Group 2 post 2/25

An important theme throughout Plum Bun is the constant struggle for identity particularly because of the diverse complexions in the Murray family. Race during this time period was more than just a social construct, it was a law that categorized and told people who could associate with who. It went much further, defining people 's friends, where people could live and especially what rights certain people had. For example it was appalling that Angela could be viewed as a close friend  just because her friends thought she was white, then, as soon as they learned she was black, they changed their entire perspective of her. Despite having built a trusted friendship with her, all ties were severed simply because of a social construct.

This social construct is so deeply ingrained that the Murray family has a very defining moment in the introduction of this book. While Angela and Mattie are out shopping and "passing" for white they have to blatantly ignore their family members in order to maintain their false identity. In the Home section of Plum Bun race and identity are further emphasized. The Murray family appears to be the perfect family, however there is also a very clear divide within the family. Because of this the characters have individual struggles with maintaining their strong familial bond amidst this chaos. It is difficult to define a family during this time because being black in society is actually counterintuitive to having a wholistic functional family. Mattie is ashamed of the fact she cannot claim her family in public while "passing" so that she can enjoy her simple pleasures of life. Junius and Virginia have had no choice but to come to terms with how their family functions because they do not have the option of disguising themselves in public. Angela is still young and grappling with the anger and misunderstanding of the concept of racism. However she denies these issues more than confronting them because she does not fully understand why her family is the way it is, or rather why society functions the way that it does.

This book is a principal example of this ultimately irrational yet very real and legally enforced social construct of race. It speaks to the value of blackness in society during this time period and how much it factored into the categorization of people. This institutional oppression impacts black people from every aspect, including those who can "pass" and especially those who cannot. As the reader we have the ability to view the different perspectives that something as simple as skin tone can actually be so complex and impactful on one's life despite the fact it technically does not exist.

Group 1

In Plum Bun, Angela is tasked with the difficult choice of whether or not she should pass, or pretend to be white. There are many passages that show both the positive and negative impacts that passing entails. It seems that using her lighter complexion as an advantage throughout the novel will bring some heavy choices that will affect not only Angela, but her family and relationships as well.

Angela is detrimentally affected by her chastised, unincluded treatment by her peers as a girl, and this greatly affects her idea of blackness, causing her to ultimately resent it. She realizes that “passing” gives her a sense of autonomy she never would have known if relegated to the world of black life in America, like her father and Virginia. Upon reaching New York, Angela is immediately thrilled by the opportunities afforded to her and her new agency, but is later struck with introspection: “Would these people, she wondered… would these people begrudge her, if they knew, her cherished freedom and sense of unrestraint?” She contemplates whether the white woman sitting next to her in a movie theatre would “show the occasional dog-in-the-manger attitude of certain white Americans and refuse to sit by her or make a complaint to the usher?” Angela reaches a kind of paradox of thought in which she knows white people would not accept her and perhaps vilify her if they knew the truth, and yet she desperately wants to live among them.

“Mary said again: ‘Coloured!’ And then. ‘Angela, you never told me you were coloured!’... ‘Tell you I was coloured! Why of course I never told you that I was coloured! Why should I?’” This is the beginning of a recurring theme in Angela’s life and leads to her to pity colored people. After being elected as chief representative for the school magazine, Mary Hasting appointed Angela as her assistant. Afterwards the students revealed to Mary that Angela was colored which leads to the quote above. Afterwards, Angela begins to detest being colored and wonders why Mary had a change of heart after discovering that she was colored. This is the first of many instances of Angela being denied opportunities that were given to her while others thought she was white. As a result, Angela comes to the conclusion that if she moves away from Philly and hides the fact that she is colored she will have a greater possibility of becoming a successful painter.   

Plum Bun also captures the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Describing her first impressions of Harlem the book says, “She was amazed and impressed at this bustling, frolicking, busy, laughing city within a greater one. She had never seen coloured life so thick, so varied, so complete,”. This quote shows that she was finally being exposed to her idea of what the ideal black community should look like, which made passing almost unnecessary. It was apparent that New York City, Harlem specifically, offered way more opportunities for Angela.  By moving to Harlem, Angela opened up limitless possibilities for herself and this passage is indication of that.

