You Left Without A Word So I'll Give You Two, 'Thank You'

After countless nights of staying up late with tears streaming down my cheeks and waking up to find makeup smudged across my face and pillow, I can finally say that I am over you.

I can listen to songs again without having to fight back tears or get upset. I can hear your name (and hers) without a knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Most importantly, I can be happy again.

I will never forget our first date or our last. The first day when we held hands and laughed so much it hurt.

People probably thought we had been together for months when really, it was our first time hanging out. We were so comfortable and complimented each other in every way possible. What we had seemed perfect and unparalleled.

Months went by with me still thinking about how hooked I was and with every passing day, I fell for you even more.

Then it happened: the word “read” under my texts with no reply. The sound of your phone ringing six times then going to voicemail. The snapchats left with open arrows.

What had happened? What had changed? What had I done wrong?

For the longest time, I was stuck under the impression that you were the end-all-be-all, the greatest guy to walk this Earth. It turns out that you were really just another person passing through in my life.

It has taken me a long time to say this, definitely longer than I thought it would have taken me, but thank you for ending it with me.

You’ve given me a chance to rebuild and find myself and for that, I’m very grateful.

You’re still the first person I want to tell when anything good happens to me. Your phone number is engraved in my mind along with every memory we share. Everything that I see reminds me of you whether it be one of our favorite places to disappear to or a store we used to shop in together.

You’re the one I want to tell when I do something good because I know that at one point it would have made you proud. You’re the one I want to comfort me when I’m tossing and turning at night, but unfortunately, you’re the one causing it.

Although it has been difficult, I’ve come to realize that everything gets better with time. The sun still rises every morning and the coming days bring much less agony than before.

No more anxiety attacks keeping me up until the early hours of the morning and I no longer wake up with pounding headaches and puffy eyes. You treated me wonderfully while I was yours and I don’t regret a single thing. I am a better person because of you so thank you.

Thank you for being part of my life and thank you for letting me go

Symbolism in A Visit of Charity

Often seen in literary pieces, color plays a vital role in being symbolic throughout the course of the work as well as other seemingly innocent items in their placement within the story. Color can be found to represent other inanimate ideas in the short story, A Visit of Charity. There are also times when physical objects have a deeper meaning behind them and the focus placed on them during the story is not merely by chance, but to draw the reader in and force them to considerate alternative reasons for it being mentioned. I found that the contrast between light and dark along with the inclusion of several other symbols seemed to play the biggest part of conveying second meanings and were subtle in separating the outside world from life inside the nursing home.

The story starts off with Marian getting off of the bus and walking towards the nursing home. Before entering, she stops for a minute at one of the prickly dark shrubs right outside of the home. We don’t know why she stopped until the end of the story where she retrieves a red apple that she had placed there on her way in and takes a big bite out of it. This importance and significance of the apple is not revealed and leaves it up to the reader to put together the pieces. I think that the apple symbolizes the outside world. It is bright in its red color and contrasts the dark shrubs in which she hid it. Why didn’t she take the apple in with her to the home? I’d have to say that this is because the home is so completely different from the outside world that a red apple wouldn’t fit in among the mundane color scheme that runs throughout the inside of the building.

The other peculiar thing about the dark and prickly shrubs is that they show a contrast of light and dark since they are placed against the white-washed bricks creating the home. I imagine the shrubs around the building as almost a barbed wire fire-dark, strong pointed prickers that turn people away and keep those inside, inside. Ii also was questioning why there are dark prickly shrubs which have more of a negative connotation than something softer like evergreens or flowers. The overall description the author gives allows us to assume that the inside of the home is cold and lacking beauty just as the outside and keeps the older people inside the home like a prison.

