Old Men
Ernest J. Gaines was the brilliant author of the novel, A Gathering of Old Men. This book mainly is a fictional story about the real life prejudices whites had against blacks in the 1970's. Earnest displays these prejudices through carefully thought out characters. The main protagonist of the story is a white woman known as Candy. She is an orphan who was raised by neighbors near a plantation in the Deep South where the story takes place. At the time of the story, Candy is around 18 years old. Another main character is a white sheriff known as Mapes. He is also a protagonist in the story but is more of a neutral character than Candy. Many antagonists appear throughout the book, but the only one who takes any action is Luke Will. He is a huge young man who appears to be bull headed and never backs down from a fight. Also, Luke has a great dislike for the blacks in the area, and feels that whites are superior to blacks. In all these are the major characters that appear throughout the novel. The story begins with a young boy, known as Snookum, running from house to house telling all the "old men" in the area to meet at Mathu's house with a twelve gauge shotgun and an empty number five shell. Each old timer is rounded up one by one an
He had to go and try to make the whole town of black people pay for what one black man did. The fight was over and only Luke and Charlie were seriously harmed. This was just one of the many pitiful stories the black told Mapes. This alone can tell the reader that the book probably takes place sometime in the 1970's. Here they sit and wait for Mapes the sheriff to come. He goes onto say that even though the court knew he was innocent, they gave him the chair rather than call a white woman a liar on the account of a black man saying so. For instance, the book gave great examples of how black workers were still being treated like slaves. They had all been secretly loading their guns while Mapes wasn't looking so everyone's gun was loaded. A trial occurred within the next couple of weeks and it lasted 3 days. This tells the reader that the story took place many years before now because, although Tucker is a 70 year old man, he still can remember that when he was young and breaking horses for a living, he got shut down by the white man and his machines. Fix was known around these parts for abusing blacks that crossed his path and with the act of killing his son he was sure to show up. Today this is very untrue, almost all people who live in the country or suburbs own a vehicle no matter what race or gender they are. Also, the novel tells of how the black people stuck together and stood up for one another in the face of prejudice, as did all the old men stand up for Mathu when they thought he was in trouble. To start, the characters in the book describe their experiences with segregation and how it had been a long time since they had to sit in separate rooms as whites but that nothing had really change. With his last ounce of strength Charlie shot Luke and they both were killed.
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Acceptance Essays
