We’ve mentioned the ‘yam scene’ a few times in class, but we haven’t quite gotten to it yet so it’s pretty much uncharted territory for the moment. I think it’s a super important scene for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is the sense of freedom that the yams bring the narrator. He leaves Mary’s house needing a breath of fresh air and a break from his inner turmoil, and the yams end up bringing him a huge deal of clarification. He says immediately after eating the yams that he is “overcome by an intense feeling of freedom” and I don’t think that he’s truly experienced this feeling yet in the book (pg 264).

I was definitely a little confused at first – that eating yams from the street can inspire an inner revelation in someone seems pretty weird – but then I thought about all the times that I’ve gone somewhere on my own, or bought something on my own and I understood a little better. Being in a situation where you answer entirely to yourself and everything you do is on your own agenda is really liberating. Think about the first time you drove to a friend's house by yourself, or bought something with your own money. The narrator made a spontaneous decision to buy the yams, but most importantly it was his own decision and it was a decision he made completely autonomously. No one was there to hold him back, and on the other side of the spectrum, there was nobody forcing him to stop and buy yams – he bought them simply because he liked yams and he wanted to eat them. The lines that really spoke to me were, “to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am” (pg 265). After living his entire life to please others, this revelation of 'I can actually have my own opinions and not feel guilty for that' is real heartwarming to see. In my opinion it’s the first moment that the narrator truly realizes the constraints that he has been living in. And, I think it’s this moment that inspires his speech only minutes later. When he comes across the old couple being evicted, not only has the narrator just been thinking about his family and his home (the yams give him a “surge of homesickness” – pg. 264), but he has also been thinking about how much time in his life he has wasted doing what was expected of him. I think it’s true that when he gives his speech and incites the protest he doesn’t have any clear idea of what he is doing, but regardless, he effectively throws out every expectation that he would have abided by before. It’s interesting that so far the two speeches the narrator has given in the book have been almost completely opposite. Whereas during his speech at the Battle Royale he is submissive and his goal is to do what is expected of him by pleasing the white people, his second speech, though starting out in a similar vein, ultimately ends up shattering those previous expectations.

Weirdly though, I don’t see the revelation that he comes to as necessarily holding up – I think that by joining Brother Jack’s organization the narrator is still working within constraints placed on him by others, and he doesn’t seem to have as much autonomy as I had hoped (he has to cut contact with his family, move out of Harlem, and take on a completely new identity). On the other hand, he talks about ‘playing the game’ if you will – pretending to be a Booker T Washington but aiming for the Founder secretly – so I’m interested to see where that goes.