Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 3

WILLY (worried and angered): There’s such an undercurrent in him. He became a moody man. Did he apologize when I left this morning?

LINDA: He was crestfallen, Willy. You know how he admires you. I think if he finds himself, then you’ll both be happier and not fight any more.

WILLY: How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!

WILLY (with pity and resolve): I’ll see him in the morning; I’ll have a nice talk with him. I’ll get him a job selling.

Remember how they used to follow him around in high school? When he smiled at one of them their faces lit up. When he walked down the street... (He loses himself in reminiscences.)

MAMA: Son—I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers—but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we weren’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor.

...And maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees... [He does so, RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror.] “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman—[groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slow-witted movie stereotype] Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh!

[She is nodding, slowly, reflectively.]

You done wrote his epitaph too—like the rest of the world?

You saw him—down on his knees. Wasn’t it you who taught me—to despise any man who would do that?