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Staci Hammer

Dr. Waldmeir

REL 316

11 December 2017

Final Exam

Human identity translates across time, race, religion, gender, or what have you. This is

shown in the books A Different Drummer and The Shawl that we recently studied in class. In

both cases, the main characters experience an in-between identity, and act on their desire to get

to one side of it based on their religious backgrounds. While Tucker of A Different Drummer

spontaneously ditches his life from the south in which he originated, Rosa from The Shawl

experiences a constant back and forth of identity as she physically moves between countries and

eventually states in America. Different reasons drive these two into action, but they are both

influenced by society around them. Out of the two, The Shawl better depicts an individual’s

personal identity engaging with the surrounding community.

First, one character that struggles with an in-between identity in A Different Drummer is

Mister Leland, the 8-year-old son of Harry Leland. His parents are raising him to respect

Negroes by not using the n-word and addressing black men as “sir.” On the contrary, Mister

Leland often tags along with his dad to the porch with the other men where he encounters a lot of

disrespect towards Negroes. The reader can pick up on this middle ground when Mister Leland

starts to say the n-word but quickly finishes with the word “Negro.” In addition, Mister Leland is

often put in an adult role even though he is still a kid. For example, Harry Leland had his son

visit a woman and send her good wishes from his family because Harry was afraid of getting hit
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on by the lady. Not only does Mister Leland struggle between learning of different societal

treatments of Negros, but he also bounces between being an adult and a child.

As for the main character of A Different Drummer, Tucker Caliban lives in southern

United States where slavery is nonexistent, but racism is still prevalent. In the case of being in-

between, the Negroes and white people live in the same town of Sutton, but the Negroes live

physically apart “at the northern edge of town” where the men on the porch went to look around

“the Negro section” (187-188) after they had all left. If this separation is not clear enough,

Tucker’s uncle died on a bus that carried both whites and blacks, but he was very aware of his

place behind the “Colored Section” sign he saw as he passed away. The blacks in Sutton were in

the fuzzy state of not being considered people yet thought of not equal to other people.

While the black people of Sutton were not technically slaves, Tucker’s family catered to

the Willson family doing slave-type labor for pay. The setting of the book appears to be like the

old days of slavery in which Negroes did all the work to keep things running while the white

men sat back and enjoyed the benefits. In the time of A Different Drummer, the Negroes do all

the dirty jobs the white folks feel they’re above doing, and regularly throughout the book the

white men sit on a porch simply hanging out all day. Then they talk about the myth of the

African, which is Tucker’s first ancestor to be brought to America for slavery. All around the

town are reminders of the Civil War with General Willson’s statue and the legend of his favorite

tree. Tucker can’t escape his past and doesn’t live in a time of equality for black people. He’s

stuck in the middle where he yearns to take his body and life back that the African could not do.

Similarly in The Shawl, the character of Rosa Lublin is in the middle of remembering the

horrors she faced during the Holocaust and trying to move on long after it’s over. After enduring

the concentration camp and witnessing the murder of her infant daughter, Magda, Rosa’s
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personality obviously changed. Now the people she meets write her off as crazy because they are

not aware or do not care about her past. Yet she can’t seem to leave the past alone because the

camp is the last place her daughter was alive. If she were to forget the past, she would lose her

daughter. To combat this, Rosa imagines Magda as a grown woman who lives in New York near

Rosa’s niece, Stella. Now Rosa is putting herself between reality and insanity.

However, even if Rosa were to choose and be able to make a new life for herself after the

Holocaust, there are a few factors that don’t let her. For one, Stella is tired of Rosa trying to

mentally keep Magda alive. Stella constantly badgers Rosa to move on by sending her away to

Florida and keeping the shawl, which connected Rosa to Magda because that is where Rosa kept

her hidden from the Nazis. On the other hand, Rosa keeps receiving letters from doctors who

want to study the damaging effects of the Holocaust on her, pulling her back into her time spent

in the camp. Rosa’s outside world plays tug-of-war on her in-between identity.

Finally, Rosa always seems to be stuck between two places. When she’s stuck between

life during the Holocaust and her life after, she’s physically stuck between Europe and America.

Then when she is constantly reminded of the concentration camp as she lives with Stella who

survived the camp with her and moves away at Stella’s suggestion to get away and forget, she’s

stuck between New York and Florida. Even though Rosa was the reason she had to leave New

York because she destroyed her shop, she tells Stella that she wants to move back to New York.

She never seems to be happy in one location. Lastly, Rosa meets a fellow Jew in Florida that is

also from Warsaw, but perhaps a different part, because she snaps at him that his Warsaw is not

the same as her Warsaw. He did not endure the concentration camp as she had, and thus it is her

own place like her experience was her own. Her lack of commitment to one place represents her

indecisiveness with her identity.

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For A Different Drummer, Tucker lived in an Evangelical culture. This religion focuses

on the spirit moving the individual, so once Tucker felt the need to destroy his property and

leave, he did. This is similar to the Aszua Street Revival that we studied in class because nothing

was planned out; it simply happened, just as Tucker left without thinking it over. Interestingly,

this revival occurred in a burned-out building, and Tucker’s house became that very thing.

Furthermore, Tucker’s wife, Bethra, had left Tucker because she didn’t understand his decision.

