Becoming an African-American

Alice Walker and James Baldwin are two of America's most prominent African-American writers. Both have addressed the question of how one "becomes" African-American, focusing on issues of how an oppressed minority group and its members achieve a sense of personal identity that includes recognition of a heritage of discrimination and slavery and their "place" in contemporary American society. This was one of the themes present in Walker's short story, "Everyday Use," and Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."

Walker (2000, p. 1422) describes a woman with two very different daughters. Dee is the educated older sister who wanted nice things and who "at sixteen had a style of her own: and knew what style was." Maggie, the younger sister who has remained with her mother in a rural shack with a dirt yard, was badly burned as a child in a house the family used to life in. Maggie "knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by" (Walker, 2000, p. 1422).

In this short story, Dee returns to visit her mother and sister after having adopted a new name and after becoming involved with a man who appears to be a Black Muslim or at least a far more radical African-American than Dee's family. Dee rejects her name despite the fact that it is a name that has been in her mother's family for years. Adopting a new name and a new attitude toward life, Dee wants to reclaim items from her family's past such as a butter dish, a churn, and a pair of hand-pieced quilts co

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ilts destined for Maggie, connects herself and her life to the daughter who remains behind and not the daughter who has in effect rejected them. In "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin (2000, p. 271) describes a young and talented urban African-American male who tragically becomes involved with drugs. Told from the perspective of an older brother, Sonny's story is about the alienation that African-Americans often feel in mainstream American society. Sonny turns to heroin - which symbolically represents the image of freedom from the burdens of oppression and marginalization in white society - as his own strategy for "becoming" an African-American. Sonny says of himself that "I've been something I didn't recognize, didn't know I could be. Didn't know anybody could be" (Baldwin, 2000, p. 288). It is in his music that Sonny escapes the conditions of his life just as it is in her new name and her new assumed heritage that Dee escapes the conditions of her life. For Sonny, heroin is a retreat from the darkness of the exterior and interior worlds that he inhabits. First, he attempts to escape by joining the Army, and then he chooses heroin and the piano as his way of achieving holiness. What Sonny's older brother

Category: History - B