Throughout Plum Bun, Angela demonstrates wisdom over the shallowness of slavery, yet also paradoxically glorifies and yearns for the life of a “free” white woman. Interestingly, as a child, Angela seems to understand the absurdity of slavery in a more mature and concrete manner than in her adult life. When one of her good friends in school is shocked to find out that she is “coloured” Angela is forced to confront the realities of what her life will be like for the rest of her life. Angela contemplates her friends actions by saying, “She failed me once, -- I was her friend, yet she failed me for something with which I had nothing to do. She’s just as likely to do it again. It’s in her” (Fauset 46). Angela is aware of her friends own  limitations, yet she also comes to terms with her own limitations as a “coloured” girl. As a young adult, Angela’s attitudes towards white people changes. Instead of confronting her racial struggles, she uses her pale skin to avoid the “ugliness” of her true self. After Angela moves to New York she is overwhelmed with the opportunities she has away from her black culture. Angela explains, “She remembered an expression ‘free, white and twenty-one,’... this is what it meant then, this sense of owning the world, this realization that other things being equal, all things were possible. ‘If I were a man,’ she said, ‘I could be president’” (Fauset 88) Angela succumbs to neglecting her own obvious ignorance. To “own the world” meant to be another race. Simply having African blood was looked down upon. Angela’s own contradictions show the power of social constructs, and illuminate how easily societal pressure can cause a person to change their own identity in order to fit in.

Group 4 Plum Bun review, 2/25

Major Themes:

• Freedom
• Identity
• Frustration
• Community
• Objectification of women
• Power
• Social constructs/confines of race
• Gender roles
• Monetarial status -- as a form of power

In Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Angela struggles with identity and self-love due to the social constructs that deprive her from the life that she has envisioned for herself during the Harlem Renaissance. In an attempt to escape the many struggles involved with racism and to embrace freedom, Angela attempts to pass as a white woman. However, Angela is extremely oppressed due to the blatant racism of the white world in which she attempts to live in. For example, Angela experienced racism in the white community of Philadelphia when one of her peers discovered that Angela was actually black. As soon as Angela’s peer discovers this, Angela loses the respect that she was receiving when she was perceived to be white.  

Out of frustration, she fails to embrace her heritage as the rest of her family so graciously does because of the racial ideologies that uplift white supremacy, therefore tearing down the black race. Due to this societal influence, she feels as though she will never have the life she deserves because of her “blackness”.  As the novel sheds insight on her thoughts it describes; “to feel that coloured people were to be considered fortunate only in the proportion in which they measured up to the physical standards of white people” (Fauset, 18).  Ultimately, the definement of her worth being left in the hands of her white counterparts proved detrimental to her growth as the prevailing stigmas for African - Americans in that time period were extremely negative.  She developed an unfavorable view of herself and decided to flee from her reality, escaping to her fantasy as she leaves home and decides to pass for white.

After fleeing home in search of “equality” she finds herself in the middle of a bustling New York City. Expecting the place to be an oasis for her, in light of her new white identity, she soon realizes that it is an entirely different world than she is used to. Once she entered Harlem, she saw the allure of black life unfettered, bursting with creativity and movement. In this, Angela experiences the allure of the black community in New York and begins to question whether white is truly the thing to be, or does she simply want to feel equal. This is only beginning of her wrestling with her identity throughout the novel.

Group 3 Blog Post – Hudson, Marlena, Reem, and Jack

Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset follows Angela Murray through the 1920s as she transitions from being a young African-American girl living in Philadelphia with her family to when she decides to move to New York City and “pass” for white.  Angela grows up with a little sister – Virginia – who has darker skin than her, as does her father.  However, Angela’s mother also has lighter skin and they pass together.  As a result of her experiences “passing,” during which she has the freedom to go to nice, white-only places, Angela believes that: “The great rewards of life riches, glamour, pleasure, are for white people only” (10).  So, when Angela’s darker skinned father and sister pass by and her and her mother do not say anything, she remarks, “It’s a good thing Papa didn’t see us, you’d have had to speak to him, wouldn’t you?” (11)  While the reader knows that Angela’s mother later confessed to her husband what happened and apologized for it, Angela does not know this and does not see anything wrong with what happened.

            This incident foreshadows what Angela goes on to do later in the book.  After both of her parents die, Angela once again puts being white and the greater freedom it offers before her family and blackness.  She leaves behind her sister and her previous racial identity to “pass” for being white in New York City in order to “launch out ‘into a freer, fuller life’” (48).  Her move was sparked by her art teacher’s reaction after he found she was white, which made him treat her differently.  Although Angela did nothing differently, he had to re-categorize her.  The incident highlights how volatile the terrain of identity and race is and how sloppy it is.  Afterward, Angela concludes that if “the fact of your racial connection was not made known,” then it is as good as being white and you can enjoy “the good things of life” (27).  So Angela moved.

