Thursday, April 13, 2017
Reading Response: James Baldwin and Emmett Till
For Tuesday's reading response, you can choose to focus on the essays or on two of the poems. Think about how the works are in dialogue with one another. How are they responding to a similar idea or using a similar strategy to convey their point? Where do they diverge or rely on contrasting strategies? What do you learn by reading them together? This response is due by class time on Tuesday, April 18.
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By reading through Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby and Emmett Till’s Glass Top Casket, I got to experience poem in a whole different level. Just by reading through a different lens made something as simple as a poem bring out such power in a human being. These two poems connect in very similar ways because they convey the muderous death of Emmett Till in such powerful language.
ReplyDeleteFirst, reading the titleTallahatchie Lullabye, Baby made me instantly stop and think if this title was supposed to bring a sense of irony to the reader who is reading this poem. As you dive into reading this poem, the choice of word that is being used to describe the events seems so choppy and disrupted. It is not like any other ordinary poem filled with smooth language and rhythm. The sense of peace that a lullaby should bring to a person is clearly not what is being brought to Emmett Till. The poet incorporates a lot of alliteration such as “up skimming skin upon pond scum skiff-ish”, to make it hard for the readers to really understand what is going on in the poem. Uncovering the poem, we see that Emmett was beaten, bruised, and had to endure much pain to come to his death. The poet expresses the pain in words such as “who’s a bruise to blue hue hatchie”, to show the brutality. Not only that, through the usage of repetition, the pain and suffering Emmett had to endure really sticks to the reader. After reading it a couple of times, I realized the irony of this “Lullabye”. It was a description of brutal events that occurred when Emmett Till was murdered.
Then, connecting his death, “Emmett Till’s Glass Top Casket” continues to illustrate the emotions of Emmett through an impactful usage of the casket. It gives a clearer picture to what happened to Emmett after his murder. He was put into this casket and was thrown into the water. Hints such as “but this is where the city ends, after all, and I float still, after the footfall fade”, shows how his body was left wandering in the water in a casket. The emotional impact this poem brought upon the reader, especially reading the previous poem hits hard with the ending saying: “Once I held a boy who didn’t look like a boy”. I think this phrase is extremely powerful, especially when it is put near the end because it shows that by the time he was found, it was already hard to recognize this little boy’s features. These two poems bring out the inhumane side of humanity, it shows the extent that people are willing to go to treat those who are indifferent and minor based on their own judgement.
In the poems, “Emmett Till’s Glass-Topped Casket” by Cornelius Eady and “Tallahatchie Lullaby, Baby” by Douglas Kearney the author’s use certain objects and scenery that are connected with Emmett Till’s death in order to convey their messages. The sentiment expressed in these poems transcend subjectivity and cause the reader to experience the magnitude of this dark time in history from a neutral point of view. Essentially, it is due to a direct consequence of the horrific nature and cause of Emmett Till’s death that enables the author’s to convey this truth through a casket and a pond. By reading these two together, our understanding of the situation is only enhanced. Whether it be from the point of view of the casket or the river, a terrible happening took place concerning Emmett Till that had huge implications then and those implications still linger within our society today.
ReplyDeleteConcerning “Tallahatchie Lullaby, Baby” Douglas Kearney uses imagery, and alliteration in order to convey his message. This poem is not allowed to be read smoothly. Through alliteration the reader must stop and break up each phrasing in order to catch the hidden meaning within. Not only does it cause the reader to pause, it also helps brings about a sense of emotion and life within it. We also have imagery of the river and the ecosystem that it creates which serves as witnesses to Emmett Till’s body being chucked into the ‘hatchie.’ An example of imagery and alliteration at work here could be seen in these lines from the poem; “cattatil casts tattles Till tale, lowing low along the hollow crickets chirrup and ribbits lick-up what’s chucked the ‘hatchie swallow.” The cattails are plants that grow along the Mississippi. Here they become eyewitnesses to Till’s death and they tattle amongst each other, spreading what they know along the river bank, until the crickets chirp and frogs ribbit, creating the lullaby.
In Eady’s poem we see the river being symbolic here too, however, the focus is on that of the coffin. Eady’s poem begins with “By the time they cracked me open again, topside, abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest.” The coffin had become a home for possums. This may be a stretch, but Eady might be using these creatures renown for their ability to play dead to in a sense show how though we may have thought situations like Emmett Till are in the past, racism is still alive. This poem also depicts the horrendous condition in which Emmett Till’s body had been mutilated. When the people who open the casket have a ‘wild surprise’ as possums inhabit it, this alludes back to the shock on the faces of those who saw Emmett Till in the casket years prior.
The two poems that I have decided to focus on are “Emmett Till” by Wanda Coleman and “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket” by Cornelius Eady. Both of these poems are dealing with the same issue and use some strategies that are similar to each other and also some strategies that are different. Despite their differences, it is very clear to see that both are very motivated to portraying the injustice towards the murder of Emmett Till, and the African-American community as a whole.
ReplyDeleteIn the poem “Emmett Till”, Coleman uses very powerful vocabulary in order to help the reader to feel the tragedy more. One of the things Coleman writes strike very hard such as, “from the deep dank murk of consciousness a birth”. This is very powerful imagery as well and it really helps the reader to better imagine the tragedy of Emmett Till. This is similar to some of the strategies that Eady uses in “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket”. Written from the point of view of Emmett Till’s casket, the poem describes that, “Once I held a boy who didn’t look like a boy”. This is very similar to Coleman’s poem because helps the reader to better understand what kind of pain and suffering Till went through. Both of these poems illustrate the injustice and lack of recognition from the judicial system at the time.
There were a few differences in the strategies used to convey the story and message between these two poems. In Coleman’s poem, she used incomplete sentences and short bursts of information possibly to represent how at first, the world only had bits and pieces of what happened to Emmett Till. This also could have been done in order to represent the shock of what happened and how it eventually shocked a new wave of the civil rights movement. This is somewhat different than what Eady did in his poem. His poem was shorter and had a lighter tone to it which was interesting because the tone did not match the message of the poem. The personification of the casket seemed to lighten the blow of one of the last lines that said it held a boy that didn’t look like a boy.