The Mercury Reader, Frederick Douglas “Learning to Read and Write” Frederick Douglass was slave who started to learn how to write when he was eight years old. His mistress started teaching him the alphabet. Soon her husband, who didn’t know what was going on, found out that Douglas was learning how to read and he forbade his wife to teach him any longer. He had to find new ways to learn how to read. He started seeing white poor kids in the streets when he was running errands for his master.
In Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery,” Jackson displays the fear of the lottery in the villagers by using symbolism, word choice, and sentence structure. Symbolism [Mr. Summers and Mr. Adams] grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd. Where he stood a little apart from his family.
The lottery is an annual event that has been around for over seventy-seven years and it is practiced by every member of the town but has one single winner. The head of each family draws a small piece of paper from a black box which is kept in a specific place and locked up so nobody can get into it. A slip with a black spot on indicates that the family has been chosen.
When the villagers gather in the morning, she wants the readers to realize the villagers get nervous and quiet when traditional objects are pulled out to begin the lottery. These objects, such as the “black box” (18) and the “three-legged stool” (18), are connected symbols to their ritual. The color black, which symbolizes “complete death” (black) and “mourning” (black), is used frequently giving the image of darkness in the story. A box symbolizes that it “holds a secret” (box) indicating the power that it contains. The “three-legged stool” (18) is considered to support the citizen’s fate and how the people support this ritual.
So much so that as a child he runs away from a foster home and encounters a white police officer and does not know if the police officer is going to hurt him or not. All African Americans in the Jim Crow South are constantly living in fear just as Wright is. Wright has very few school years that he actually finishes due to the fact they constantly have to move around to stay safe and for Wright and his mother to find enough work to survive. Wright faces extreme racism at every job he works also. When he is younger, he helps out whites around their houses for pay and he seems to be treated the same way he would have been treated if he were their slave.
After school a few of the kids start collections stones, soon after their parents started to call them to gather up to get ready for the lottery .Bobby Martin has his pockets full of rocks. After all of the village people had arrived in the square between the post office and the bank, Mr. Summers (the conductor of the lottery), and Mr. Graves (the postmaster and Mr. Summers assistant) did also. Everyone in the village feel bad for him because he has no children and a wife who isn’t’ too pleasant. Mr. Graves sets down a stool and Mr. Summers sets an old black box down on top of it. The black box is older than Old Man Warner, the
Shirley Jackson was the author of “The Lottery” and she showed death by community. Once a year the townspeople gathered together and took a piece of paper from a black box. The first round of the drawing is just for the head of the family. Whichever man has the dotted paper then it is on to everyone in that family taking a draw. Now whoever has drew the paper with the dot on it is the one who gets stoned to death by the townspeople.
What do people believe about it? The original purpose of “The Lottery” was to demonstrate the act of violence and bullying in America. In a way, I believe Jackson was trying to approach her audience in a personal way by introducing a familiar atmosphere for readers to relate to such as the ‘small town’ setting. By doing this, Jackson’s audience realizes and takes notice of the violence in your own environment. With Jackson’s writing style, it makes readers feel involved into the story and helps us visualize abuse in short, dense sentences when Mrs. Hutchinson is beaten with smooth stones.
Both stories deal with gender effecting the decisions and the character’s development because they show men back then had all the power, the showed men making all the decisions, they showed the men and women in their different roles in general life. Now just to recap, we know the information of both stories “The lottery” was the story of the little community that came together for their traditional lottery, they got names of everyone in the community and when everyone was accounted for they started the name drawing. Who ever got the paper with the dot that was marked for death; they died by stones. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” a woman and her husband move into a house for the wife’s sake. She is ill and her husband thinks this is the way to get her better, just not do anything and be away for people for a while.
In reference to the events in Jackson Heights, Gilyard wrote an essay arguing that “the only way to correct injustice is all at once” (95). After presenting his essay to his teacher, Keith went out for a softball game with his school friends. Half-way through the game Lonnie and his crew showed up, messing up the game and started bullying the white boys. In that moment, Keith had a choice to make between sticking with his school-mates, who had done no wrong, or to cross over and join the Black group. Joining Lonnie and his friends was one of the first steps in choosing his culture and those of his skin over doing what was right.