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Nineteen Fifty-five Essay

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Essay question: What message do you think Alice Walker is trying to convey in the short story 'Nineteen fifty-five'?

In Nineteen fifty-five, a short story written by Alice Walker, there seems to be a variation of different messages that she is trying to convey. As an author she relates the story to real life issues as well as using the character Gracie Mae to highlight the way in which black people have been exploited by whites.

The story is set over quite a vast timespan, from 1955 to 1977. By setting the story over this period of time Alice Walker is reminding us of the interlocking political and racial situations from the Civil
Rights Movement. At the beginning of the 1968 section, Gracie Mae mentions that 'Malcolm X, …show more content…

This has a lot to do with the segregation laws, which were very much a part of Southern American life in this time period.

J.T. finds it difficult to 'act decent' around white people, as white people did not respect the blacks. So he does not feel he should go out of his way to respect the white men. You can tell this as in the story 'J.T. declined to put on a shirt' when the two white men knocked at the door.

Gracie Mae quickly forms an opinion about the deacon, from the moment she opens the door as she puts her 'hand on the lock inside the screen'. She even goes on to comment on how his 'hearty Southern way' in which he speaks makes her 'eyeballs ache'. She describes his eyes as being cold and grey and it is clear she is generally not at all impressed with the way he acts and physically appears. By including this into her story Alice Walker is highlighting the distrust black people felt for many of the whites.

When Traynor comes to visit Gracie Mae in 1968 he mistakes Horace for
J.T. Gracie Mae corrects him but he still seems puzzled that he got it wrong. This shows that white people saw black people as all the same stereotyping them all into one category and did not regard them as individuals. Yet another time when racial discrimination comes out is when both
Gracie Mae and Traynor perform on the television programme. The fans greet Traynor with an enormous cheer but when Gracie Mae had sung the song before him the had merely

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