We Wear The Mask Analysis

In the time of the Great Depression, many people were in moments of suffering and hardships. However, African American were facing moments of prejudice and segregation, that was sonly based on the color of their skin. In the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper lee and the poem “We wear the mask” by Paul Lawrence Dumber, gave incite to those moments and how African Americans changed themselves to fit in to the white people society.

In the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the prejudice and segregation that the African Americans were facing was very present throughout the book. We see those types of moments, where African Americans are found guilty before the trial even begun, or how African American had to change how they were to fit in to the society. African Americans changed the way they talked, the way they acted, even they way they looked, to make sure that it wouldn’t lead them to their death, and in a lot of cases it ended in just that. In a moment in the book the main character Scout and her

brother Jem go to Calpurnia church “First Purchase” this is a moment in which the reader can truly see the difference between the races. When they were entering the church, the manner in which African Americans handed the presence of the white people in the church was one of respected and some form of automatic response of knowing that they are lower the white people. “The men stepped back and toke their hats; the women crossed their arms at their waists, weekday gestures of respectful attention.” This wasn’t the only moment in which Africans Americas changed themselves in that very scene Calpurnia changed the way in which she spoke “they’s my comp’ny,”Calpurnia, Again I thought her voice strange; she was talking like the rest of them “the manner in which they spoke in front of white people was different from that of how the spoke in front of their own kind.

In the poem” We wear the mask” shows the emotions of how the African Americans felt doing the time of The Great Depression. The sentiments that African Americans were feeling during the Great Depression was nothing more than pain and sorrow, when they were being purposely attacked just for the color of their skin. African American felt as if they were lower than the white people and were being pushed back from the line of freedom and equality, and yet they had to have a smile on their faces to hide it all, to wear a mask. “We smile, but O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise. “ The African Americas were really struggling to keep their head above water. It’s horrifying the about of pain “blacks” had to withstand in a time that whites didn’t even think twice of firing, blaming, and killing them.
When looking at both the novel and poem there was instant connection of how African Americans were in the Great Depression.

In the novel there were many events that showed how the African Americans were in this time period. One of them being the court case of Tom Robinson, who was put under arrest for raping a white girl. Even though the white girl was the one coming on to him this resulted in her father walking in on them and hitting his daughter. Know this should have ended with the girl getting in trouble, but that was not the case in this time period it was a white man word versus a black man word and in this time a black man’s word was worth less than a dime. This was also shared in some level in the poem, this mask that it says African Americans had to wear to hide there pain and sorrow is the same thing that Tom Robinson had to do when facing life in jail, blacks had no choice they knew their fate in the hands of the

whites.

In the end of it all the time period of the Great Depression was one that believes that many African American would look back on and only sees pain, sorrow and moments in which there people by law were free but by society were chained to a wall of race. That made them truly seems as if they were nothing more than other that was in the white’s man land.