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Compose a short response (2-3 paragraphs)
While Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” and the excerpt from Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man could not be different in style, each draws
our attention to the protagonists who are fighting for survival.
Consider the way each writer describes the main food(s) in each work.
Compare/contrast the ways in which each author uses food to illustrate
each protagonist’s fight.
Ralph Ellison
From Invisible Man (1952).
In American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes. Molly O’Neill, ed. New York:
Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2007.
The streets were covered with ice and soot-flecked snow and from above a feeble sun filtered through
the haze. I walked with my head down, feeling the biting air. And yet I was hot, burning with an inner
fever. I barely raised my eyes until a car, passing with a thudding of skid chains whirled completely
around on the ice, then turned cautiously and thudded off again.
I walked slowly on, blinking my eyes in the chill air, my mind a blur with the hot inner argument
continuing. The whole of Harlem seemed to fall apart in the swirl of snow. I imagined I was lost and for a
moment there was an eerie quiet. I imagined I heard the fall of snow upon snow. What did it mean? I
walked, my eyes focused into the endless succession of shops, beauty parlors, confectioneries,
luncheonettes, fish houses, and hog maw joints, walking close to the windows, the snowflakes lacing
swift between, simultaneously forming a curtain, a veil, and stripping it aside. A flash of red and gold
from a window filled with religious articles caught my eye. And behind the film of frost etching the glass
I saw two brashly painted plaster images of Mary and Jesus surrounded by dream books, love powders,
God-Is-Love signs, money-drawing oil and plastic dice. A black statue of a nude Nubian slave grinned out
at me from beneath a turban of gold. I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair,
ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. “You too can be truly beautiful,” a
sign proclaimed. “Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.”
I hurried on, suppressing a savage urge to push my fist through the pane. A wind was rising, the snow
thinning. Where would I go? To a movie? Can I sleep there? I ignored the windows now and walked
along, becoming aware that I was muttering to myself again. Then far down at the corner I saw an old
man warming his hands against the sides of an odd-looking wagon, from which a stove pipe reeled off a
thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.
I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back. At
home we’d bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them cold to school for lunch;
munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind
the largest book, the World’s Geography, and we’d loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat
fried in a pocket of dough or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them
raw–yams and years ago. More yams than years ago, though the time seemed endlessly expanded,
stretched thin as the spiraling smoke beyond all recall.
I moved gain. “Get yo’ hot, baked Car’lina yam,” he called. At the corner the old man, wrapped in an
army overcoat, his feet covered with gunny sacks, his head in a knitted cap, was puttering with a stack of
paper bags. I saw a crude sign on the side of the wagon proclaiming YAMS, as I walked flush into the
warmth thrown by the coals that glowed in a grate underneath.
“How much are your yams?” I said, suddenly hungry.
“They ten cents and they sweet,” he said, his voice quavering with age. “These ain’t none oh them
binding ones neither. These here is real, sweet, yaller yams. How many?”
“Oh,” I said. “If they’re that good, one should be enough.”
He gave me a searching glance. There was a tear in the corner of his eye. He chuckled and opened the
door of the improvised oven, reaching gingerly with his gloved hand. The yams, some bubbling with
syrup, lay on a wire rack above glowing coals that leaped to low blue flame when struck by the draft of
air. The flash of warmth set my face aglow as he removed one of the yams and shut the door.
“Here you are, suh,” he said, starting to put the yams into a bag.
“Never mind the bag, I’m going to eat it. Here … ”
“Thanks.” He took the dime. “If that ain’t a sweet one, I’ll give you another one free of charge.”
I knew that it was sweet before I broke it; bubbles of brown syrup had burst the skin.
“Go ahead and break it,” the old man said. “Break it and I’ll give you some butter since you gon’ eat it
right here. Lots of folks takes ’em home. They got their own butter at home.”
I broke it, seeing the sugary pulp steaming in the cold.
“Hold it over here,” he said. He took a crock from a rack on the side wagon. “Right here.”
I held it, watching him pour a spoonful of melted butter over the yam and the butter seeping in.
“Thanks.”
“You welcome. And I’ll tell you something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“If that ain’t the best eating you had in a long time, I give you your money back.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said. “I can look at it and see it’s good.”
“You right, but everything what looks good ain’t necessarily good,” he said. “But these is.”
I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I’d ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of
homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as
suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom–simply because I was eating while walking along
the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To
hell with all that, and as sweet as the actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. If only
someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked
they’d be! I’d push them into a side street and smear their faces the peel. What a group of people we
were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with
something we liked. Not all of us, but so many. Simply by walking up and shaking a set of chitterlings or
a well-boiled hog maw at them during the clear light of day.” What consternation it would cause! And I
saw myself advancing upon Bledsoe, standing bare of his false humility in the crowded lobby of Men’s
House, and seeing him there and him seeing me and ignoring me and me enraged and suddenly
whipping out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned and dripping sticky circles on the floor as I
shake them in his face, shouting:
“Bledsoe, you’re a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do
you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you’re unobserved! You’re a sneaking
chitterling lover! I accuse you of indulging in a filthy habit, Bledsoe! Lug them out of there, Bledsoe! Lug
them out so we can see! I accuse you before the eyes of the world!” And he lugs them out, yards of
them, with mustard greens, and racks of pigs’ ears, and pork chops and black-eyed peas with dull
accusing eyes.
