Night Walker By Brent Staples Pre-reading Do you agree that clothes make the man?

Night Walker

By Brent Staples

Pre-reading

Do you agree that clothes make the man?

Building vocabulary

1. A. threatingly B. not recognizable—ooze, pass through slowly C. eager, devoted D push ahead gradually but firmly E. susceptible to injury F. death causing G. false bravery H. suffocate I. Care, advance protection against danger J. cold and hard like steel—thrusting forward

Building vocabulary

2. Action: victim, shoved, swung, “cast back.” “pick up her pace,” running, disappeared.

Emotion: mean, worried, menacingly, “in earnest.”

It creates a suspenseful atmosphere; suggests impending or potential violence.

Understand the writer’s ideas

1. He portrays himself as a menacing figure—the way that white people often view him in such situations.

Understanding the writer’s ideas

2. In Hyde Park, Chicago; “late one evening”; twenty-two (or “youngish”); taking a walk to relieve insomnia; because she though he might be a mugger or rapist; no, the term is applied ironically—he was “surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed.”


3. Urban white people’s tendency to view him as a threat on the street—”the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” The implication is that in some white people’s eyes his presence can transform any locale into a dangerous place.


4. Sensitive, intellectual, gentle. He shies away from violence—he even dislikes cutting up chicken. He describes this as an adaptation to a violent childhood environment where those who courted violence died or went to jail.


5. People may react violently when the feel—rightly or wrongly—that they are being threatened with violence.

6. Defensive reactions to fear—locking car doors, crossing to the other side of the street.


7. They thought he might break into their cars to rob them. He became “accustomed to, but never comfortable with” it.


8. Chester, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town-he did not stand out against the more general level of violent crime there, and was presumably not considered a threat. Manhattan has so much side walk traffic that one-to-one encounters are not likely; women in Brooklyn are highly sensitive to potentially dangerous situations and often act as if bracing themselves against a possible attack.


9. Surprised (early on), understanding, but also angry. He has had to suppress the anger for the sake of his sanity. Keeping his distance from people: waiting before following people into buildings so as not to seem to be tailing them: whistling classic music.


10. Police mistook the reporter for the suspect in the crime on which he was writing a background story. Only his press credentials saved him from being arrested.


11. Not directly related in this essay, although security guards at his office mistook him for a burglar (par. 7), and he notes that tales of mistreatment by police are commonplace among black men.


12. No. He acknowledges that young black men are “drastically overrepresented” among violent criminals.

13. They might assume that an educated, cultured individual (as someone who knows classical music would presumably be) would not be likely to attack them.

Understanding the writer’s techniques

1. The fact that a black man walking in urban America will, to the majority of his white counterparts, be indistinguishable from predatory criminals, and will often be regarded as if he were one.


2. “Night Walker” could be the title of a suspense or horror story—excites reader interest, as does the opening, “My first victim….” Both of these seem to promise excitement, action.


3. Staples uses the staccato narrative style and evocative diction of crime and spy stories to establish a suspenseful tone. The tone shifts in the second paragraph, where Staples dismantles the illusion that the previous passage was about an impending crime.


4. By not disclosing the actuality of his identity and relying on direct “action narrative” in par. 1, Staples allows the audience to view the incident through the eyes of a white person alone on the street at night. A less limited perspective is used in the narrative section of par. 7.


5. Heightens tension—undoes the effect suggested by “discreet, uninflammatory distance” in the previous sentence.

6. Par. 1: Description of his appearance conveys to readers why he might be perceived as menacing. Par. 5: Description of women’s defensive reactions underscores the intensity of perceived threat.


7. “Thunk, thunk, thunk” of door locks in par. 3—allows the reader to feel more fully Staples’s sense of alienation and embarrassment.

8. Seeing “countless tough guys” sent to prison; the violent deaths of friends and family members; his consequent desire to avoid a similar fate.


9. Hikers wear cowbells to alert bears to their presence will in advance’ bears, like people, may react violently when surprised or make afraid. Staples’s whistling is like a cowbell in that it deters mistaken impressions on the part of those who share his nignttime environment.


10. In par. 1. Staples represents a visual stereotype of a “dangerous” black man only to show, as the essay unfold, how unreliable such stereotypes are.

11. The article is probably primarily intended for a white audience—the mistakenness of the stereotypes Staples addresses and the anger and alienation they create are, as Staples suggests, commonplaces for many blacks.

Documents

Night Walker By Brent Staples Pre-reading Do you agree that clothes make the man?