Example #2: Reality TV: Surprising Throwback to The Past? (by Patricia Cohen) This passage compares two types of attitudes about the author’s grandfather one of the black community and the other of the response of the white to this blackness. And this during the years when almost half the black male population were skilled craftsmen who lost their jobs to white ex-convicts and immigrant farmers.” His rancor was legitimate, for he, John Solomon, was not only an artist but a first-rate carpenter and farmer, reduced to sending home to his family money he had made playing the violin because he was not able to find work. He was an unreconstructed black pessimist who, in spite of or because of emancipation, was convinced for 85 years that there was no hope whatever for black people in this country. He lost all 88 acres of his Indian mother’s inheritance to legal predators who built their fortunes on the likes of him. He was my grandfather, a musician who managed to hold on to his violin but not his land.
It was his earliest recollection of what was to be his habitual response to the promise of white people: horror and an instinctive yearning for safety. “His name was John Solomon Willis, and when at age 5 he heard from the old folks that “the Emancipation Proclamation was coming,” he crawled under the bed.
