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July 31, 2007 |
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Whiteassnow
FOUND by Monica
in Oxnard, California
Found on a residential street. At first I thought it was some kind of history exercise; then I realized that someone had saved her homework from 42 years ago. And, worse yet, lost it.
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Here Is a Larger... January 17, 2006 |
The Nap June 16, 2005 |
I Want Your Life December 19, 2008 |
Love January 16, 2007 |
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We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework,
to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles -
anything that gives a glimpse into someone
else's life. Anything goes...
Sad and beautiful...
Thank you, Civil Rights Movement!
That's 'sweet-sad.'
I wonder how the graduation show went?
I also must say that penmanship is pretty decent for the age of the child.
I wish I could hear him or her sing it.
Ahhh, gotta love our country, upheld on the foundations of biogotry and ignorance.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
it looks like the person originally wrote just "little boy" on line 5, but whoever marked it, if it was for a school thing, corrected it by adding "black". the boy who was picking cotton couldn't just be a boy, it had to be a black boy, the word "black" looks to me like its in green ink....
Wait, the teacher corrected 'black' but not any of the gross spelling errors? Sweet priorities.
Actually, it looks like some of the other errors have been corrected--"crie" to "cry", a "t" added in "mother", etc. If you start looking for the darker ink, stuff starts coming out.
Plus, although I on first glance I thought the student had written "white ass now" it's obvious that he wrote "white snow" and then he or someone else wrote "as" in the small space left between.
The penmanship is horrible for someone in the eighth grade. This country has come a long way though.
Is a "co-lo" a solo?
THE LITTLE BLACK BOY
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointed to the east, began to say:
"Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
"And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
"For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, 'Come out from the grove, my love and care
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice',"
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy
I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
-William Blake, Songs of Innocence
If you magnify it, it's tons easier to decipher.
Really odd find.
Neat, though.
I'm thinking someone in eighth grade with solo status on everyone's favorite biggoted tune should have a bit more practice on their penmanship. They're what, thirteen at that point?
and furthermore what eighth grade class keeps a journal?
and then has it corrected? The night they're about to "graduate"?
oh, maybe the kid is younger and sees "eighth grade graudation" as a big deal.
Maybe the writer isn't at an eighth grade level, I know my schools always had the underclassmen play at commencements and whatnot. Its kinda strange for her to write "the eighth grade graduation," instead of "I'm graduating tonight," I think.
I'm curious about the hyphens. "To-night" and "So-lo". When you look at documents from a couple hundred years ago, you see way more hyphens. Why did they fall out of favor? I think we should start using them more often.
Good-bye for now.
you must be an idiot if you thi nk this is good pensmanship for soemone in 8th grade. this is horrible penmanship and spelling errors.
its an interesting peek into time though. not beautifull at all. since when is slavery beautifull?
beautifull slavery from an idiotic eight grader with the spelling talent of a fucking 8 year old. nice.
kool find though
ps
yah my typing blows
I wanna learn how to play the bango. I imagine that it is a weird mating between a banjo and a bongo.
Aren't these kind of racial stereo types just heart warming? I mean c'mon not all black folk pick cotton and play the banjo. On the other hand it is a reference to the book by Richard Wright. Ah, the innocence of a child. Cute song lyrics, I'd buy the CD.
This is sweet. Oh, the innocence of a bygone age. Interesting comparison to yesterday’s Find! Kids these days, eh?
I don't think it's a journal entry. I believe the child wrote out exactly what he/she was going to say in front of the audience. Stage freight, you know.
I hate that the end of it promises sleep/death to ease their pain (sandman).
Jay* I saw the 'whiteass now' too. lol
since this is a william blake poem, maybe jumping to a bigotry conclusion is hasty. i mean, his lamb and tyger poems were not about lambs and tigers. he tends to throw a big blanket of metaphor over every sentence.
what i mean to say is, i think this is really an ANTI-slavery poem, although it appears to use stereotypes to get its point across.
that paper is very well preserved for 40 some years. white ass snow.
this makes me uncomfortable.
I have to agree with Monica (the finder), it's an odd thing to keep your homework for 42 years and then lose it. It's like it was part of a larger collection of material.
It begs the question: If this person kept their homework from 1965, what else did they keep and then lose?
