Free Literature Review On "The Welcome Table" And "Country Lovers"

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the many general similarities between Alice Walker’s "The Welcome Table" and Nadine Gordimer’s "Country Lovers", and the ways in which racism is presented by both writers. Both stories condemn the hypocrisy and attack the injustices of racist societies. Both stories have a symbolic element which is examined and discussed and the fact that both stories are set in very different societies and, therefore, have very different contexts and settings is always at the heart of the paper’s argument. Each story is also discussed and explored separately in order to focus on its individual qualities. Finally, the fictional methods and effects of both writers are contrasted and the paper reaches an evaluative conclusion about both stories.
Nadine Gordimer’s "Country Lovers" and Alice Walker’s "The Welcome Table" are both texts which condemn and criticize racism and expose the human consequences of living in a racist society. However, they also differ - partly because of the context within which each story was written, but also in the way they are written and their overall emotional impact on the reader. Gordimer’s story was first published in 1975 in South Africa under the undemocratic and notorious apartheid regime, which used the law and the apparatus of the state (the police, the army, the education system) to impose terrible living conditions on all non-whites in South Africa. They were denied their human rights, while preserving wealth and economic and educational opportunity as the exclusive privilege of the white South African population. In 1950, the South African government passed the Immorality Act, which is highly relevant to any appreciation of Gordimer’s story, since the Act made sexual relations and acts between people from different racial backgrounds illegal. In contrast, the setting of Walker’s "The Welcome Table" is the Southern States of the U.S.A. in the civil rights era. However, Walker (as is common in many of her short stories written in that era, such as ‘Everyday Use’) examines the difficult situation of elderly rural African-Americans who have not been able to take advantage of the increasing freedoms and social mobility that younger African Americans increasingly had access after the successes of the civil rights movement and whose lives continue to be blighted the historical legacy of slavery and segregation. My thesis, therefore, is that both stories expose and attack the cruelties and irrationalities of racism, but use very different methods and with very different emotional effects. Both stories center on hypocrisy. In Walker’s "The Welcome Table", the title itself is deeply ironic because the elderly and confused African-American woman who accidentally strays into a whites-only church is given no real welcome, but is greeted with embarrassment and shock – no welcome table exists for her in this house of God, because the different races have their own places of worship. The eponymous welcome table is an arresting and powerful image: it is, of course, a clear reference to the eating of the Last Supper, which is symbolized in Christianity when communion is celebrated and where Christians go to eat the body and the blood of Jesus Christ, the bread and the wine, but it is represents heaven for the elderly African American woman – the table replete with food and drink that the old woman believes is waiting for her in heaven after her death. In the whites-only church that she wanders into and then is hastily ejected from, there is no welcome whatsoever for an elderly African American woman like her, despite Jesus Christ’s message of love and forgiveness and compassion for all. As Klinkowitz (2001) puts it, “If you are a Christian, and a sincere one, do you think Jesus was present in that hypocritical white church? Or is he out there on the road with the old dying lady?” (p. 146). In Gordimer’s "Country Lovers" the hypocritical attitudes have more personal, intimate resonances, despite having the support of South African law and the apparatus of the system of apartheid. Gordimer’s opening sentence is, “As a young children growing up in the countryside Paulus and Thebedi seem almost unconscious of the society that they live in and they simply follow their natural, instinctive feelings by being attracted and drawn to each other. There is a beautiful and touching innocence and a deep physical sensuousness to the description of Paulus’ natural desire for her, but as Paulus becomes older and is sent away to the city to attend boarding school, a gap develops between the young lovers. Paulus becomes more aware of convention and more aware of society’s racist prejudices as he grows up and loses his childish innocence. As such, he realizes that what Thebedi and he are doing is deemed wrong - indeed, illegal. Although he is content to continue to exploit her by having sex with her, when she becomes pregnant, he is prepared to betray and disown her and finally to murder the baby they have conceived to protect himself, his reputation and to avoid the chances of his being charged for breaking the Immorality Act. Therefore, Paulus’s hypocrisy directly affects Thebedi in its vindictiveness and selfishness, whereas the social hypocrisy in "The Welcome Table" is more general and is founded on many centuries of enslavement and the subjugation of African-Americans in the U.S.A.. Both writers are at pains to make clear the economic repression of blacks. In South Africa the apartheid system was deliberately set up to deny South African blacks economic improvement; in the United States the legacy of slavery and continuing racism have conspired to limit the life chances of African Americans. In ‘The Welcome Table’ the white middle-class congregation who see at the elderly African American woman see her as an interloper, but in fact Walker presents her as frail, confused and vulnerable; because of their stereotypical ideas of what African Americans are employed as, the think of “cooks, chauffeurs, maids, mistresses” – all the trivial, deferential jobs that were available to African-Americans (Walker, p. 75). The old woman’s lack of wealth is obvious from the condition of her clothing: “the missing buttons down the front of her mildewed black dress” (Walker, p. 75). In "Country Lovers", there are also clear social and financial divisions that separate Paulus from Thebedi. His father is a wealthy land-owner and he can afford to send his son away to a private school in the city: Paulus’s being sent away to be educated is an important moment which increases the divisions between him and Thebedi and could be said to mark the start of their break up . Thebedi, because of her race and her gender, is destined for a lifetime of manual work and, like all Africans under the apartheid system, she has limited access to education. The financial and class divide between the young lovers is clear: the conditions of life in the kraal stand in complete opposition to the modern amenities and relative luxury of the white farmhouse. It could be argued that both stories also center around the feeling of fear. In Gordimer’s story, and indeed in all racist societies such as South Africa under apartheid, there is the fear of miscegenation which is one of the reasons Paulus murders his own son, although there is also Paulus’s fear of the law – not merely for murder, but for having had a sexual relationship with Thebedi. As far as Paulus’s father is concerned, he seems socially embarrassed by the behavior of his son more than anything else. The local newspaper at the end of the story quotes him: “I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district” (Gordimer, p. 11). In ‘The Welcome Table’ there is a similar air of social embarrassment – the white congregation simply do not know what to say to the elderly African American lady who has wandered in off the street, but Walker also suggests very strongly that alongside this embarrassment, there is also a more primitive, racist and violent fear of the unknown: “Many of them [the white congregation] saw jungle orgies in an evil place, while others were reminded of riotous anarchists looting and raping in the streets.” (Walker, page 75). In neither story are the white characters able to see the black characters as human being equal in every respect to themselves. Because of this inability to see people of another race as equal to them and fully human, the white characters in both stories are unable to feel empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings – because they do not recognize them as fellow human beings. For most of her life Nadine Gordimer has fought and criticized the apartheid system. Acording to Hallengren (2004):
"For fifty years, Gordimer has been the Geiger counter of apartheid and of the movements of people across South Africa. Her work reflects the psychic vibrations within that country, the road from passivity and blindness, to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul, and the underground networks. She has outlined a free zone where it was possible to try out, in imagination, what life beyond apartheid might look like." (p. 34)
Early in "Country Lovers", Paulus and Thebedi’s love and attraction is described in an idyllic rural setting: Paulus’s sexual attraction to Thebedi is made clear by Gordimer when she describes Thebedi walking in the river: “the girl came up the bank and sat beside him, the drops of water beading off her dark legs the only points of light in the earth-smelling, deep shade.” (Gordimer, p. 4). Paulus is not a virgin: he has had sex with a white girl he met at a wedding, but his desire and love for Thebedi is presented differently – as something deeper and more real:
"They were not afraid of one another, they had known one another always; he did with her what he had done that time in the storeroom at the wedding, and this time it was so lovely, so lovely he was surprised and she was surprised by it, too – he could see in her dark face that was part of the shade, with her big dark eyes, shiny as soft water." (Gordimer, p. 5)
Gordimer is perhaps suggesting that in the country, away from civilization, black and white people are able to love whoever they like regardless of the Immorality Act. As Fallow (2001) writes, “She [Gordimer] explores the limitations that racial prejudice and expectations impose on interactions between the races: (p. 183). But because of society’s mores and the South African law, Paulus betrays his black lover and is capable of killing his own son - the product of their sexual relationship. This act can be seen as symbolic. Because of the political situation in South Africa when the story was written and when it is set, Paulus is, it could be argued, symbolically ‘killing’ the possibility of a future, mixed-race South Africa – one of racial assimilation and concord. Martin (1995) writes, “The farmer’s son thus takes on a significance beyond himself, as a representative of Afrikaners, rather than as an individual caught up in ‘deviant’ sexual behavior. The characters become vehicles to describe a political situation” (p. 139). The fact that Paulus is exculpated in court at the end of the story serves to show how far white people exerted power and exploited their positions of power under the apartheid system. Thebedi’s husband is, ironically, the one character who emerges from the story with genuine recognition. His situation is that of the black man under the apartheid system – he has no power at all and has to accept what the white court decides, in much the same way that he recognized the baby was not his, but still did his best to treat for Thebedi and the child with kindness and generosity. He is tolerant, uncomplaining and unstinting. Gordimer’s story centers around a series of oppositions: the most obvious is the opposition between black and white, but there are several other important ones: between the country (where Thebedi and Paulus are able to love as they choose) and the city where Paulus is educated; between innocence of childhood and the distrust and deceit of adulthood; the dichotomies of class and education (bound up inexorably with race, of course); the dichotomy between the white farmhouse with its electric lights and the poverty of the kraal; and, perhaps most importantly, between the Eysendyck family’s lack of kindness and sympathy, and the compassion and generosity of spirit demonstrated by Thebedi’s husband. Such oppositions, it could be argued, are an inevitable consequence of a society based on a system based on the very idea of opposition – apartheid. Walker’s ‘The Welcome Table’ could be said to have a symbolic meaning which is clear and is highlighted by the way the story is written. It can be argued that the elderly black woman who tries to go into the white church is a symbol of all the exclusion and all the marginalization of all her people for many centuries in the past:
"She was angular and lean and the color of poor grey Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and extreme weather. Her elbows were wrinkled and thick, the skin ashen but durable, like the bark of old pines. On her face centuries were folded into the circles around one eye, while around the other, etched and mapped as if for print, ages more threatened to live." (p. 75).
Walker’s use of the word “centuries” evokes the long centuries of suffering and oppression caused by the enslavement of African- Americans. When she has been forced to leave the church, the old lady encounters her Savior, Jesus, and talks to him happily until she slowly dies by the side of the highway. How should we interpret this ending? On the one hand, it is deeply ironic because the Jesus whom she meets is blue-eyed, blond and Aryan (and would seem to have more in common with the white folks who have ejected her from their church) and her mental notion of what Jesus looks like is based on a picture that she once tore from the Bible of her white employers. This image of Jesus is a construction of the dominant white culture as Porter et al. (2004) point out: “Alice Walker’s short story illustrates the difficulty of rescuing Jesus from a racist, Euro-American ideology.” (p. 190). One could argue that the old lady dies in a state of happiness, but “this white, blue-eyed Jesus accompanies her – but we are never told if her encounter is truly redemptive or not, or if Jesus can be disentangled from the pages of the white slave owner’s Bible.” (p. 191). As readers we are left to determine our own response to the story’s ending. Has Christianity been used as a mechanism of social manipulation and control to appease African-Americans and offer them the promise of a better life in the next world in return for their acquiescence in their own suffering in this world? That is a convincing interpretation, but the old lady dies in a state of happiness and contentment, although completely ostracized by the dominant white society that has exploited her ancestors and her. Although both stories have very similar themes and preoccupations, they are written very differently. Gordimer’s story is longer and more detailed; its events occur over a period of many years and Gordimer presents the gradual growth and slow development, and then the death of a romantic relationship; the characters given names and individual attitudes, and, therefore, when Thebedi weeps in court at the end of the story the reader is likely to sympathize with her. In the same way, the reader is likely to be emotionally engaged and enraged by Paulus’s betrayal of Thebedi and his son’s murder. However, at the end of the story Gordimer distances us from the characters by concentrating on the judicial procedure in court and the reporting of the case by the newspapers. By contrast, Walker writes more concisely and the events of "The Welcome Table" are restricted to a single day (although the elderly African American lady’s dead body is not found until the following day). Walker does not give her characters names and this imparts to her story an abiding, common feel to it which almost allows the old lady to achieve the status of a symbolic Everywoman or, perhaps, Every Black Woman. "The Welcome Table" has features which remind us of Jesus’s parables in the Bible, as Scholl (2008) asserts: “In its many ironic reversals of social roles, expectations and events, this story uses the formal structure of parable suggests its derivation from the biblical heritage of Walker’s church-going childhood” (p. 118). The purpose of Biblical parables is to teach. Does Walker’s "The Welcome Table" have a similar purpose? It does teach the reader a very straightforward lesson about the importance of sympathy for the poor and the marginalized, but it is also very critical of the ostensible Christian principles of the church from which the old lady is turned out. Christian principle suggests that love for one’s fellow human beings is vital and central: Jesus in the New Testament says about racial segregation or racial prejudice. Comparing these two stories, Walker’s "The Welcome Table" could be said to be slightly more successful because of its shortness, its action being limited to one day and the way it uses religious allusions to become almost like a parable. Gordimer’s "Country Lovers", while it shares the same horror and criticism of racism and its injustices, has a different effect because it is a story of a love that is thwarted and ultimately destroyed by society and by the law.
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