Country Lovers

Racial background and ethnicities are represented in the short story "Country Lovers" and the poem "What It's like to be a Black Girl." Both the poem and the short story have a black woman as the main character. Both of the women experience in the story and poem some type of racialism because of their race.

We all experience some type of racism in our daily lives, whether if we are in school or just walking around in a store. Just about anywhere you go, you will see somebody discriminating because of what color they are. Racism is a very poorly thing in this country and yet even after Martin Luther King tried to change the ways; it really did not do any better to our country. The short story called "Country Lovers" was written by a woman named Nadine Gordimer back in 1975. This short story is based back on an African Farm where a Black woman and a White man fall in love, although it is forbidden where they live.

They were raised together growing up, the young male was white and the young girl was black. They would always play together and spent just about every day of their childhood together. When they became older and they grew up, time drove a wedge into their friendship and they eventually started to grow apart.

Toward the end of the story is when the racialism sets in when he came home from college and discovered that his long time childhood friend had given birth to a little baby. When he first saw the baby it was hard on him because he knew if someone knew about the relations between him and her, it would be totally forbidden in his town. When he returned to the hut where the mother and baby are staying, the mother heard what sounded like baby grunts when a baby is too full. The young man came out of the hut as if he was his father and went to his father's home. She then realized that he had killed her baby and was trying to cover up something was forbidden in their community. This goes to show just how racialism was very serious back then in the time this story was written.

At the end of the story the police had found the little infant buried in the ground and brought murder charges up against the young man. He was sent to jail because the mother stated that she saw with her own eyes him pouring liquid in her baby's mouth. When in court, she testified a whole different story and stated she did not see, so after all this he was released and found not guilty.

Patricia Smith, wrote the poem "what it is like to be a black girl," back in 1991. The way this story is written is intended for the reader to know how strong and serious this poem means to her in a sense of writing unstructured sentences. Smiths' poem gives the reader the knowledge of the poem is about a young black girl is transitioning herself into a young black woman, and she is trying her hardest to accept the changes her body is going through when the process occurs. Back then,