ACT & College Preparation Course for the Christian Student

No one knew how to live with race in a just way, although justice never really was a topic of anyone’s conversation. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature.” Franklin is intimating that one can create his own reality to justify almost any action or opinion. In other words, many modern people suspend beliefs; pretend, in other words, to obtain their desires. Convenient delusions.

We have created a language to describe American people groups. “White trash” were poor white people. “N-----” were African-Americans who “misbehaved” and “Nigras” were African-Americans who conformed to what we considered a proper African-American to be. In the minds of my mother, my grandmother, and countless other community members, the idea of race, then, emerged from the ways that social meaning becomes attached to physical differences. “Black” meant subservient; “White” meant domination.

The White community pursued power and convinced themselves they were entitled to it.

Racial discussions were complicated by the myth of homogeneity — as if there were a pure white and black race. But, ironically, American racial homogeneity was an illusion. Very few white southerners in my community were 100 percent black or white. Miscegenation had been epidemic for over a century.

Nonetheless, most of my white neighbors normally described their racial identity in homogeneous terms. The reality was that individuals and their racial communities were not homogeneous. When one was classified white, one enjoyed the privileges of the dominant caste. Non-whites did not enjoy these privileges. So the whole discussion of American racism was made even more complicated by the ambiguous defining apparatus of American racial language. But my white community needed this language and needed a language that was homogeneous and antiseptic.

The problem was, as I intimated, my grandparents wanted to build their mansion too close to what my community called “N--- Town.” At least Mammaw wanted to build it there; my grandfather most assuredly did not. He wanted to build his house in the new Wolf Project where all sensible, prosperous, blue-blooded white southerners lived. But he lacked imagination and he knew it, so he dutifully submitted the decision to Mammaw. Not that he could do anything else. No one ever denied Mammaw anything that she really wanted.

Mammaw was no Civil Rights activist nor did she pretend that she had any high moral standards. Mammaw was no hypocrite. She was a cold realist and she cared for no one more than herself. Her egotism was unalloyed with any idealism. She loved us, her family, dearly but she loved herself more. She knew a propitious place to build a house and was not going to let the absence of money or the pretension of Southern society stop her.

Old man John John Parker at the bank at first denied her request. But Mammaw walked into his business, the Fitzgerald County Stock Exchange, sat on his lap, kissed him on the cheek, and asked in her most polished and sophisticated Southern accent, “Please, Mr. John John, will you loan me the money to build my house?”

Whether from warm enticement of further benefits, like homemade pecan pie and fried squirrel brains or from cold fear that she would do something else to embarrass him, Old Man Parker loaned her the money at no interest. The deal was sealed when Mammaw promised to bake him a Christmas pecan pie for the rest of his life. And she did. Parker ate pecan pie every Christmas until he died. (In fact, it may have killed him — when he died he weighed a whopping 330 pounds.) Only once did Mammaw fail to live up to her bargain — one season the pecan crop was abysmally bad and she had to substitute Vermont walnuts. Old Man Parker hardly noticed because Mammaw compensated the loss with her 100-proof rum cake! Mammaw did not like to cook — nor did she have to cook — she always had servants. But when she did anything, cooking, building a house, playing hide and seek with her grandchildren, she played and cooked to win.

Married when she was 15 and divorced when she was 16, Mammaw was truly an iconoclast. She was the first unrepentant divorced woman my small Southern railroad town had ever known. Her first husband abused her once and she nearly killed him. In fact, she would have killed him but the shotgun with which she shot him was loaded with number eight shot and only made him lame for life. She merely walked away from the marriage and the man. It was beneath her to file for divorce — but Judge Johnstown knew what she wanted, everyone did, so he filed and granted divorce within the week. Her first husband never remarried and suffered in ebullient regret for the rest of his life. For penance, he became a United Pentecostal pastor. As far as I know, Mammaw never spoke or thought of the man again.

RITING

Writing with Emotion

This essay is about a very emotional incident, the death of a helpless dog. Answer the questions that follow this poem.

Dog’s Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.

Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn

To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor

And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.

The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.

As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin

And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed

And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.

We found her twisted and limp but still alive.

In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur

And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.

Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,

Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,

Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame

Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor

To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.2

John Updike

What is the tone or mood of this poem?
How does he create the tone or mood of this poem?

EADING

Tone

What is the tone of the following passage? Highlight verbal clues that determine what this tone is.

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head. Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a Missionary — there were many like her — such as the world will do well never to breed again.

All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. “A great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!”

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.3 (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

Diction Clues: Syntax Clues:

OCABULARY

The Old Man and the Sea5

Ernest Hemingway

In The Old Man and the Sea, most of the action occurs during three days and three nights on the sea. There is also a “day before” and part of a “day after.” Consider the demands this makes on the writer. Three days in the life of one person — with no other people around. Remarkable! Hemingway does a fantastic job of making a statement about almost all aspects of life.

Suggested Vocabulary Words

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

NGLISH

Agreement

Correct the following sentences.7

“Neither of the sisters were very much deceived.” — Thackeray

“Every one must judge of their own feelings.” — Byron

“Had the doctor been contented to take my dining tables, as anybody in their senses would have done.” — Austen

“If the part deserve any comment, every considering Christian will make it themselves as they go.” — Defoe

“Every person’s happiness depends in part upon the respect they meet in the world. — Paley

“Every nation have their refinements.” — Sterne

“Neither gave vent to their feelings in words.” — Scott

“Each of the nations acted according to their national custom.” — Palgrave

“I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx