Week in Seven Words #128

antsy
People shuffle between the express and local sides of the platform as the announcer makes a calm droning promise that a train is just one stop away.

confer
The little office where we work, with the utilitarian furniture and the crushed earwig on the wall, feels like a battle command room.

coverlet
All eyes on the little one as he tumbles among the blankets.

glimpsing
I like when older people suddenly become very young; the moment he stops watering the grass and springs after the soccer ball, I can see him as he was forty or fifty years ago.

miscellany
Shells and feathers, old birds' nests and flowers on a white wood shelf.

self-made
He's a self-proclaimed superhero and has made a little kit for himself complete with a badge and a book illustrating his many battles against monsters, robots, and supervillains. Most impressive to me is the way he carefully writes in the book, slowly spelling out words while sounding them out to himself. I'm so proud of him.

three-pointer
The hoop in the basketball court is way too high for him but he keeps aiming for it anyway. Not caring for once about the score, he has fun trying to steal the ball from me and laughs at how I bob around, shoes squeaking and arms waving wildly, as I mount an exaggerated but incompetent defense.

Scenes from a green Fourth of July

One of the day's highlights was walking by the lake in Central Park and through the Ramble, which is my favorite part of the park.

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now?
- from "You Reading This, Be Ready" by William Stafford

Week in Seven Words #127

filament
A friend I haven't seen or spoken to in years, speaks to me in a gift I find while cleaning out a drawer: a little jewelry box and in it a small scrolling paper bearing a message about dreams, beauty, and light. Her name signed at the bottom.

impassioned
Ray Charles sang the best rendition of "America the Beautiful" I've heard so far.

larded
A paper made indigestible by jargon.

nonpartisan
Napping on a hot afternoon is the best way to stay clear of trouble.

panicled
Purple hydrangea blossoms and books neatly stacked on my newly tidied desk.

retrogress
Without knowing it, they push me towards making the same unsuitable choices as before.

sobering
The rumble of fireworks and the sigh and shout of the crowds are pierced from time to time by an ambulance or firetruck wailing in the distance.

Extracts: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Don't you see there isn't any real progress... there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us - our own little mirage that we think is the future.

A Raisin in the Sun is a wonderful play, one of the best I've read in a while. Lorraine Hansberry shows how people define themselves and strive for their dreams; in progressing towards what they hope will be a better life, they discover new sources of strength in themselves but also risk self-destruction and undermining others. The play ends on a mix of good spirits and foreboding; the Younger family haven't had it easy up until that point, and they have frightening circumstances to deal with in the future, but they're still alive, fighting with one other and against the world.

Meet the Youngers
The Youngers are a black family living in Chicago's South Side in the years after World War II. The patriarch of the family, Big Walter, has passed away, and his material legacy is an insurance check worth 10,000 dollars - a boon to his family, who have long wanted to get out of their airless, lightless hole of an apartment.

There are six of them: Lena (Mama), Big Walter's widow and the matriarch of the family; their adult children, Walter Lee and Beneatha; and Walter Lee's wife, Ruth, and son, Travis.

Walter Lee is a chauffeur, and both Lena and Ruth work as domestic servants, cooking and cleaning in white people's homes. Unlike Walter Lee, it's apparent that Lena and Ruth don't stop working when they get home; with some help from Beneatha, they take care of all the chores in their apartment, while Walter Lee spends time with his friends, shooting the breeze and cooking up grand business schemes. Beneatha (who at a low point in the play speaks the words excerpted at the start of the post) is a college student, a first for her family. In the course of the play she's also wooed by two very different men - George Murchison and Joseph Asagai - each representing a certain kind of future for her, should she choose one of them.

Dreams deferred, denied, or achieved
Everyone in the Younger family has a dream they want to realize. For Beneatha it's becoming a doctor, and for Walter Lee it's running his own business as a bigshot executive. Lena's primary goal is to move to a real house, something Ruth longs for as well. The only affordable neighborhood within an easy distance of their workplaces in the city is a suburb where only white families live.

Personal flaws and family tension could keep their dreams from materializing. Hansberry might have gone the route of having the family be on the same page, united by the same beliefs and outlook as they fight for a better life, but instead she wrote them as messy and real. Walter Lee fights a good deal with his sister about the man she should marry, and with Lena about what to do with the 10,000 dollars; he wants a chance to be his own boss, and if Beneath got to go to college, why can't he have his opportunity to develop himself?

Walter Lee and Ruth's marriage also goes through a lot of strain. Ruth doesn't have Beneatha's booksmarts or Lena's central position in the family, but it's a testament to Hansberry's writing skills that instead of being a sidelined two-dimensional figure she's distinct, given good lines, a dry wit and a complex character, and made to confront her own difficult choices. As for Lena, she looks at her kids with love and pride and, at times, incomprehension. Of those in the younger generation, Ruth (the aptly named daughter-in-law), is the only one who consistently connects with her.

On top of all the intrafamilial conflict, there are people in their community who would resent their move to a better home, taking it as a sign that the Younger family doesn't know "their place." The one neighbor we do see, Mrs. Johnson, is a riot - a funny portrait of a woman who tries to pass off her nosiness and envy as sincere concern. There are also other people in their community who would more actively undermine their attempts to realize their dream.

And finally there's the all-white neighborhood they want to move to. The neighborhood association sends a representative to try to dissuade them from coming to live there; in a morbidly funny moment, Beneatha refers to him as the "Welcoming Committee," a joke taken up by Ruth and Walter Lee:

Mama: What he want?
Ruth: (In the same mood as Beneath and Walter) To welcome you, honey.
Walter: He said they can't hardly wait. He said the one thing they don't have, that they just dying to have out there, is a fine family of fine colored people!

Lorraine Hansberry's own parents fought racial residential segregation in the northern U.S. (read about the Supreme Court Case, Hansberry vs. Lee) and she knew first hand how violent the situation could get, with black families getting fire-bombed out of their homes, attacked by mobs, and worse.

What is progress?
Returning to the excerpt at the top of the post - is progress an illusion? It's fitting that Beneatha makes this pessimistic pronouncement, as someone who's still figuring out her identity.

On the one hand she's the first college-educated person in her family and wants to be a doctor. But if she marries could she still pursue a career in medicine? (Her brother is leaning on her to marry George Murchison, who would be least likely to support her career.) So what is her identity, her role in the family and society at large, meant to be? And what options are available to her as a black woman who wants to go into medicine? She isn't expected to take charge of her family; for better or worse, Lena comes to expect that of Walter Lee, not necessarily because he has good judgment but because he's the man of the house. With her education and career aspirations Beneatha finds herself in an unprecedented position in her family.

Across the generations, the Younger family has progressed out of slavery, then out of the South, to live in their own apartment and to send one family member to college. Even when the "Welcoming Committee" representative from the white neighborhood comes to speak with them, he doesn't threaten them outright, as Beneatha puts it:

Oh - Mama - they don't do it like that any more. He talked Brotherhood. He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Christian fellowship.

Progress seems to work uphill, with backsliding and resistance for every bit of ground gained. The newer generations - Walter Lee and Beneatha - are building off of the sacrifices of their parents and forebears in different ways, while also fighting certain battles all over again: not what previous generations fought against - not slavery and not the southern Ku Klux Klan specifically - but against similar forces, in new shapes and forms. They also fight to understand who they are and where they belong in society, and to understand how the legacy of their parents and ancestors affects them; they absorb it, honor it, chafe against it, turn to it sometimes for guidance and mock or ignore it otherwise. The sum total of Big Walter's legacy - along with what Lena has imparted to her kids - is more than 10,000 dollars.

Any push for progress requires risk. Sometimes the desire for a better life is so consuming that it blinds people to potential dangers as they work impatiently towards it. Then again, focusing too much on the dangers keeps people where they are, relatively safe but also miserable and diminished.

Why haven't we seen more of Hansberry?
In addition to being very active in the Civil Rights movement, Lorraine Hansberry made history in theater with A Raisin in the Sun, becoming the youngest American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Tragically her life was cut short, at age 34, by pancreatic cancer.

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I read The Modern Library edition of A Raisin in the Sun; it's also the first work I'm writing up for the Classics Club Challenge (you can find the link to the challenge post in the Reading Lists tab at the top of the page as well).

Week in Seven Words #126

armed
I find a black and white photo of her tucked inside a book. It was taken decades ago, during her army training. She stands by a tree and holds a gun, the butt of it resting against the ground; she looks at the photographer with a smile that gives away nothing.

captured
She sits alone in her roller-skating gear and with a smile and a little wave snaps a photo of herself out in the bright world.

missed
On a walk in the park I come across a few actors who are yelling things at each other that sound vaguely Shakespearean but don't carry well in the open air. I ask a couple of people who are leaving, "What play is this?" Silently they point to my feet, where I stand on the giant HAMLET written on the pavement in pink chalk. (To thine own clueless self be true.) Speaking of which, Polonius comes out soon after, and you can tell he's an experienced actor. His voice projects, and he speaks his lines well. Too bad he has to die sooner than everyone else.

packing
I'm starting to associate my old apartment with boxes and hamburgers and papers that multiply every time I look the other way.

sapless
I watch eleven and a half minutes (yes I counted) of yet another T.V. show for kids where the characters don't have distinct personalities - they all do the same things and sound alike when they speak. Their misunderstandings are minor and are resolved almost immediately. The message for kids is that if you and your friends are as similar as possible there's less of a chance that you'll be inconvenienced by disagreements, compromises, and independent thoughts.

siesta
In the shade of the beech tree the mallards are napping.

sitting duck
When the car is stuck in traffic, and the frustrated driver is just spoiling for a fight, there you are, captive in the passenger's seat.

Good Short Fiction: Coyote Peyote (by Carole Nelson Douglas)

Title: Coyote Peyote
Author: Carole Nelson Douglas
Where I read it: Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories (ed. Ellen Datlow)

Midnight Louie works as a detective in Las Vegas. You can find him at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino by the koi pond, which supplies him his dinner. He cuts a striking figure - black with "tourmaline-green" eyes and "topping twenty pounds soaking wet" - and has a pretty high opinion of himself. It isn't easy being the foremost feline detective (maybe the only feline detective?) in a city like Las Vegas.

In the story he's approached by a wild coyote who needs his help; the coyote death rate has soared at the borders of a real estate development called Peyote Skies just outside the city. Louie's first assumption is that they're getting killed off for trespassing:

No wonder the coyotes are goners. They were trespassing on some high-end new real estate of the first water. I sit under one of the paired yucca trees that mark the development's entrance to read the billboard, which features colors like trendy turquoise, orange and lavender bordered in a chorus line of alternating jalapeno peppers and howling coyotes.

Though I was curious about the mystery of the dying coyotes (and a dark tale it turned out to be) it was really Louie himself - and the idea of a cat detective - that drew me into the story (I'm sure he'd be happy about that). He narrates like a film noir detective - cool and perceptive, given to colorful descriptions, and knowing just how good he is. There's no femme fatale in the story, but he does get a sidekick for a while - Happy Hocks, a half-grown coyote who worships the ground Louie struts on. Along with the humor, attitude, and striking characterizations I loved the strong sense of place in this story: Las Vegas and its environs through the eyes of a feline who's seen it all.

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Other stories in this collection include Puss-Cat (by Reggie Oliver) and The White Cat (by Joyce Carol Oates), along with Every Angel is Terrifying (by John Kessel), Tiger in the Snow (by Daniel Wynn Barber), Gordon the Self-Made Cat by Peter S. Beagle, and Guardians by George R. R. Martin.

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This post has been linked to at this week's Short Stories on Wednesdays at Simple Clockwork.

Week in Seven Words #125

assured
He loves looking at photos of his parents and older siblings. When you point them out one by one and name them he smiles confidently. To them he belongs, and they belong to him.

convection
Throughout the heatwave I resolutely (many would say idiotically) leave the air conditioning off; there's a breeze coming in through the window - a warm breeze, but at least the air is circulating – and I can live with that. When the thunderstorm finally rips through the city, I notice at once how the quality of the air changes, pouring in cool and damp. I don't think I've ever loved thunderstorms more.

curious
On the subway a young man is openly reading a paperback copy of Fifty Shades of Gray. From time to time he looks up from the book and stares into the middle distance.

fortitude
I'm having a pleasant time, even though the sun's in my eyes and the rock I'm sitting on is trying to pry open a new orifice in my body.

parched
On a hot dark night people are gathered moth-like around the lit fountain.

pigments
At the restaurant he turns the table into a palette on which he mixes the dull green of smushed peas with glossy drippings of soy sauce and bright ketchup red.

reeled
I can't remember the last time I set foot in a movie theater (was it for The Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009?), but I enjoy the experience. It's a week night, so it isn't too crowded. I like the hugeness of the sights and sounds. I even like the previews (no matter how bad a movie turns out to be, the previews are pretty much always entertaining).