Racism In Maya Angelou's The Brown House

Today, we often see the phrase “Your actions speak louder than your words” to be the solution to our day-to-day problems. Rather than telling someone ‘We should hangout sometime!’, we instead state ‘Hey I’ll pick you up at 7’ and just like magic are problems are resolved. Within Maya Angelou’s “The grandmother” and Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Brown House” we see just how compelling this phrases is as our two heroines demonstrate the power of our action by keeping silent. Maya Anelgou demonstrates to us her life as a child, living with her grandmother Momma, and her fight against the never-ending struggle of racism within their time. While in the story “The Brown House” we’ll see a family struggle with their father’s gambling problem and just how

Maya being the young child that she was expressed large amounts of resilience towards the “powhitetrash” living within her mother's property, not fully understanding just how racist people living in her time were. Mrs. Hattori was a good wife with a loving family and a good husband, but her husband got tied up in the white man’s game of gambling. Both women, although residing in different stories come together to stamp their feet down in the name of justice by attempting to start a revolution in their own world. Margarite at first commences as a simple-minded character, showing complete hatred to those she deemed “trash” and believing that if she “pinched it” things would progressively get better. She believed that her actions would express what her mouth could not. When the three white women approached her grandmother and completely treat her like trash as they “…mocked that strange carriage that was Annie Henderson.” and one of the girls went as far as too show off her “slick pubic”. Maya is outraged and considers firing a “.140… sawed-off shotgun…”, but knowing that she would “never be able to hold it straight.” Maya believed that her actions would speak louder than her words just as these three white women where demonstrating to her. Margarites thoughts go as far as to considered taking the life of these women which would cause a war between the blacks and white on her grandmothers land just for the