William Faulkner's Dry September and Eudora Wetley's Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden

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Recommended: The importance of african american literature

Many people say to embrace your own self but it is hard when are being treated differently because of who you are. In Southern Gothic Fiction there are many visible signs of how people are treated differently because of something to do with their appearance. It’s interesting to look at in our time period now since so many laws and human expectations have changed. I believe the people in these stories were treated unfairly and it would never have happened in today’s society.
I chose to look at William Faulkner’s “Dry September” and Eudora Welty’s “Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden” because I saw the stories were shaped the most by race relations in the south. If the way race was looked at was different in this time period, these stories wouldn’t even exist. There are different ways white people treated African Americans in the south and they are all cruel and unjust in my opinion.
In Faulkner’s “Dry September”, the African Americans live among the white people but are treated much as less. These stories took place in a slightly awkward time period after emancipation but before the Civil Rights movement. Due to the fact that African Americans were free but didn’t really have any rights, the people in this town find it their responsibility to take care of matters. In the story a majority of the white men in town go to “take care” of Will Mayes after he has been accused of raping Minnie Cooper, a white woman. The story doesn’t actually tell the reader if Will Mayes is killed but it is implied that the white men kill him.
Another aspect of this short story, which I consider to be unjust, is the fact people take the word of a white person over a black person only because of skin color. Minnie Cooper said Will Mayes raped her and almost e...

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...ricans resorted to home remedies, which proved to be unsuccessful.
Due to the fact African Americans didn’t have equal opportunities set them back not only to advance in the financial world but when it came to gaining respect of others. I don’t think African Americans would have thought it would take all the way to the civil rights movement to gain equal rights. It relates to how the characters in these short stories were treated because they were treated unjust and not humanly.
In conclusion, African Americans were treated nowhere near the standards they should have been. They lived under hard circumstances that were difficult to overcome. It’s quite amazing to me that they overcame these obstacles and are considered to be equals with whites. Of course there will always be racism in the world but compared to what it was a hundred years ago is revolutionary.

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