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Uncle Frank's Last Word: Redemption In After Rosa Parks

Ben Davis, 2008

Freedom from oppression, or lack thereof, is seldom far from the American public conscience. By taking on this issue on a massive scale, The Civil Rights movement has left an especially formidable legacy. By way of national institutions such as Black History Month, Modern Americans have studied the movement's images and rhetoric at a grade school level for at least twenty years. Civil Rights legislation gave a platform for the sidelined American black of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to become, at last, an public entity that could hypothetically participate in American life as advertised. Furthermore, a generation of political pushes for equality and tolerance followed the Civil Rights Movement, many of which may claim lasting successes. In After Rosa Parks, Janet Desaulniers explores the relationship between characters making their way within and without a socity that may not have absored the lessons of the this generation. Ellie, Frank, and Cody struggle to deal with suffocating surroundings, where freedom seems, at best, elusive, and at worst, destructive. Their struggles are compounded by forces beyond human control, and Ellie, especially, must come to terms with her limited ability to raise Cody without interference. To the extent she accomplishes this, she does so via Cody's emerging awareness of his own self and right to self-determination. Frank, though flawed, brings the lesson of Rosa Parks into Ellie's and Cody's psyche, in the process liberating the two of them from the oppressive stalemate between them and their surroundings.
Ellie is a divorced single mother, her financial and social struggles setting an us-against-them tone for the narrative. A tense interaction with the school nurse brings about bitter feelings when the nurse, in Ellie's mind, senses in Cody "a strange and probably damaged life... probably Ellie's fault," (Williford 131). Thus, Ellie falls prey to the cultural xenophobia that was supposedly the plague of an...