" The drying up of the dream like a raisin suggests that the spirit of someone who is the victim of prejudice experiences a kind of living death, with all vital forces sucked away from his or her sprit like dried fruit. The dream can also "crust over" like something sweet, implying the false face that African-Americans must put on to live in America. (a Raisin in the Sun, the Lorraine Hansberry play that uses a line from the poem as its title, portrays one of the central characters, a chauffer named Walter Lee, as a man filled with rage who must smile and cater to whites in his job).
This contrast between sweetness and reality is even more dramatically depicted in "Strange Fruit," where images of the old, genteel South of Magnolia trees are starkly juxtaposed against the image of a dead, African-American male: "Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, /
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh." The dream that sags like a heavy load in "Harlem" is a living man in "Strange Fruit." "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze," sings Holiday.
Hughes'...
He treated the other residents with dignity as he was working. He said that while there were many residents in the shelter, none of them was alike but people insisted on treating them the same way. Often, residents will find reasons to fight and argue with one another but he wanted to be above that kind of behavior. He was sensitive to the fact that all of them had
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