The Lesson and Dark Prophecy

The beginning of “The Lesson” made me laugh more than any story in Hokum has so far. Obviously, as the story progressed toward the lesson provided at the end, it got less and less funny and more and more serious. But, I found the first couple pages leading up to them entering the store pretty funny. I don’t know if it was just me, but until they entered the store and were getting weird looks, I wasn’t giving much consideration to the fact that the kids in the story were African American. Maybe this is why I found the beginning so funny, since I wasn’t considering race or any of the racial undertones, and was strictly focusing on the content at face value, I wasn’t confronted with the issue of African Americans being treated unfairly. Until they entered the store, I was just picturing a group of kids rebelling against authority and having a good time making fun of each other and beating each other up and I thought it was quite humorous. I think this confirms what I’ve thought about a large portion of the stories in Hokum; if you ignore the time period and the racial differences and forget the races of the characters and just read the stories naively and at face value, some of these stories really are funny. However, knowing how poorly and unjustly African Americans were treated, and understanding and analyzing the racial undertones, it is clear that nobody with any sense of heart would find these stories funny at least in the ha ha belly laugh sense of the word. Some of them might draw periodic laughter through incongruities, quick witted jokes, or the occasional name calling but overall, none of these stories have provided belly laughs. Almost every story ends with either an implied or spoken commentary on society just like “The Lesson” did and there is nothing funny about these commentaries. An African American child pondering how American can be considered a democracy when their family was never given a chance is not funny. At all. To me, these stories have been more eye opening than funny.

Before, I mentioned that none of the stories that we have read so far in Hokum have really provoked a belly laugh. Well, that was until I read “Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine.” From about the 7^th line on, I laughed hysterically all the way through this poem. Some people might see it as a little or extremely obscene but I thought it was extremely funny. It was so blunt and straightforward and the exact opposite of what I was expecting. Basically nothing we have read so far has the African American winning and I believe that this is another reason why it was so funny. It is never funny or enjoyable seeing a bully win. But everyone loves the underdog. If Shine had taken any of the white peoples’ propositions, I believe that the poem would no longer be funny. One of the reasons it stayed funny throughout was because Shine kept winning and turning down the white people in the most blunt and humorous of ways. By the end of the poem, once I finished laughing, I wanted to stand up and cheer for Shine. You’re left with a sense that justice was served for the first time in any of these stories. There are definitely racial undertones rich white people definitely take the brunt of every joke but deservedly so. Nobody ever gave Shine a reason to want to save them. They offer him money among other things but if he stays and saves them, he will die and the money will be worthless. The setting is on the Titanic, the gaudiest ship of them all, where greed ran rampant and likely for the first time in their lives, money wasn’t going to save them. I feel like we don’t feel sorry for the white people because there is an overwhelming feeling that they deserved it. It was about time Shine or any other African American for that matter caught a break. If this was a white person ignoring the pleas for help of African Americans, this story wouldn’t be funny because that happened every day. That was what was expected during these times. However, the cognitive shift of the African American finally winning and reaching safety makes this by far the funniest and most uplifting story we have read in Hokum.