Patterns Plus

Questions About the Reading

1.Why does the writer think that psychiatrists are not interested in finding out why people kill?

2.The writer says that he does not like "to make fun of people who oppose the death penalty because they're so sincere." Does he make fun of them? Cite examples from the essay to support your answer.

3.What do the families and friends of homicide victims have in common?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1.In paragraphs 4-10, what method does the writer use to create evidence supporting his position?

2.Is the essay an example of argumentation, persuasion, or a mixture of the two? Explain.

3.What is the dominant mode of development in paragraphs 11-22?

4.Can you locate a statement of the problem in the essay? Can you locate a solution? Is a solution implied?

5.How does the writer refute the argument that the death penalty won't deter criminals?

Writing Assignments

1.Write a persuasive essay in which you use examples to appeal to your reader's emotions. Possible topics might include spaying or neutering of cats and dogs, the need for smoke detectors in all buildings, the need to make day care widely available at a reasonable cost, the need for closer government oversight of safety in the workplace, or the need for stiff penalties for people who pollute the environment (for instance, by dumping hazardous waste or ignoring pollution control procedures).

2.Some people support mandatory sentencing for criminals, or ensuring that people who commit certain crimes are automatically given prison sentences of a certain length. What purpose do you think mandatory sentencing would serve? Write an essay in which you support or reject the concept of mandatory sentencing.

The Death Penalty Is a Step Back / Coretta Scott King

373

The Death Penalty Is

a Step Back

Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King has strong opinions about the death penalty. Despite the loss of two family members, including her husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., by assassination, she remains firmly convinced that the death penalty is morally wrong and unjustifiable. A long-time civil rights activist, she believes that the practice of nonviolence is the way to make our society a more just and humane place to live. In the essay that follows, she argues passionately for her convictions.

Words to Know

abhor detest, hate strongly deterrent something that prevents inequitable unfair

irrevocable not reversible legitimizing making lawful miscarriage a failure

proponents advocates, supporters retaliation to get revenge sanctioned approved

specter ghost

unequivocally clearly, without question unwarranted not supported by facts

I Have a Dream

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The 1963 march on Washington, involving a quarter of a million people, was the largest demonstration for civil rights in the history of the United States. This event, which coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, climaxed with the delivery ofa speech by Martin Luther King, jr., from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King's words, printed below, are a classic of modern persuasive writing. His powerful demand for courage and persistence in the continuing struggle for justice moved many in his audience to tears.

Words to Know

In a sense we have come to our nation's Capitol to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked '''insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check-—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Nozv is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Nozv is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Nozv is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the mo- 5 ment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have

a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something I must say to my people who stand on the 6 warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the

and ghettoes of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficul10 ties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out 11 the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons 12 of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state 13 sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a 14

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious ra16 cists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every 18 hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. 19 With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair

a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day. This will be the day when all of God's chil20 dren will be able to sing with new meaning.

My country, tis of thee

Sweet landof liberty,

Of thee I sing:

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring.

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So 21

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! 24

every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and we allow freedom to ring, when we 27 let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

Questions About the Reading

1. In paragraph 2 and throughout the speech, how does King support his statement that "the Negro still is not free"?

2.How does King show, throughout his speech, that his demands for justice are upheld by the established laws and traditions of the United States?

3.What warning does King give in paragraph 6? How is this warning balanced in the paragraph that follows?

4.What does King mean by "creative suffering" in paragraph 8?

5.In the speech, King's attitude toward whites tells us a great deal about his character and his vision. Describe his attitude, citing examples from the speech.

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1. Find as many examples as you can of parallelism in King's speech. What effect does it have on you as a reader? What effect do you suppose it had on the original audience?

2.King uses metaphors throughout his address. Identify three such metaphors in paragraphs 4-6, and analyze their effect on you. What feelings do they evoke?

3.State King's thesis in your own words. What tone dominates as King develops his thesis? Is the tone simple or complex? What different emotions are present?

4.King's "dream" can be viewed as a symbol. In your own words, interpret what it symbolizes.

5.Is this an example of argumentation or persuasion? How can you tell? Does King emphasize the connotative or the denotative value of words? Find examples to support your answer.

Writing Assignments

1. Write an essay suitable for delivery to your class, urging people to vote.

2.Is the United States today a more just society than the one King describes? Write a persuasive essay in which you try to convince your reader that the United States does or does not set an example of justice for all the world to follow.

3.Write an essay urging people to participate in a volunteer activity that you are especially interested in.

