The American Dream Theme Analysis

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.

A busy night never saw all his chairs full but I was jealous of his success. He had his own business; he owned something.

All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.

At the first words I went to my closet. I don’t know what I wanted to do there, maybe pack my bags and leave town. Maybe I just wanted to hide in the closet, I don’t know.

DeWitt Albright had his bottle and his gun right out there in plain view. When he asked me what I had to say I told him; I might have been a little nervous, but I told him anyway. Benny didn’t care about what I had to say. [...] He wasn’t a businessman, he was a plantation boss; a slaver.

But I didn’t believe that there was justice for Negroes. I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn’t a sure bet but it’s the closest to God that I’ve ever seen in this world.

“Guilt?” He said the words as if it had no meaning. “You mean like what I did makes you feel bad?”

“That’s right.”

“I tell you what then,” he said. [...] “You let me work on this with you and I let you run the show.”

“Whas that mean?”

“I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ you don’t tell me t’do.”

[...]

“Whatever you say, Easy. Maybe you gonna show me how a poor man can live wit’out blood.”

Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She’d whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss.

“I mean this house. I mean us here, like we aren’t who they want us to be.”

“Who?”

“They don’t have names. They’re just the ones who won’t let us be ourselves. They never want us to feel this good or close like this. That’s why I wanted to get away with you.”

“I came to you.”

She put her hand out again. “But I called you, Easy; I’m the one who brought you to me.”

“I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came to my house and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.”

“She can love a white man but all he can love is the white girl he think she is.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“That’s just like you, Easy. You learn stuff and you be thinkin’ like white men be thinkin’. You be thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you. She look like she white and you think like you white.”