Read the excerpt from Notes of a Native Son.The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who dealt with them, for my father’s temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stiff, and by his voice, harsh and vindictively polite. Which figurative language device does Baldwin use to emphasize the rage buried beneath his father’s outward appearance and actions?
Read the excerpt from Notes of a Native Son.A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.Baldwin describes a personal event taking place amid a riot to
Read the excerpt from Notes of a Native Son.That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. What emerging solution to his problem does Baldwin recognize?
Which best explains why Baldwin uses a problem/solution structure to write about his relationship with his father in Notes of a Native Son?
Read the excerpt from Notes of a Native Son.He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. Which best explains why Baldwin chooses the word “menaced”?
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