Blue and Brew

Philip Kopper

Good recipes are perfect examples ofprocess analysis. They demand precision, clarity, and step-by-step thoroughness. But in this recipe for cooking and eating Atlantic blue crabs,

Philip Kopper offers still more. Using several modes, he narrates his own introduction to the art of eating crabs. He compares several ways of cooking crabs—his own is best, of course. And he even manages to classify the different kinds of crab restaurants. This recipe (and a lot of other good seafood recipes like it) appears in Kopper's book, The Wild

Edge.

Words to Know

appendage something attached diabolically devilishly

dowel a wooden rod ectoderm outer layer of skin

fawned over acted slavishly over gauche clumsy

incisor front tooth

lieutenant j.g. lieutenant junior grade obtuse blunt, dull, not discerning palate sense of taste

sated filled up, completely satisfied sullen resentful

supercilious arrogant, haughty wangle manipulate

B'lue crabs make something more than a meal. Properly done, they become a delicious, difficult and messy ritual. I learned about it all in Baltimore from a native who was doing time in the Navy while I apprenticed at the local paper. When my college pal would come home on leave, I'd wangle an evening away from the police beat and we'd go to one of the local crab houses. These were the only restaurants where two young men (on a cub reporter's pay and a lieutenant j.g.'s respectively) could hire a table for several hours of food and talk without being either fawned over by supercilious French waiters or hurried by sullen American ones. Sit down in one of these establishments and they didn't want you to leave until closing time—so long as there was another crab and another beer on the paper-covered table.

tice. Pry off the apron—the pointed plate covering the rear of the bottom.shell. With this gone, the top shell will flip off to reveal the gills. These feathery gray things should be scraped away with the dull paring knife. Eat everything else that tastes good—namely all the meat you can find, the yellow tomalley (spelled "Tom Alley" in one restaurant) and the whitish fat in the body cavity. Then go for the meat. This is easier said than done because each morsel is diabolically encased in ectoderm and partitions. A crab surrenders its meat one nibble at a time.

Using both hands, break the remaining crab in half along the seam 6 that runs front to back. Crush each half slightly. Break off one leg at

a time, doing your damnedest to keep a segment of muscle attached. This is a little tricky; practice is the only teacher. With thumb and forefinger, grasp both the inner joint of the leg and the body segment to which it's attached, squeeze, and twist the leg off gently. Start with the hind legs; it's easiest with them and, when done properly, results in a legitimately bite-sized piece of "back fin" meat jutting from the end of the leg. After dispatching that morsel, nibble at each pliable leg Joint; sort of squeegee them between upper and lower incisors to get the meat out.

To get inside the claws, tear off the entire appendage from the body and lay it on the table. Hold the blade of the dull paring knife across the claw and smack it gently with the dowel, broomstick or whatever's handy. (You could always tell if a crab house had pretensions; it provided little mallets for this job.) Repeat with each segment. The notion is to cut about halfway through the claw, then snap it apart with your hands and nibble at the exposed meat. As you proceed, pick out elusive bits of meat with the knifepoint. Go back over your first crab, making sure you haven't missed anything. Morsels hide in all sorts of nooks, crannies, and cubbyholes. You'll soon know the animal's anatomy better than it did.

Needless to say, the entire procedure creates a good deal of scultch and beer cans. That's why you spread the table with so much newspaper. When things get out of hand, roll it all up in a few layers of classified ads, chuck the bundle and start fresh on the sports section. This cannot be a tidy meal, nor a delicate one, nor a fast one. A hungry man can eat a dozen jumbos—if he has the patience and a couple of hours. (One never gets sated on crabs; one gets tired first.) When the party is on the way to finishing the first batch of crabs, put another on to steam and fetch another six-pack from the fridge. The ratio of crabs to cans is sometimes on the order of 1 to 1; peppery seasoning warms a thirst. Outlanders sometimes accompany crabs with french fries and/or coleslaw. Some people even drink good wine with this meal, though fingering a wineglass with crabby hands seems gauche, at least, and all that pepper dulls the palate. Beer goes best.

Discussing the corruption of the mother tongue, H. L. Mencken rather proudly observed that "in Maryland crabfeast has never yielded to crabfest." (He probably knew more about Maryland food ways and the American idiom than anyone of this century, and wrote about both at greater length.) A crabfeast traditionally includes she-crab soup, crab imperial, crab cakes, and sauteed soft crabs. Some Baltimore re- staurants—the places that had moved from dowels to mallets and from newspapers to brown wrapping paper to gingham tablecloths—fea- tured fried hardshells too: hard crabs covered with butter and cooked in deep fat. This practice is slightly more obtuse than gilding lilies.

Ode to My Father

TessGallagher

Tess Gallagher is a poet. She seems to have been aware of this calling from early in her youth. When she tells of her experiences with her father, she comes back several times to her central idea, almost a refrain: this was necessary to become a poet. The modes are narration and cause and effect. At the end, Gallagher is a grown woman with a life of her own and a new view of the father/whose actions shaped her.