            In New York City Angele changes her name and “passes” for white and goes to Cooper Union to study art.  She enjoys her life so much doing this as she is able to explore all of the opportunities that whites are, such as going to the Ritz.  Through a fellow classmate Angela meets Roger Fielding who courts her.  In him Angela see a wealthy, white man who can secure her place in society and offer her power, wealth, and influence and allow her to enjoy the finer things in life, which she wants to do.  However, one night at dinner she finds out that Roger is horribly racist after he ensures that African-Americans attempting to dine at the same restaurant as them are kicked out.  Afterward, Angela is upset and does not see him for a while, but she eventually gets over it because she enjoys him and his wealth and the supposed happiness he has to offer.  So, when Virginia comes into town and meets Angela who runs into Roger right before, Angela acts like she does not know her own sister.  Although “passing” offers Angela all of the opportunities of white folk, it comes at a tremendous cost, leaving behind her personal history and family. 

The Harlem Renaissance - Group 4

Major Themes:

• Re-Inventiveness
• Rebirth
• Enlightenment
• Creativity
• Opportunity
• Innovation
• Transformation

The Harlem Renaissance was arguably the most influential movement in American culture. A new age of glory, followed by centuries of oppression that resided in the institution of slavery, flourished in the 1920’s to 1930’s for African-Americans in America and had a profound effect on the African American community. The Harlem Renaissance represents the dawn of revitalized African American culture. This time period was a time of intellectual and artistic explosion.  Black people were now viewed as intelligent, scholarly, creative, and innovative.  Thus, the “New Negro” was reinvented during the Harlem Renaissance, bringing a positive light to the qualities that were often overlooked in African-American people in lieu of the prior two hundred plus years of bondage.  W. E. B. Du Bois was a model “New Negro” as he was one of the intellectual leaders put on the forefront of this movement.  Social stigmas were not the only things transforming during this movement, as positive economic and social opportunities arose for African-Americans, particularly in the North.  

As we acknowledge the positivity that arose from this historical movement, we must also study the struggle that came with it.  America did not simply wake up one sunday morning and say “Looks like slavery is over, we can all coexist peacefully now!”.  No, there were hundreds of years of painful societal constructs that were embedded into American history that had to be sifted through and confronted in order to truly move forward and they continued to face adversity every step of the way. However, the fact that the African-American community now had a chance, hope, and an opportunity, well that was all we really needed! Taking this grain of hope and turning it into a mountain of success through black owned businesses, historically black colleges and black institutions, this new era set the tone for a legacy of greatness for the black community.  

Group Review 1 by Group 2 (Katherine, Christal, Kayla, Jonathan, Malik)

            Based on a true story, Beloved by Toni Morrison is a novel that tracks the life of Sethe, a mother who happens to be an ex-slave, and the people in her life who have been affected by the way that memories of slavery threaten her ability to love freely. The novel encompasses many themes, such as power, love, memory, community, and morality of slavery, and it also sheds light on the ways that “free” life for slaves was still dictated by the power that white people did not relinquish even after legal emancipation.

            Sethe is first introduced at her house in Ohio, referred to as 124. It has been haunted for eighteen years, ever since Sethe killed her baby in a shed in its backyard. The event sounds monstrous and cold-blooded at face value, but as readers learn of the complexities of Sethe’s experience with slavery at Sweet Home and the horrors that she had to endure leading up to the point of her child’s death, it becomes more understandable as to why she could do such a thing to her own child whom she loved so much.

            Sethe’s life at 124 starts to change when Paul D, another ex-slave from Sweet Home, arrives at her door and continues to reside at the house. As Paul D makes himself more comfortable in their home, the spirit that lingered in 124 diminishes its presence. One day, after Denver, Sethe’s only remaining child, Paul D, and Sethe spend a day at the fair, they come home to find a young woman sitting on a tree stump outside the house. From then on, memories of slavery and the journey to freedom start to pile up for the adults who lived through its terror, and Denver starts to learn more about the truth that has been only slightly revealed to her through bits and pieces of stories that Sethe can hardly bear to tell. This addition to 124 turns out to be Beloved, the child that Sethe killed when her slave master, Schoolteacher, came back for her and her family eighteen years ago. As each character’s relationships with Beloved develop, the themes of the book become richer and all bend toward the same major points—that love has the power to consume or take your life, that processing grievous memories of pain makes the present a still difficult place, and that community has the power to heal.

