Essay Packet#1 Response

In Sunday, the narrator makes a satirical comment on the civil rights movement through the eyes of a young girl. The young girl’s life is described as plentiful. Her family lavishes in the tradition of delicious and bountiful meals. This description is at odds with her misperceived notion of the civil rights movement. She describes her family’s status as fruitful, but her family and she have unequal human rights to whites. The girl’s aunt also has a backwards conception of the racial status quo. She believes that the whites are inferior, that they need the help of the blacks in order to better themselves.

The Aunt serves as the determiner of the girl’s world view. She has sugar coated the girls world view so that she doesn’t have to confront the grim reality of racial inequality. This short story is all the more impactful due to the perspective it is presented from.  It is from the distorted worldview of a child, whose world view undermines and insults what the civil right movement stood for. The story is all the more powerful as it utilizes the false innocence of a little girl in order to demoralize the ideology of the civil rights movement.

In Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird, the narrator describes hummingbirds with very different descriptors that one would infer from the title’s description of hummingbirds, “mute dancers”. Hummingbirds are described as energized, powerful, and even violent creatures. They are resilient, able to survive an attack by a cat with little injury. They are courageous enough to take on humans and animals much larger than them such as cats. The narrator completely turns the typical conception of hummingbirds on its head.

The text repeats twice that “a lot of hummingbirds die in their sleep” due to sleeping. Instead of dying due to physical exhaustion, they die due to sleeping. Hummingbirds are described as “sleeping giants” in a sense. They are a small and inconspicuous at a glance, but due to the narrator’s descriptions of them relative to their size, their immense energy for such a small stature and their voracity, they appear to be much “larger” in a specific context than they really are.