I let out a wild laugh, almost choking over the yam as the scene spun before me. Why, with others
present, it would be worse than if I had accused him of raping an old woman of ninety-nine years,
weighing ninety pounds…blind in one eye and lame in the hip! Bledsoe would disintegrate! With a
profound sigh he’d drop his head in shame. He’d lose caste. The weekly newspapers would attack him.
The captions over his picture: Prominent Educator Reverts to Field Niggerism! His rivals would denounce
him as a bad example for the youth. Editorials would demand that he either recant or retire from public
life. In the South his white folks would desert him; he would be discussed far and wide, and all of the
trustees’ money couldn’t prop up his sagging prestige. He’d end up an exile washing dishes at the
Automat. For down South he’d be unable to get a job on the honey wagon.
This is all very wild and childish, I thought, but to hell with being of what you liked. No more of that for
me. I am what I am! I wolfed down the yam and ran back to the old man and handed him twenty cents,
“Give me two more,” I said.
“Sho, all you want, long as I got ’em. I can see you a serious yam eater, young fellow. You eating them
right away?”
“As soon as you give them to me,” I said.
“You want ’em buttered?”
“Please.”
“Sho, that way you can get the most out of ’em. Yessuh,” he said, handing over the yams. “I can see you
one of these old-fashioned yam eaters.”
“They’re my birthmark,” I said. “I yam what I am!”
“Then you must be from South Car’lina,” he said with a grin.
“South Carolina nothing, where I come from we really go for yams.”
Come back tonight or tomorrow if you can eat some more,” he called after me. “My old lady’ll be out
here with some hot sweet fried potato pies.”
Hot fried pies, I thought sadly, moving away. I would probably have indigestion if I ate one—now that I
no longer felt ashamed of the things I had always loved, I probably could no longer digest very many of
them. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I
myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things that you
actually didn’t like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was
considered a mark of refinement and education—but because you actually found them distasteful? The
very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh
many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of
trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the
accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple…
But not yams, I had no problem concerning them and I would eat them whenever and wherever I took
the notion. Continue on the yam level and life would be sweet—though somewhat yellowish. Yet the
freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An
unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it
had been frost-bitten.
Jack London
A Piece of Steak
With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of
flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way. When
he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the feeling that he was distinctly
hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two children in the other room had been sent
early to bed in order that in sleep they might forget they had gone supperless. His
wife had touched nothing, and had sat silently and watched him with solicitous eyes.
She was a thin, worn woman of the working-class, though signs of an earlier
prettiness were not wanting in her face. The flour for the gravy she had borrowed
from the neighbor across the hall. The last two ha’pennies had gone to buy the
bread.
He sat down by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight,
and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket
of his coat. The absence of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and, with a
scowl for his forgetfulness, he put the pipe away. His movements were slow, almost
hulking, as though he were burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles. He was a
solid-bodied, stolid-looking man, and his appearance did not suffer from being
overprepossessing. His rough clothes were old and slouchy. The uppers of his shoes
were too weak to carry the heavy resoling that was itself of no recent date. And his
cotton shirt, a cheap, two-shilling affair, showed a frayed collar and ineradicable
paint stains.
But it was Tom King’s face that advertised him unmistakably for what he was. It
was the face of a typical prize-fighter; of one who had put in long years of service in
the squared ring and, by that means, developed and emphasized all the marks of
the fighting beast. It was distinctly a lowering countenance, and, that no feature of
it might escape notice, it was clean-shaven. The lips were shapeless, and
constituted a mouth harsh to excess, that was like a gash in his face. The jaw was
aggressive, brutal, heavy. The eyes, slow of movement and heavy-lidded, were
almost expressionless under the shaggy, indrawn brows. Sheer animal that he was,
the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him. They were sleepy, lion-like the eyes of a fighting animal. The forehead slanted quickly back to the hair, which,
clipped close, showed every bump of a villainous-looking head. A nose, twice broken
and moulded variously by countless blows, and a cauliflower ear, permanently
swollen and distorted to twice its size, completed his adornment, while the beard,
fresh-shaven as it was, sprouted in the skin and gave the face a blue-black stain.
< 2 >
All together, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely
place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal.
Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had harmed no one. Nor had he
ever been known to pick a quarrel. He was a professional, and all the fighting
brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances. Outside the ring
he was slow-going, easy-natured, and, in his younger days, when money was flush,
too open-handed for his own good. He bore no grudges and had few enemies.
Fighting was a business with him. In the ring he struck to hurt, struck to maim,
struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it. It was a plain business proposition.
Audiences assembled and paid for the spectacle of men knocking each other out.
The winner took the big end of the purse. When Tom King faced the Woolloomoolloo
Gouger, twenty years before, he knew that the Gouger’s jaw was only four months
healed after having been broken in a Newcastle bout. And he had played for that
jaw and broken it again in the ninth round, not because he bore the Gouger any illwill, but because that was the surest way to put the Gouger out and win the big end
of the purse. Nor had the Gouger borne him any ill-will for it. It was the game, and
both knew the game and played it.