Words to Know /

defiance unwillingness to submit primal primary, of first importance psychic mental, psychological stamina endurance, strength

vulnerability openness or susceptibility to being

hurt

Un Saturdays my father would drive my mother and my three 1 brothers and me into town to shop and then to wait for him while he drank in what he called "the beer joints." We would sit for hours in the car watching the townspeople pass, commenting on their dress and faces, trying to figure out what they did with the rest of their lives. Although it was just a game we played to pass the time, I think it taught me to see deeply at a very young age. Every hour or so my mother would send me on a round of the taverns to try for a sighting of my father. I would peck on the windows and the barmaid would shake her head "no" or motion down the dim aisle of faces to where my father would be sitting on his stool, forgetting, forgetting us all for a while. Back at the car, my brothers were quarreling, then crying. My mother had gone stiff. These times were the farthest I would ever get from home.

My father's drinking and the quarrels he had with my mother be- 2 cause of it terrorized my childhood. There is no other way to put it. And if terror and fear are necessary to the psychic stamina of a poet,

I had them in steady doses—just as inevitably as I had the rain. I learned that the world was not just, that any balance was temporary, that the unreasonableness could descend at any minute, thrashing aside everything and everyone in its path. Love, through all this, was constant, though it had a hoary head. Its blow, brutal as any evil, was perhaps more so for how it raked the quick of my being. The body

When he got home, we put the coffee pot on and sat at the kitchen table and talked. I don't remember when we began this sort of talking but I think now it happened because my father had caught sight of his death. He had suffered a heart attack while I had been in Ireland and this had given him more to say. When I'd been a child fishing with him in the salmon derbies he had talked more than he usually did— talked "to make the fish bite"—for just when you got to the most interesting place in the story, the fish were sure to bite. And they did. But this night there was another kind of talking. My father knew I was going the next day to a job in another part of the country. He might not see me again. He began to tell me his life. And though he told it all plainly and without pity for himself—only some verbal turning of the palms upward—the rhythms of his speech, his vulnerability before me had a power and beauty I did not want to see lost to the world.

The next day I got on a bus and waved good-bye to him and my mother. The bus was crammed with people headed for Seattle. They were talking and adjusting their packages. The woman sitting next to me had some knitting to work on. I took out my notebook with its pale green-white pages, frog-belly green they were. I was thinking this is no place to write this; this is too important a poem to be writing here. I put the book on my knees and tried to hear my father's voice, to get it to speak through me. This was the only place, the only time.

3 A.M. Kitchen: My Father Talking

For years it was land working me, oil fields, cotton fields, then I got some land. I worked it. Them days you could just about make a living. I was logging.

Then I sent to Missouri. Momma come out. We got married.

We got some kids. Five kids. That kept us going.

We bought some land near the water. It was cheap then. The water

was right there. You just looked out the window. It never left the window.

I bought a boat. Fourteen footer. There was fish out there then. You remember, we used to catch six, eight fish, clean them right

out in the yard. I could of fished to China.

I quit the woods. One day just

walked out, took off my corks, said that's it. I went to the docks.

I was working winch. You had to watch to see nothing fell out of the sling. If you killed somebody you'd

never forget it. All

those years I was just working

I was on edge, every day. Just working.

You kids. I could tell you a lot. But I won't.

It's winter. I play a lot of cards down at the tavern. Your mother. I have to think of excuses

to get out of the house. You're

wasting your time, she says. You're wasting your money.

You don't have no idea, Threasie. I run out of things

to work for. Hell, why shouldn't I play cards? Threasie,

some days now I just don't know.

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most important black woman writers in the United

States. Although her works of fiction, folklore, and essays were popular during the Harlem renaissance in the 1930s, her writing was out of print and she was penniless at the time of her death. Her work has recently been reissued, and an anthology of her writing, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, edited by writer and activist Alice Walker, was published in 1979. The following essay, taken from this anthology, describes how Hurston became aware of the color of her skin and how it has shaped her attitude toward life.

Words to Know

assegai a light spear used by Southern African tribesmen

circumlocutions roundabout ways of speaking ebb the retreat of the tide

extenuating making less serious Hegira a flight from danger

oleander a poisonous shrub with sweet-smelling

flowers pigmentation coloring

proscenium the area of the theater located between the curtain and the first seats in the audience

raiment clothing rambunctious unruly

Reconstruction the period after the U.S. Civil War (1865-1877)

rending tearing apart specter ghost

thorax the chest

veneer a thin layer, the surface appearance

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode