Arc of Justice

Here are some of the passages we will discuss

(p.5) The frenzy was shot through with condescension. White "slummers" thought black life exciting because it was "primitive" and vital.

(p.6) Fear of moral decay

(p.7) Everyone knew that Negroes were a breed apart , "... charming in their simplicity but also frightening in their volatility, their carnality, their utter incapacity to learn the lessons of civilized society

(p.9) As the structures of segregation hardened, white homeowners became more and more determined to protect their neighborhoods' racial purity. Those whites who could afford to do so left the ghetto. Those who had no black neighbors organized to keep their areas lily-white. They formed legal organizations, protective associations, they called them ...to write clauses into their deeds prohibiting the sale of their homes to blacks. They monitored real estate sales to make sure no one broke the color line. And if a black family somehow managed to breech the defenses, they could always drive them out, quietly if possible, violently if necessary

(p.14) in 1900, when Ford was first organizing his company, Detroit had 285,000 living within its city limits. By 1925, it had 1.25 million.

(p.15) Immigrants clustered on the east side of the city, the native-born on the west side, all of them paying premium prices for homes slapped up amid factories, warehouses, and railroad yards or along barren streetscapes

(p.23) Detroit's race relations had been deteriorating ever since the Great War, when Southern blacks had begun flooding into the city [55 blacks shot by police within the 1st six months of 1925; police department thick with Klansmen]

(p.83) For the huge middle range of jobs that didn't require any special skill-- increasingly Detroit's specialty-- most of the big employers hired the foreign-born.

(p.103) A city which is built around a productive process... is really a kind of hell. Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink, and make merry. What a civilization! [Reinhold Niebuhr]

(p.103) The manufacturer's definition of citizenship "Each one in his sphere, keeping busy, doing honest work, and contributing to the sum total of wealth for the support of the nation."

(p.104) Ford's extremism fed fires of xenophobia smoldering among the city's Anglo-Saxon minority, blending anti-Semitism with anti-Catholicism, nativism, and a deepening racism."

(p.106) Like so many other parts of the North, Detroit's race relations had been decaying since the turn of the century. The Great Migration dramatically accelerated the decline

(p.108) In Detroit, the neighborhood color line was drawn in the same jagged way that segregation was imposed everywhere else in the city through a host of individual actions arbitrarily imposed.

(p.133) "Do you want to maintain the existing good health conditions and environment for your little children?" the flyer asked. "Do you want to see your neighborhood kept up to its present high standards?" Those who shared those goals were invited to organize "in self-defense" at what the Waterworks Park Improvement Association was calling a mass meeting.

(p.134) In the privacy of their flats, husbands and wives talked nervously of fragile family budgets, mortgage years fro being repaid, and the specter of plummeting property values. Children heard the fear in their parents' hushed voices and spun out the horrors that the Negroes would bring to their homes, terrifying and thrilling themselves with thoughts of assault and pillage. Out on the streets, there was rage at the audacity of the coloreds, moving where they didn't belong, buying the best goddamned house on the block.

(p.136) An acquaintance once remarked that Ois wasn't as articulate as his older brother. " The difference," Ossian bitingly replied, " is the difference between a Negro who has been educated in the North and one who has been educated in the South." Had they not been brothers, Ossian wouldn't have chosen Otis as a friend."

(p.138) When the Anglo-Saxon elite took control of city government in 1918, they made it a priority to restructure Detroit's criminal court, long known as Recorders Court, which they considered hopelessly soft on crime. To toughen it up, they increased the number of judges from five to seven, put control of case assignment in the hands of a presiding judge, then made sure that hard-nosed conservatives won election to four of the seven seats on the bench, enough to assure them a permanent hold on the presiding judgeship and this on all the court's activities. In short order, the conservatives launched a massive crackdown on petty crimes and the poor people who committed them, a judicial complement to police brutality rampant in the foreign-born and colored districts of the city."

(p.140) By 1923, there were twenty-two thousand Klansmen in Detroit, and the Invisible Order was ready to go public. Throughout that summer, the KKK held nighttime rallies on the far west side, complete with cross burnings so spectacular and speeches so incendiary they drew upward of eight thousand...And on Christmas Eve 1923, Klansmen marked the season by burning a six-foot tall cross in front of city hall, then cheering a hooded Santa Claus, come to entertain the kids.

(p.142) That Saturday night, upwards of fifty thousand gathered under a flaming cross in the western suburb of Dearborn-- Henry Ford's hometown-- to hear last-minute exhortations and the usual round of condemnations. Klan pickets kept nonmembers away, so no outsider knew precisely what was said. But the message was clear enough. The KKK was preparing for power.

(p.143) And in Detroit, there was no better way to fuel savage anger than to raise the specter of the Negro masses pouring across the color line into white man's land.

(p.147) Surely it crossed the parents' minds that their daughters soon would be sharing the street with brooding Negro men and sitting in classrooms next to colored boys whose passions knew no restraint. At least some people also felt in the rumor a blow to their pride. Having Negroes in the neighborhood would ruin standards, Harry Monet insisted, dragging whites down to the coloreds' level, degrading everything people up and down the block had worked so hard to achieve.

(p.157) " a single fatal riot would injure this city beyond repair."

(p.219) Johnson, however had to make sure that the story was spun in just the right way. For a campaign created on the run-its strategy and publicity shaped in the snatches of time the association's frenzied schedule permitted--it was very effectively fashioned. Beginning with the press release announcing that the NAACP "will throw its entire power to the defense of Dr. O. H. Sweet," sent out the day the defendants lost the preliminary hearing, Johnson never failed to link the Sweet case and the Washington Supreme Court challenge, companion pieces in a seamless struggle against residential segregation."

Bless Me Ultima

This lyrical book captures the magial surrealism of a forgotten age. Here are some questions for reflection:

1) Why does Antonio say "but then...who wil hear my confession?" when his mother suggests that he will be a priest?

2) Please comment on the syncretism in the following passage:

"I dreamed about the owl that night, and my dream was good. La Virgen de Guadalupe was the patron saint of our town. The town was named after her. In my dream I saw Ultima's owl lift la Virgen on her wide wings and fly her to heaven. Then the owl returned and gathered up all the babes of Limbo and flew them up to the clouds of heaven."

Does the owl most resemble the Holy Spirit of the Gospels or the Breath of God of the Hebrew Scriptures?

3) Have you seen "the beauty in the time of day and in the time of night?" Have you known the "peace in the river and the hills?" Have you listened to the mystery of the groaning earth or felt complete in the fullness of its time?

4) Anaya paints a realistic picture of post traumatic stress disorder in his portrayal of Lupito by the banks of the river, hidden in the darkness below the bridge, waving a pistol and screaming like a hunted animal. Why does he cry "bless me" as the second volley of shots finds its mark?

5) Please share your understandingof the Act of Contrition. Does it match Antonio's?

"Over and over through my mind ran the words of the Act of Contrition. I had not yet been to catechism, nor had I made my first holy communion, but my mother had taught me the Act of Contrition. It was said after one made his confession to the priest, and as the last prayer before death. (p.23)

6) What do you make of Antonio's transformation within the vision on p.26?

7) How do you interpret Antonio's words on p.27

"Where was Lupito's soul? He had killed the sheriff and so had died with a mortal sin on his soul. He would go to hell. Or would od forgive him and grant him Purgatory, the lonely, hopeless resting place of those who were neither saved nor damned. But God didn't forgive anyone."

Is his theology a hybrid of his mother's piety and his father's anti-clericalism?

Does he believe La Grande when she says " you must never judge who God forgives and who He doesn't"

Contrast this with the passage on p.44 that reads

"God was not always forgiving. He made laws to follow and if you broke them you were punished. The Virgin always forgave. God had power. He spoke and the thunder echoed through the skies. The Virgin was fullof a quiet, peaceful love."

8)Please comment on the following passage

"Then Abel, who had been pissing against the church wall, called outthat mass wasstarting and we all rushed to get the premium pews at the very back of the church"(p.38)

9) How would you describe " la tristeza de la vida" (p.59)?

10) Please comment on the stories of the golden carp and the Trementina sisters? What is Anaya's understanding of forgiveness and redemption?

11) What does Ultima mean when she says "I must work the magic beyond evil, the magic that endures forever." "Life is never beyond hope." " The smallest bit of good can stand against all te powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant

12) Is there something bittersweet in the Nativity play that Anaya recounts on pp.151-157?

13) Please coment on the folowing passage

The townpeople had killed Lupito at the bridge and desecrated the river. Then Tenorio and his men had come upon the hill with hate in their hearts. My father had tried to keep his land holy and pure, but perhaps it was impossible. Perhaps the llano was like me, as I grew the innocence was gone, and so too the land changed." (pp167-8)

14) Please comment on the voice Antonio hears in his delirium: " You would have a God who forgives all , but when it comes to your personal whims you seek punishment for your vengeance."

15) How would you answer Florence's questions on pp. 196-7? Do you agree with Antonio that God comes in cycles?

16) Is Father Byrnes description of eternity convincing? (pp.201-2)

17) Why does Antonio agree to hear the children's confessions? Why do the penitents give him the Indian torture? (pp.212-215)

18) How do you explain the dream that Antonio has after Florence's tragic death? (pp.243-44)

19) Please comment on Gabriel's description of Ultima

"Ultima has sympathy for people, and it is so complete that with it she can touch their souls and cure them...no greater magic can exist."

Contrast it with Antonio's description

"For us Ultima personified goodness, and any risk in defense of goodness was right. She was the only person I had ever seen defeat evil where all else had failed."

20) What does Antonio mean when he says " I ran to save Ultima and I ran to preserve those moments when beauty mingled with sadness and flowed through my soul like the stream of time." (p.257)