After a week, though, she came back because she had a feeling that she should follow him

because he had a faith in himself that she had lost in herself. Speaking of faith, Camille is the

wife of David Willson who is also influenced by Tucker to have faith and remain with her

husband until he becomes a different man. Faith and the spirit are at the heart of the Evangelical

church.

Next, as the readers get a glimpse of Tucker’s past, they notice that when he got in

trouble for a minute offense, Tucker accepted the punishment instead of fighting back. This

relates to the black church because its mission is to be the victim and generate success by

overcoming adversity or failure, as James Cone puts it. However, members of the black church

don’t suffer individually; instead, they work together as a community. That is why when Tucker

up and left the south, the other Negroes got up and followed Tucker as if he were a prophet from

biblical times. This action is analogous to the black church’s tradition of call and response in

which one person starts with a verse and then everyone repeats it afterwards.

Unfortunately, not every black person made it out of Sutton alive. Reverend Bradshaw

was murdered by a few of the men on the porch. The Evangelical church strongly believes in the

Bible, and this lynching is similar to one of the stories in the New Testament. James Cone said

that Jesus’s crucifixion was the first lynching, so Reverend Bradshaw resembles Jesus as he
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allows others to beat him up before killing him on a tree. Jesus then became successful as he was

resurrected to a better place (heaven), just as the Negroes are doing by leaving the south for a

better life up north.

Likewise, Rosa’s Jewish heritage and community believes in a Zion for her people. Rosa

needed to get away from the horrors of Warsaw, so she came to America to lead a life away from

any danger that might linger in Europe. Later, she moves from New York to Florida to start a

new life after destroying her shop. She had felt disconnected from her community, a strong value

in Judaism, when customers wouldn’t listen to her life story or care about the stories behind each

item in her junk shop. Jews value stories because many times they base their whole lives and

identity on those from the Bible. For example, The Shawl’s author, Cynthia Ozick, kept close to

her Jewish heritage with memories of her grandmother, who shared Bible stories to dole out

moral lessons.

Jews also like to do many things together, so they focus on family and community

learning. This is probably why Rosa daydreamed of having a proper family of a respectable

Jewish man fathering her child instead of the German soldier who had raped her. Furthermore,

she pictured Magda as a well-educated woman with a doctorate degree and a job teaching at a

college. When Rosa doesn’t feel any community towards her niece, she refers to her as the

“Angel of Death,” which alludes to Judaism. The Angel of Death is the bad guy in the story of

the Passover during Moses’s time, and Jews celebrate Passover together to this day.

Another Jewish tradition is to keep the home organized and clean. This is clearly seen

when Rosa does her best to be well-dressed and have her apartment spotless before opening the

package with Magda’s shawl, which she revered, and some Jewish readers have related it to a

prayer shawl. Rosa also made a fuss about the state of her apartment when Simon Persky comes
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over to visit. It’s fascinating that she worries about the organization of her physical surroundings,

but her life otherwise seems to be a mess.

Finally, William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

were similar to each other because both stories had characters struggling with in-between

identities. Kelley’s whole book is based on the perspective of the white community that

surrounds Tucker, with a different person’s point of view for each chapter. However, this doesn’t

allow for the reader to gauge Tucker’s personal thoughts and how he really feels about each

encounter he has with each of these people. Even though Kelley’s writing is much clearer to read

than Ozick’s, The Shawl is more successful in sharing the interaction between a main character

and the surrounding community.

Ozick allows the reader to get to know Rosa through her thoughts and perceptions of the

outside world. One could clearly tell there was something up with Rosa starting with the second

short story titled “Rosa,” because she believed Magda was alive when the reader just saw that

she had died an infant. So not only can it be seen that Rosa has an in-between identity personally,

but also one gets to experience Rosa’s firsthand account of her contact with people in her

community. Ozick writes out every scene so that the reader can identify with both Rosa and

whoever else she is with. For example, I understood Stella’s viewpoint when she was on the

phone with Rosa because Rosa would not get past the idea that Magda was no longer alive. I felt

Stella’s frustration. In addition, readers can understand the way customers would dash out of

Rosa’s store because one can picture Rosa suffocating them with foreign stories as they try to get

on with their busy day. However, Ozick claims that we are to forgive Rosa because of all that she

has gone through.

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Lastly, Ozick’s compressed writing made the story confusing to read, but that ties in

perfectly with Rosa’s feelings of uncertainty in herself. On one hand, she writes letters to her late

daughter who she believes to be alive, but on the other hand, she never sends them. This could be

because subconsciously she knows that the letters will never make it to her daughter. Rosa is

caught in the gray area of what is true and what she’d like to believe is true. Again, she is pulled

back and forth between reality and insanity, but ends up with a mesh of everything. Ozick’s

confusing story represents this as she compacts it into two short stories.

Therefore, two people with completely different situations are reflected in the books with

in-between identities. Tucker comes to find himself through faith and spirituality, which lies as

the heart of the Evangelical church. Rosa keeps her Jewish heritage close to her as she tries to

blend the past and the future she dreams of into the present. Sometimes those around them tried

to push them in one direction or another, as all of us often experience in our own lives. Either

way, it’s undeniable that everyone reaches an in-between stage in their lives, whether it’s

dramatic like in these two stories, or it’s simply from transitioning from a child into an adult.