Marian sees the two women that she is visiting as animals. Addie is described as a bleating sheep and the other old lady has her hand’s being referred to as bird claws. These animal references show the ignorance and dehumanization that Marian is subconsciously doing The dehumanization begins right when Marian enters the home and is walking down the hall with the nurse. The nurse says “There are two in each room” to which Marian replies, “Two what?” Obviously we know that there are two residents in each room but for Marian, she quickly questions what are in them. Following her questioning, she describes a sound that she hears as a bleating sheep and then continues after the nurse to the tiny, crammed room that she would be visiting the ladies in. What the unconscious reduction of these women to mere creatures does for Marian is it displays her young and naïve way of thinking. 

Playing on the white that describes the lady’s bunchy forehead and the bird-like claws that reach out to grab her plant and her hair, the negative connotations that goes along with these words are vital in portraying the disgust that Marian feels along with her fear of being at the home with them. Their motions are eerie and seem to creep Marian out as they do the same to the reader.

On several occasions, the Addie is compared to a sheep. Sheep are typically seen as weak and feeble creatures that aren’t really able to think on their own and instead, follow the herd. They are also white which, to me, symbolizes illness (think pale skin) and reminds me of a sterile environment such as a hospital. Because of this, comparing the old and frail woman in the home to a white sheep symbolizes Marian’s view of the boring and humdrum lives that the people trapped within the walls of the home live.

White is also seen being worn by the nurse that leads Marian to the room.  The woman was dressed in a white uniform and, from the narrator’s perspective, looked as if she were cold. With this, I see the white of her uniform meaning that she belongs there. She blends in with the overall white theme of the home and is cold just like many other things mentioned in this story. The hands of Marian are described as getting colder and colder the longer she stays in this room. This is because the longer she is there, the more she turning into her surroundings. The day that she enters the home, she says it is mid-morning and a very cold, bright day. She then goes to say that the whitewashed bricks reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice (cold). Finally, when she leaves the home it is still cold as the wind hits her when she steps outside. I think what she is saying with this is even once she leaves, the reminder of the coldness she experienced inside the home will follow her out into the real world.

This story, which seems to be a random telling of events with no real purpose, is filled with underlying meaning when you examine the text more thoroughly and look at what else the author is trying to say based on the words they use. I was able to uncover some of the symbols that Eudora Welty uses in her short story A Visit of Charity by examining the colors that were repeated throughout and other symbols such as the comparisons made towards animals and the connotation derived from those. 

Double Consciousness and the Veil

W.E.B. Du Bois came up with the concepts of the veil and double consciousness in his book In the Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois says on page 326 in our textbook Digging into Literature, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like [them perhaps] in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” This is the pivotal moment. It was here when he noticed that he was not the same as the people around him because he was being seen as someone that he was not and viewed in a negative light. He also brings up a veil which is what  makes it so people don’t see others for what they truly are, but instead see a different version.  Du Bois’s double consciousness is when you are able to see yourself as others see you and the way that the other people see you is not equal to them. With that being said, the veil comes between us and who we are trying to see and at the moment, double consciousness is noticed within the person hidden behind the veil. Both double consciousness and instances of the veil are seen in the essays Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples and Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin and play a role in how the main character acts.

Brent Staples is like any other graduate student: intelligent, looking forward to a good career, and climbing his way up in society by earning degrees. There is, however, one thing that makes Staples stand out as a menace to society- he is black. He has no criminal record to validate the assumption that he is out to get people yet women still clench their purses and men lock their car doors when he walks past. This here is a prime example of the veil being in place because the people that he passes assume he is less than them and view him differently than how he views himself. Staples showcases this phenomenon in his essay Black Men and Public Space by giving instances of the veil, people not seeing him for who he is, and double consciousness, being seen in different versions of himself. The essay actually starts out with an instance of double consciousness when the lady in the alley picked up the pace to a running speed because she saw a big black man walking close behind her. Staples was obviously meaning no harm to the girl and was just walking; however, she is not in this moment seeing him as an upstanding citizen but a threat to her safety. What I find ironic is he comes from an affluent neighborhood in an otherwise impoverished area. Perhaps the lady in the street thought that he couldn’t possibly have come from the wealthy area and he must be from the not-so-good part of town. He says, in fact, that “in the echoes of a terrified woman’s footfall” he realized that he was being stereotyped. The veil comes up here since he sees himself as he truly is yet he also can see the fictitious version of himself that the frightened lady is running from. Whether he was being viewed as a mugger or a rapist, it was not him. He even goes as far to say that he is scarcely able to cut a raw chicken let alone hurt another human being, yet women in particular would flee the scene when he’d be in close proximity. This is an example of the veil because he doesn’t view himself as harmful and actually he sees himself as the exact opposite. Since people are not be able to see past the veil, they only view him as someone less than equal to them and stereotypes him as a “bad guy.” 

