Black And White Man In Memphis, By Scott Russell Sanders

1. Who is the narrator? Where does the story take place? What time period? – How did you guess?
The speaker of this piece is Scott Russell Sanders. The setting of the story is in Memphis, throughout his youth. The time period is in the course of slavery in the end of 1940s and 1950s. I came to this conclusion from the text when he stated “The first men, besides my father, I remembered seeing were black convicts and white guards, in the cotton field across the road from our farm on the outskirts of Memphis.”
2. Identify at least two pieces of imagery or sensory details the author uses to describe the men he knew as a boy.
“The overseers wore dazzling white shirts and broad shadowy hats. The oiled barrels of their shotguns flashed in the sunlight. Their faces in memory are utterly blank.” Black and White men are the symbol of ethnic abhorrence. “The prisoners wore dingy gray-and-black zebra suits, heavy as canvas, sodden with sweat. Hatless, stooped, they chopped weeds in the fierce heat, row after row, breathing the acrid dust of boll-weevil poison.” The narrator expresses the unforgiving situations the slaves worked in; they didn’t even have a choice which is the saddest part. Yet the slave masters lived a different elegant life.
What does he come to believe are the “two chief destinies of men”?
In his perspective “two chief destinies of men” are the soldiers and toilers. Yet, he learnt they were not the only two from same gender teachers, books and