            Love is a sticky subject for slaves and ex-slaves alike, because in slavery, nothing could belong to them to be loved. This is a problem for free life too, because characters such as Sethe and Paul D must learn to love things again. When Paul D tries to accuse Sethe for doing the wrong thing in killing her daughter, his justification is that her “love is too thick” (193).  She tells him that “love is or it ain’t,” which is something that Paul D cannot understand, because for so long he has shut down any emotion, especially love, just so he can simply survive (194). The book went from no sense of love at all in haunted 124 to an ending with a lot more love that the reader just does not understand.  This is relevant to today’s discussion of the African American experience from slavery and beyond because it shows the fundamental healing that so many individuals had to undergo as an aftereffect, even when emancipation finally happened. For the characters, love consumes life or can take it away from you, which is why Sethe kills her child and why Paul D has turned himself off from the emotion so completely. Because slavery made it okay for white people to degrade slaves’ love, it is something that causes as much pain as it does beauty.

            In general history classes, students are taught that ex-slaves’ lives became instantly better after emancipation, and that the problems that existed in slavery did not pervade and pervert what was supposed to be free life. Beloved proves this to be true because it gives gripping examples of how memories of slavery are as horrific as the events of abuse themselves. Morrison uses the word “rememory” on multiple occasions to show how the characters (and ultimately all ex-slaves in real life) had to relive so many horrible events, and how slavery did not truly end when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced. Even after slavery has been abolished, the institution has left physical and psychological scars. All ex-slaves deal with the forever-lasting trauma of slavery; however, for characters like Sethe, Paul D, and Halle, it drew them to a point of insanity. Beloved, the physical representation of the lasting trauma of slavery, eventually renders Sethe powerless and so unlike herself that Denver fears she has “lost” her mother (314). For Sethe’s memory, “no misery, no regret, no hateful picture” was “too rotten to accept” (83). Slavery continues to overrun her life because her memory was “loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left no room for her to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (83). In Sethe’s lives and the lives of real ex-slaves after emancipation, slavery still dominated and their identities and memories were not theirs alone.

            A hopeful element does shine through Beloved, however, and it applies to lives of slaves in a nonfiction setting as well. At the end of the novel, the personified Beloved has stopped making amends with Sethe and actually begins to eat away at her, causing more guilt and more loss of identity as a mother and an ex-slave who has been through so many terrors. When the rest of the black community of Sethe’s rural Ohio town hears about the haunting that continues in 124, they approach the house and the family in song to drive away the “devil-child” (308). The community helps drive away the domination that memories of slavery has pressed on Sethe’s life: “Building voice upon voice until they found [the key]…It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash” (308). This proves that communities could band together to support one another in light of all the terrible things that slavery and its memories and distortions of love wreaked upon ex-slaves.

            Toni Morrison uses literature to show readers, even centuries after slavery, that its effects run rampant even after freedom and that the institution complicates the most basic human emotions.

2/4 Discussion Group 4, Beloved

Major Themes:

• Family
• Identity
• Rememory
• Community
• Love
• The supernatural

The savagery and ferocity of the institution of slavery inevitably caused the majority of its victims to suffer from physical, emotional and mental ailments.  In the novel Beloved, the toll that the dehumanizing nature of slavery took on Sethe’s psyche caused her to flirt between the line of sanity and insanity as her motherly instincts, conditioned by slavery, told her that it was better for her to murder her children than to even allow them the slightest chance to be swept away by the horrors of the South.  The distortion of the familial system is also flagrantly apparent as the vicious cycle of the destruction of natural relationships between family members is seen when Sethe reveals that her own mother was hanged for reasons she cannot recall.  The lack of a mother figure in her life along with the emotionally disfiguring scars of slavery  already put the odds against her success in motherhood, however she chose to love her children wholeheartedly, the best way she knew how.  Denver’s attachment to beloved and resentment towards her mother is finally revealed as a consequence of the absence of her father, and the vicious cycle set in motion by the destructive nature of slavery penetrates yet another generation.  

One of the most poignant points within the novel is the moment in which Schoolteacher, nephew, and the slave catcher come to retrieve Sethe and her children, planning on returning them back into slavery. It is not only a sad moment but also reflects the brutality of slavery. The fact that a mother would rather kill her children and herself rather than returning to Sweet Home is a testament to it’s physical and psychological damage as Sethe decided she would be not be hurt or taken advantage of anymore. She held back on loving her children for too long and finally had the opportunity to love them wholly at 124. Out of that love she was convinced she  was doing the right thing by not bring them back into such a terrible way of life. Also, slavery’s effects are shown within other people’s reaction to the event during the story. Slavery taught slaves to love less, if all, and to live in modesty being careful not the exude too much happiness or live in excess. So when the community saw the love and ample happiness within 124, displayed by the meals they would have, they grew jealous. To think that being so entrapped in mind by the parameters set by slave culture would cause a community to not help a family or at least warn them when people were literally coming to take away their freedom is appalling. However, it shows the lasting mental effect that slavery has on a person.