James Baldwin traveled to a small, mountain village in Switzerland with a population of only around six hundred people. There are not many things open in this town when it is not summer and they have tourists filling the streets. Even with the few hundred tourists that visit this village, there had never been a Negro man or woman show up until Baldwin arrived. In his essay, Baldwin looks at double consciousness and the veil from the perspective of a true anomaly- a person with black skin in a village of people whom had never encountered anyone that was not white. He says before his trip he was warned that he would be a “sight” for the village. Coming from a place where the people were diverse, he couldn’t possibly imagine an entire town of people that had never see an African American man and assumed that the “sight” would be him since he was a city boy in a rural area. This shows double consciousness because he thought that this was because he was a city a boy in a rural village. What he didn’t realize is that the villagers didn’t care that he was from a city; instead they saw him as a sight because he was not the same skin color as them. He uses the term “white wilderness” to describe the town where he stood apart from everyone. The children call him “Neger” and shout it to him when he walks by. This is both an example of the veil because for him, the children are only seeing him from the outside, and also double consciousness because he notices how the children are viewing him as a lesser version of himself. They aren’t looking at his personality or intelligence or anything besides his skin color and making assumptions based on that. Everyone in the town knows his name yet it is rarely used and this is like them saying they really don’t care to learn his name because they know his skin color and can call him that since that is what is truly important about him.  Baldwin says “The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me.” While he doesn’t directly say why it sounds echoes inside of him, I would assume it is because he wants them to know that there is more to him than the color of his skin.

After looking at what both authors experienced, it is clear to see that even now, the concept of the veil and double consciousness still exist. What I found most interesting between the two is that once they saw the veil between them and the people on the other side, they altered their own actions. Staples talks about how he learned to smother the rage from so often being mistaken for a criminal and took precautions to seem less threatening. Especially when he wasn’t dressed in business attire from work, he would do his best to not follow what one might consider “too close” behind and he whistles Beethoven and Vivaldi so that people walking by know he is calm, educated, and not going to harm them in any way. He even mentions that on the rare occasion in which he is pulled over, he always acts calm and extremely congenial when face to face with the officer. Similarly, Baldwin was raised to be a likable person since trying “to be pleasant at all times was a great part of the American Negro's education that took place before they would go to school”. If the child understood that he had to be amiable in order for people to like him back and not be place judgement.

            The concept of the veil and double consciousness are prevalent in the essays Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples and Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin. The people in the essays experience things unfairly and are driven to change how they act to accommodate the prejudice and fears that the people around them hold. Staples experiences double consciousness when he hears the clicks of cars locking as he walks past and is screened out by individuals such as policemen and bouncers whose job it is to pick out troublesome-looking individuals. Baldwin gets more of a taste of the veil when he is in the village in Switzerland and people don’t call him by his name or believe that he is a writer from America. They not only assume that he is from Africa since he is black, but they also call him Neger since that is the color of his skin. I would get annoyed if someone replaced my name with white because I’m not just white. I am so much more than that and I wouldn’t want people judging me solely off my skin tone. What can be seen when comparing the essays is that double consciousness and the veil go hand in hand. The veil is noticed when an instance of double consciousness occurs and this is because we can go without noticing ourselves being different from the people around us, but when someone acts differently around you and doesn’t see you for who you really are and for all of you, that is when the veil is noticed between you.