The Sculptor's Funeral And The White Troops Had Their Orders

Over the course of this semester we have read, analyzed and discussed many different works. Two themes that stuck out to me, from my favorite pieces, were “society makes people who they are” and “nature.” I chose the works, “The Sculptor’s Funeral” by Willa Cather and “The White Troops Had Their Orders” by Gwendolyn Brooks, “Lullaby” by Leslie Marmon Silko and Emily Dickinson’s poems, “122 [130]” and “320 [258]."
In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” Cather shows that even though Harvey Merrick’s “loved ones” are gathered for his funeral, most of them are making fun of him because they couldn’t change him like they did the rest of the “kids.” Laird figures out why Merrick stayed away from his home town. Laird was pulled down by the people who were supposed

She wanted to take a closer look at how whites and blacks deal with this problem. She gave her poem a literal title, “The White Troops Had Their Orders but the Negroes Looked like Men,” the order that the white men were given to kill the black men. The poem begins, “They had supposed their formula was fixed. / They had obeyed instructions to devise / a type of cold, a type of hooded gaze. / But when the Negroes came they were perplexed. / These Negroes looked like men. Besides, it taxed. / Time and the temper to remember those / Congenital iniquities that cause / Disfavor of the darkness.” The white troops had seen the mission as “fixed,” something easy to obey, and something they had done before. However, when they were confronted with the black men, they noticed that they looked a lot like them – people. So, immediately they tried to justify their orders but realized that they were just born that way and it was a gross injustice what they were being asked to do. The norms in society during this time had created “white” troops whose jobs were to take out the black troops after the war. Society created “cold-blooded” killers, troops who blindly followed their orders without a question or doubt. However, this mission had them doubting everything they had been taught and the people they had become. The line, “disfavor of the darkness,” describes this well – it means that just because they were born darker (black) gives them immediate disfavor and causes them to be discriminated against. The poems ends, “Such as boxed / their feelings properly, complete to tags- / A box for dark men and a box for other- / would often find the contents had been scrambled. / Or even switched. Who really gave two figs? / Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled. / and there was nothing startling in the weather.” This time the white