Tom King had never been a talker, and he sat by the window, morosely silent,
staring at his hands. The veins stood out on the backs of the hands, large and
swollen; and the knuckles, smashed and battered and malformed, testified to the
use to which they had been put. He had never heard that a man’s life was the life of
his arteries, but well he knew the meaning of those big, upstanding veins. His heart
had pumped too much blood through them at top pressure. They no longer did the
work. He had stretched the elasticity out of them, and with their distention had
passed his endurance. He tired easily now. No longer could he do a fast twenty
rounds, hammer and tongs, fight, fight, fight, from gong to gong, with fierce rally
on top of fierce rally, beaten to the ropes and in turn beating his opponent to the
ropes, and rallying fiercest and fastest of all in that last, twentieth round, with the
house on its feet and yelling, himself rushing, striking, ducking, raining showers of
blows upon showers of blows and receiving showers of blows in return, and all the
time the heart faithfully pumping the surging blood through the adequate veins. The
veins, swollen at the time, had always shrunk down again, though not quite – each
time, imperceptibly at first, remaining just a trifle larger than before. He stared at
them and at his battered knuckles, and, for the moment, caught a vision of the
youthful excellence of those hands before the first knuckle had been smashed on
the head of Benny Jones, otherwise known as the Welsh Terror.
< 3 >
The impression of his hunger came back on him.
“Blimey, but couldn’t I go a piece of steak!” he muttered aloud, clenching his
huge fists and spitting out a smothered oath.
“I tried both Burke’s an’ Sawley’s,” his wife said half apologetically.
“An’ they wouldn’t?” he demanded.
“Not a ha’penny. Burke said — ” She faltered.
“G’wan! Wot’d he say?”
“As how ‘e was thinkin’ Sandel ud do ye to-night, an’ as how yer score was
comfortable big as it was.”
Tom King grunted, but did not reply. He was busy thinking of the bull terrier he
had kept in his younger days to which he had fed steaks without end. Burke would
have given him credit for a thousand steaks – then. But times had changed. Tom
King was getting old; and old men, fighting before second-rate clubs, couldn’t
expect to run bills of any size with the tradesmen.
He had got up in the morning with a longing for a piece of steak, and the longing
had not abated. He had not had a fair training for this fight. It was a drought year in
Australia, times were hard, and even the most irregular work was difficult to find.
He had had no sparring partner, and his food had not been of the best nor always
sufficient. He had done a few days navvy work when he could get it, and he had run
around the Domain in the early mornings to get his legs in shape. But it was hard,
training without a partner and with a wife and two kiddies that must be fed. Credit
with the tradesmen had undergone very slight expansion when he was matched
with Sandel. The secretary of the Gayety Club had advanced him three pounds – the
loser’s end of the purse – and beyond that had refused to go. Now and again he had
managed to borrow a few shillings from old pals, who would have lent more only
that it was a drought year and they were hard put themselves. No – and there was
no use in disguising the fact – his training had not been satisfactory. He should have
had better food and no worries. Besides, when a man is forty, it is harder to get into
condition than when he is twenty.
< 4 >
“What time is it, Lizzie?” he asked.
His wife went across the hall to inquire, and came back.
“Quarter before eight.”
“They’ll be startin’ the first bout in a few minutes,” he said. “Only a try-out. Then
there’s a four-round spar ‘tween Dealer Wells an’ Gridley, an’ a ten-round go ‘tween
Starlight an’ some sailor bloke. Don’t come on for over an hour.”
At the end of another silent ten minutes, he rose to his feet.
“Truth is, Lizzie, I ain’t had proper trainin’.”
He reached for his hat and started for the door. He did not offer to kiss her – he
never did on going out – but on this night she dared to kiss him, throwing her arms
around him and compelling him to bend down to her face. She looked quite small
against the massive bulk of the man.
“Good luck, Tom,” she said. “You gotter do ‘im.”
“Ay, I gotter do ‘im,” he repeated. “That’s all there is to it. I jus’ gotter do ‘im.”
He laughed with an attempt at heartiness, while she pressed more closely
against him. Across her shoulders he looked around the bare room. It was all he
had in the world, with the rent overdue, and her and the kiddies. And he was
leaving it to go out into the night to get meat for his mate and cubs – not like a
modern working-man going to his machine grind, but in the old, primitive, royal,
animal way, by fighting for it. “I gotter do ‘im,” he repeated, this time a hint of
desperation in his voice. “If it’s a win, it’s thirty quid – an’ I can pay all that’s owin’,
with a lump o’ money left over. If it’s a lose, I get naught – not even a penny for me
to ride home on the tram. The secretary’s give all that’s comin’ from a loser’s end.
Good-by, old woman. I’ll come straight home if it’s a win.”
< 5 >
“An’ I’ll be waitin’ up,” she called to him along the hall.
It was full two miles to the Gayety, and as he walked along he remembered how
in his palmy days – he had once been …
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