Crossing the Threshold of Racial Politics: Copper Laurent's Journey from Invisibility to Power in Ernest J. Gaines's "Bloodline"

Resumo

Ernest J. Gaines's work articulates the social, political, and economic position of society's most vulnerable citizens: the poor, voiceless, disenfranchised, and invisible. As he writes openly and passionately about the common people of his childhood, the most critical aspect of the works in his canon is the impact of racism upon black men and the overall effect it has on the black family. In "Bloodline," the title narrative in the Bloodline (1968) collection of short stories, Copper Laurent, the bi-racial adult child of a black sharecropper and the plantation's overseer, returns to the plantation of his birth to confront a member of the Laurent dynasty and to claim his rightful place in the family. His is met with resistance from the remaining male Laurent. This paper examines Copper Laurent's rise from invisibility to power as he tackles the racial rules of the land, embattles social mores, and confronts a systemic code of conduct in his quest for acknowledgement of his "birthrights."