Honors English Essay

Tomato, Tomoto; Potato, Pototo

Language as we know it is evolving. New slang terms are becoming professional terms and old, formal words are words no longer. If this is to be true, then why do we judge people based upon their dialect? Is it subconscious? When it was legal, most racial propaganda used African American dialect and pronunciation to bring their culture lower. Even today, some of us think that all southerners are not as equally intellectual because they pronounce a word differently. Lorraine Hansberry exploited this phenomena and used it to her advantage in “A Raisin in the Sun”, one of her many original plays as the dialect was a spring to deeper ideas and concepts.

Setting: 1959. Chicago, IL. Characters: ever changing. The Younger’s were an African American family living beneath oppression in the south side of Chicago. The family is completely ordinary. First off is an overprotective, good-hearted, harsh mother (Ruth) with a drunk, lying father (Walter), a religious, loving, grandmother (Mama). Not to mention Walter’s sister, Beneatha, a sassy, smart-ass, intellectual, other worldly woman. Also Ruth and Walter’s son, Travis, a exuberant, lively little kid. They are just the characters that live in the house, the others we meet along the way. They were a poor family, dependent on a check from Walter’s father’s death. This would change their lives financially. This house that they seem to fit into is too small for the family; it is breaking them and wearing them down to their boiling point. They want to move, they NEED to move if they have any chance of keeping the family together.

“Did you get all them chores done already? I ain’t see you doin’ much.” The dialog and the dialect of the family is typical of an African American family in the 50’s, Hansberry evidently tried extremely hard to capture the dialect correctly and did. Through the dialect displayed a hidden feature in the play, their pride. Many African American families would conform to the politically correct pronunciation and grammar of a sentence. Not this family. Reading the play for the fourth time I could hear their swagger and pride from their words. Always excited to speak for themselves in a way that conveyed what they were feeling.

The Younger’s were an emotional family, over dramatizing every single situation at hand. They were exciting to listen to, to read to as well. This was a surprising page turner that kept my undivided attention for long periods of time. The flow of the language kept it moving along. To my surprise there were no breaks in the story as it made my eyes wander off of the page and along to the next. As they finally received the money to buy the new house in a white neighborhood, a representative of the neighborhood, Mr. Linder tries to convince them otherwise, subtly suggesting that they were not welcome. That gave the Younger family all the more motive to move.

Too much pride is not always a good virtue as Walter showed time after time. Walter’s mission to become a man throughout the play showed how immature he really was. Pride turned into stupidity most nights. He drank himself to sleep to avoid his confronting himself and his family on skipping work and having a lackluster job. He even lied time and time again to avoid the humility and shame. While his family needed to be proud and have pride to move through life with courage, he needed to be humble.

“I am afraid you don’t understand Mr. Linder. My son said we was going to move and there aint nothing left for me to say. (Briskly) You know how these young folks is nowadays mister. Can’t do a thing with ‘em! (As he opens his mouth she rises) Goodbye!” said Mama as she proudly shows Mr. Linder to the door. This quote directly after Walters turning point to becoming a man, and his mother couldn’t be prouder. Lorraine Hansberry had a way with dialog, spending months to portray accurate dialect and pronunciation to the audience. Hansberry vividly showed how pride can change the way a person lives for the better or worse. This is an example of an overall extraordinary piece of theater. Theater that will be remembered, cherished, and used for analytical purposes for the next century as it displayed such a dark time in American History of racial discrimination. Walter in the end learns the balance between humility and pride as the two women of the house speak together, “(Quietly woman to woman) He finally came to his manhood today, didn’t he? Kind of like a rainbow after the rain…”