Reading Notes Week 14 Part A - James Baldwin

This story was interesting and I enjoyed reading it. I especially like how it starts out with the date and that his dad died. Then is says "On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born." (736) It's like when someone dies, someone else is born; where there is death, there is life; sacrifice. This story sort of seems like it has "the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred," yet it's like there's that yin and yang going on throughout the story. Like life and death; love and hatred. Or the narrators relationship (or lack thereof) with his dad. On page 737, Baldwin writes, "I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first." I thought this was interesting because it seems to divulge a little more into their relationship and their past, and that they never really spoke to each other; and as time passed on, he wished he would have. And generations now seem more prone to not talking to the generation before them. Which gets me thinking about "millennials" or the younger generations nowadays and how they are on their phones 24/7, or on some kind of technological device, as if to be replaced with developing social skills and being active. I think it makes it harder for them to relate to older generations (and vice versa).