The city

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 576.

Exploring Themes

Thinking about the Story

Consider how you would feel if you moved to a bigger and more prestigious city than you are currently living in. Can you understand those people who once and forever fall under the charm of a big city after they lеаve their homes and never get back?

Read the extract and answer the questions below:

1. What do people expect from migration to big cities? Are their expectations reasonable?

2. Do you think all of them get enchanted by the City or some of them still cannot forget their origins and miss their native places?

3. What is the significance of relationships between men and women in the text?

4. What effect does big city life have on the woman and her image?

The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s, the '90s1 but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like – if they ever knew, that is. I don't mean they hate them, no, just that what they start to love is the way a person is in the City; the way a schoolgirl never pauses at a stoplight but looks up and down the street before stepping off the curb; how men accommodate themselves to tall buildings and wee porches, what a woman looks like moving in a crowd, or how shocking her profile is against the backdrop of the East River2. The restfulness in kitchen chores when she knows the lamp oil or the staple is just around the corner and not seven miles away; the amazement of throwing open the window and being hypnotized for hours by people on the street below.   Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man's blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he'd think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight. He would know right away the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn't matter at all because the deception was part of it too. Anyway, he could feel his lungs going in and out. There is no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races through him like laughing gas3 brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations. In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn't miss it, doesn't look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps. That kind of fascination, permanent and out of control, seizes children, young girls, men of every description, mothers, brides, and barfly women, and if they have their way and get to the City, they feel more like themselves, more like the people they always believed they were. Nothing can pry them away from that; the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

1By the end of the 19th century, African Americans had lost many of the civil rights obtained during Reconstruction. Violence against them, including lynchings and race riots, increased dramatically and contributed to the relocation of millions of African Americans from the Southern states to the industrial centers of the North.   The East River at sunset from the south shore of Ward's Island     2the East River is a tidal strait in New York City that separates Manhattan and Long Island. It became widely regarded as a New York City's premier waterway.   1920s Fashion Model and Sexual Icon Muriel Finley features on the cover of "Jazz Age Beauties" by Robert Hudovernik. 3laughing gas (informal) a gas that is sometimes used to stop you feeling pain during an operation   Harlem street scene, 1915–20