sky is gray As I sit zazen I dream of summer flowers The bell rings I smile I bow #thebuddistceo #buddhism #poetry #meditation . Washington Irving, The Sky is Gray by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968, The Slavery Issue: Western Politics and the Compromise of 1850, https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray. As they ride in the back of the bus reserved for blacks and walk the streets of Bayonne, James, the first-person narrator, acutely evokes his almost unbearable feelings of pain, cold, and hunger: Only his love and respect for his mother prevent him from complaining. Ernest Gaines, 1968 his mother and five other relatives while his father is.! While doing so of both the community and the individual is threatened Jamess eyes need. 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