This novel depicts the wide variety of lifestyles of American blacks around the turn of the century, aiming to dispel the myth that all blacks were/are "the same." It describes the experiences of African Americans in both the North and the South, as well as in Europe.  At the same time, it creates a bridge between the slave narratives of the 19th century and the wide variety of forms adopted in the 20th.  Some critics believe that the narrator/protagonist is based on Johnson himself, while others believe he is modelled on Judson Douglas Wetmore, Johnson's friend from Atlanta University and his partner in a law firm in Florida.

Things to Consider:

Identity: Racial/Sexual/Socioeconomic	"The Talented Tenth"
Interracial/Intraracial Relationships	Roles of Books & Music & Language

** Homework Questions ** (See Thursday's Q's )
551:

• Why is the narrator divulging his "secret"?

• Explain what the narrator means when he says "As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat" (552).  What is the benefit of looking back on his childhood days from an adult perspective?

• Why does the teacher use the technique she does to "out" the narrator as a "black"?

• What is the "distorting influence which operates upon each and every coloured man in the United States"(556)?
• Why would, as the narrator says, blacks understand whites better than whites would understand blacks?

• What disappointed him about Jesus? (Remembering that he is only twelve at the time, if that's significant)1

• What does he mean when he says that his father "was all to us that custom and the law would allow" (562)?

• What is his initial reaction to the South and the blacks he first meets there?

• Explain: "The ability to laugh heartily is, in part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the way of the Indian" (566).

• What are the three classes of blacks, according to the narrator? Explain the relationship each class experiences with the whites.

• Who are Red Head & Shiny?
• Why does the speaker's mother tell him, "Don't you bother the coloured children at school" (554)? How had he been bothering "them"?

• What two hobbies relieve the narrator of the  forced loneliness resulting from his self-discovery?

What does he think about the Bible?

• Why is Uncle Tom's Cabin important to the narrator?
• Who is the narrator's father?  How does meeting him help the narrator communicate better with his mother?

• Why does the narrator decide to go to Atlanta University instead of Harvard? How, if at all, does his mother's death affect this decision?

• What does it mean to "register" at the university? Why must he do it?

• What does a "reader" in a cigar factory do?
• How has "the scene of the struggle" shifted for Blacks at this point?
• Why are "the conditions of the whites more to be deplored than that of the blacks" (572)?
• Why do the "advanced element of the coloured race . . . carry the entire weight of the race question" (573)? Would you agree with this statement?

• What is a cakewalk?

• What four things demonstrate to the narrator that blacks have "originality and artistic conception"?
• Why does the narrator move North again?

• What is significant, according to the narrator, about the development of ragtime?

• Why does the millionaire believe that, "I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined coloured man in the United States" (591)?
• The millionaire says this about evil: "We cannot annihilate it; we can only change its form" (591).  What does this mean?

• Explain this reference to the race question:  "The greater portion of the race is unconscious of its influence" (593).

• Why, does the narrator suggest,  do blacks tend to marry lighter-skinned blacks?
• Why do lazy blacks create the longest-lasting impressions of the race?

• Explain: "The main difficulty with the race question does not lie so much in the actual condition of blacks as it does in the mental attitude of whites" (597).

• Explain: "The claim of the Southern  whites that they love the Negro better than the Northern whites do is in a manner true" (598).

• Why do educated blacks at this time feel ashamed of the old slave songs?

• Why does the lynching make the narrator feel ashamed?  How is his reaction related to that of the educated blacks encountering old slave songs?

• How is New York "like a great witch at the gate of the country"(575)?

• How is New York like opium?

• What benefits does the narrator receive from mastering ragtime?

• Why does the narrator go to Europe with the millionaire?

• Why does the narrator decide to become a linguist?

• Why does he get drunk after seeing his half-sister at the opera with his father?

• Explain: "Paris practices its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practices both very seriously" (589).

• Why, according to the millionaire, would it be a handicap to work as a "negro composer"?
• Why does the narrator head South upon his return to the States?

• What have Anglo-Saxons "done," i.e. contributed to humanity?

• Why does the narrator respect the racist white Southerner?

• How does meeting his future wife make passing less of a "joke" to him?

• How does seeing Shiny give the narrator the resolve to "come out" to his beloved?

• What is the reference in the final line: "I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage" (610)?