“‘Come to yo’ Grandma, honey. Set in her lap lak yo’ use tuh. Yo’ Nanny wouldn’t harm a hair uh yo’ head. She don’t want nobody else to do it neither if she kin help it. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!’” (Hurston 14)
- “…but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see.”: Plays into the idea that people judge based on what they see, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all that’s there.
- Repeats the motif of seeing/eyes
- Foreshadowing: Nanny is telling Janie that women are below men and men treat them like they aren’t equal. This becomes Janie’s life.
- Contrast between saying that they only know what they see, yet Nanny believes in God, something that she can’t see.
- Negative tone
- “de” repeated
- Power across the ocean: Janie starts to gain power after the flood
- Black women = mules
- Sentences flow; rhythmic
- Refers to black people as “niggers”
- Repeats the sound “uh” at the end of words
- Why would Nanny tell Janie that there is basically no hope for her to have power during her life?
- Southern dialect
- “tote”: unusual noun choice
- Repeats the motif of power
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