Maybe the author didn't keep the homework but the parent of the author did and then the parent died and all the sentimental stuff got tossed.
Nice find.
This wasn't a william blake poem. A poster put that up.
Rex, my mom has stuff from my siblings, that era (god that makes me sound old) and earlier, and it looks about the same as this does. My kindergarten stuff from 1969 looks much the same as this. (my penmanship is about as good. lol) The veracity, i think, is upheld, in this case.
Hey - wish I'd thought of filling up my one-page essay assignments with song lyrics! Would have make them go much faster.
I bet someone finally cleared out their attic, and realized their boxes of old homework weren't *really* worth keeping.
Library books printed in the 40's often hyphenated to-day and to-morrow. I thought it looked weird even as a child in the 60's but it may have been conventional then.
I don't find this offensive at all (and yes, I am a black woman, lol). I love windows into history like this...it seems a bit more honest than what we see today. There is no way that someone could get away with this now. In our quest to polarize and stereotype everything, we forget the curiosity and interest in our different histories. The past sucked and it hurt...but it is history and it needs to be explored.
I love it!!
The hyphenated words could just be that they're early stage compound words. Once they become more and more popular and begin to be used in everyday language the hyphen gets dropped and you're left with one word.
Kahlua: Nice! You win the Comment of the Day award.
As far as the hyphens go, I do like to see words in old literature hyphenated in ways that look awkward today.
What I like even more than that is the way that the author Cormac McCarthy will take objects or concepts consisting of two words and combine the words into one. The best example that comes to mind right now is "cashregister." It's an aspect of his writing style that's totally unique, and I love it.
This doesn't seem appropriate for a graduation, even in 1965.
Is the ending of the forth line "white ass now" or "white as snow?" Our little bigot should have been more attentive to his/her penmanship.
is it the Sand Man who's riding by, or is it the Candy Man?
Let's not forget when this was written folks - it WAS a long time ago - and for this child, perhaps that WAS great penmanship.
I think it's waaaay better than most 8th graders I know now.
I think we need focus on the progress we HAVE made. Have we solved all our nation's issues/problems - hell no - but we are better off in many ways than in 1965.
I just find it amazing that a piece of homework from so long ago is so intact. Sad that it got separated from someone taking so much care to save it so long.
Flargy - who was talking about Cormac McCarthy? That is a strange non-sequitur to just tack on to a comment out of nowhere.
P.S. There is no such thing as "totally unique" as unique cannot be qualified. Something is either unique (one of a kind) or not. Period.
Nowadays many 8th Graders get by with computer printouts and use calculators instead of working out equations on paper. Reading a contemporary paper by an 8th Grader often is a reflection of text message spelling: Reads like the song list on a Prince album.
in estrus:
1) Blow it out your pretentious ass.
2) The connection to Cormac McCarthy, which apparently (and unsurprisingly) flew right over your head, is that we were discussing words with hyphens which are not usually hyphenated. It reminds me of that particular quirk in McCarthy's writing style which I described above.
3) I like to say "totally unique," and I really don't give a fuck what you have to say about it.
4) Blow it out your pretentious ass. Period.
the note clearly states" it's THE eighth grade graduation" not MY 8th grade graduation. This looks like a 4th or 5th graders writing.
Many schools involve the other students in the commencements. It's not just for the graduates.
I love this find the most this year.
Yeah, In Estrus, take THAT! Hyphens rule!
Thanks for sticking up for the hyphens, Flargy.
Um, I was never putting down hyphens. I love hyphens as much as the next person.
And yes, I know we were discussing hyphens, but roping in the name of an author who uses a different style of word combining just seems really far-flung and, I might add, a bit pretentious (so blow it out YOUR pretentious ass). You used a discussion about hyphens to name drop.
You can say "totally unique" if you want, but it's nonsensical. It's like saying "a little big pregnant." Unique means "one of a kind," not "quirky and innovative" so something can't be very unique or totally unique or sort of unique. It's either unique or it's not.
stfu. uniquely.
May 26 is my birthday and I do live in cotton land.
Flargy, you're arguing with a woman in heat, i think you'd better watch your back. She's a bit cranky, which, you'd think wouldn't be the best thing when you're attempting to attract people to mate with.
Thanks to a friend, for pointing out that people often mistake intelligence for pretention. It makes them feel insecure, so they want to take you down a peg, to make themselves feel better. You're not pretentious at all. I totally got your reference to that author, and found it quite interesting. He's on Oprah's book club list, but don't let that sway anyone from reading his stuff. He's won a Pulitzer.
anyway.
People may not say "a little bit pregnant," but I've heard "very pregnant" used as a description (meaning a woman in the late stages of pregnancy and very big). I think that makes total sense.
In the case of "very unique"--unique has become overused and is often employed as a politically correct way of saying "this is crap" ("Oh Johnny, what a unique picture you drew!"). Saying *very* unique puts the emphasis back on the original meaning of the word and thus, maybe not technically correct, conveys the intended meaning nicely--and isn't that the point of language after all?
Mona - Flargy was the one who threw "pretentious" around. I was merely responding in kind. So if you are saying that Flargy was mistaking my intelligence re: proper grammar for pretention when he/she told me to "blow it out my pretentious ass," then I totally agree with you.
Laura - how does adding "very" put the emphasis back on the original meaning of the word? The original meaning is "one of a kind." Something cannot be very one of a kind. It is either the only one of its kind, or it is not. For example, when one says "a unique number in a series" one does not mean that number has green hair and a pierced nose; rather, it means that it is not repeated, i.e. one of a kind.
When you say "very unique" what you really mean is "very different" or "very quirky" or "very innovative" (not sure I have actually ever heard it to mean "very crappy" but I will take your word for it.
you people are being ridiculous. Just because it talks of a black boy picking cotton doesnt mean that its racist. I dont know if any of you have been to the south, but theres cotton there. My father (white)picked cotton, my mom (white) picked cotton, and people they know picked cotton (black and white).
also, slavery ended before 1965, because some of you are having a hard time seperating before the civil war and after.
for all our "we've gotten over race issues" we're still drowning in them if you guys cannot look past the description of the boy and realize that the life depicted is a life very common in the south for whites and African Americans.
in estrus, i stand corrected. I do, however, think that you didnt understand Flargy's comment about Coram McCarthy, to say that it came out of nowhere.
Flargy's not pretentious.
grrrr
i think the author comment was completely fine. not that flargy was, but so what if someone wants to be off topic? these are comments! we can say whatever the f*** we want
William Blake? New South???
Blake was an early 18th century British poet (pre-Romanticism)...not sure what you mean by "William Blake in the New South wrote"
well, we could be where we is now if'n we wasn't where we was then...that's all i got to say about that.
My interpretation is that this has nothing to do with a commencement speech at all. Maybe its a younger sibling or student simply writing in his/her school journal the day's events. I highly doubt this is written by an eighth grader, and I'm sure its an assignment of some sort. Am I the only one who read this and something other than hyphens and bigotry came to mind?
Shannon, May 23, 1965 is my birthdate but I have never seen cotton in the fields. Strange find.......
Estrus is just a cranky pants. I agree with him/her about the "totally unique" thing, but why did she come in here criticizing someone else's comments in the first place? Perhaps she should apply her sharp editing skills somewhere that matter, rather than the casual musings of Found fans.
you people are so effing annoying. This is a comments feed, not a message board thread, or forum to gripe in.
besides, you all know the saying:
Internet fights... Even if you win, you're still retarded.
Man! Freakin' chill people!
It's OBVIOUS that this was a writing assignment given by a teacher to make SURE the student knew their solo lyrics. Geeeeze.
Everyone is getting their panties in a wad over hyphens, racism and handwriting.
What is up with everyone here today?
Go have an iced tea & give thanks for what you've been given in your own lives...and thanks for how far that we have come in 40+yrs.
I'm absolutely floored that someone even saved this piece of homework or whatever it is! WHO saves homework for over 40 years?
I could see it perhaps, if it was a major term paper or report...but this kind of piece (just remembering and writing down one's part in a show) to me is just...what is the word for the day: "nonsensical?"
(I have to be careful when I write that word because I tend to default to writing "Non-Suessical" which is something different ENTIRELY.)
This is a rather strange find imo.
I had no idea there was a "Comment of the Day" award...I'm gonna have to try harder.
I still have writing assignments saved in a folder from junior high. That was at least 20 years ago.
I kept them because I quite liked how I thought about things in the stories I wrote. It's just a small window into my past.
My mom still has homework of hers from when she was in grade school, and I have now been a teacher myself for close to a decade (to give you an age idea...). I LOVE that she saved her work, because any time I was doing something similar while I was still in school, she would pull out her old stuff and we could compare the different assignments. She had to make a memory book in eighth grade and so did I. When mine was done, she showed me hers and we read them together. It was not only a great bonding experience, but seeing how well my mom had done on her work made me want to do better too. I don't think that's "nonsensical" at all, and I intend to copy her example with my own kids.
As much as I hate to perpetuate the grammar policing, I did want to point out that, according to my dictionary, "unique" can totally be qualified.
u·nique /yuˈnik/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[yoo-neek] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
5. not typical; unusual: She has a very unique smile.
.
meh.
.
And, while we're at it...
Main Entry: big·ot
Pronunciation: 'bi-g&t
Function: noun
Etymology: French, hypocrite, bigot
: a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
- big·ot·ed /-g&-t&d/ adjective
- big·ot·ed·ly adverb
There's always the chance that this munchkin was a little ignorant (though one can't really tell without context), but I'm just not getting bigotry from this.
Dorkus - that is because dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive (which is mostly good but in some cases unfortunate). So when enough ignorant people begin using a word incorrectly and it falls into common usage, the dictionary has to reflect that dumbing down of the language.
I just hope I don't ever open up the dictionary and see that one of the definitions of ironic has become "oddly coincidental," since that is a language abuse I cannot stomach.
Black Hole -- I agree with you on the "ironic" point, but the broader definition of unique (unusual, as opposed to singular) was in in wide use over a century before I was even born. It's ludicrous to start going back to an older, more rigid definition that pre-dates us.
It's also ludicrous of me to continue with the semantics, when that was what irked me in the first place. Not ironic, though.
I'm done.
You people are so silly.
I was in kindergarten in 1965. This sounds like a sweet lullabye. I wonder how the tune goes?
in estrus, how is mentioning an author's name "name dropping"? I didn't say, "the world-famous author Cormac McCarthy, who happens to be a very good friend of mine..." or anything of that nature. Maybe you discover authors you like via osmosis or something, but for me it tends to be through word of mouth, and I frequently mention those authors to other people as well. So thank God for all those name-droppers in my life. Without them, I could easily have ended up illiterate.
Away down South in the land of cotton, Aunt Jemima and the lawn jockeys be pickin' cotton! Look away, look away, look away, to Dixie Land!
WHITE ASS NOW!!
hee, hee, hee, hee, I said "ass"
Oh, and....
Jimmy crack corn and I don't care, my masters gone away...
I learned that little diddy in elementary school and I wasn't even born until 9 years after 1965, and if it sounds bigoted today--I'm probably not going to apologize for singing it.
Well. Bigotry or not, at least it's a better essay than yesterday's find.
Wow, the education system has advanced a lot if that was an 8th grader's writing level in 1965. (AND they were graduating!!!)
This is not a song, it's for a poem reading.
Didn't anyone else get — To-night is the eighth grade graduation. I have cologne on, Little Black Boy, it goes like this . . . and that's the song around the cologne?
And I couldn't read the Found without singing it to the tune of Chattanooga Choo Choo.
Oh, that's my wedding anniversary! May 26th. Of 2007 though...
Flargy is pretentious and always has been!
It sounds like an old spiritual slavery song (usually ending in how it's going to be good to die and get to heaven and not be a damn slave any more.) But, that said, I do wonder if they had the 8th-grade graduation in black face and put on a little minstrel show! Seems like that school was hanging on to the old ways in the face of great social change.
A wonderful little found historical document, though, if you ask me.
Nikki, Thank God that Flargy is "pretentious." Since when did being intelligent, well-spoken, well-read, and thoughtful, translate to being pretentious? Give me his comments over your laissez-faire ignorance any day.
Every person who labels someone a bigot is a bigot. We are so caught up in the most superficial aspects of race and other differences (such as avoiding certain words and phrases while projecting our narrow cultural assumptions on those who don't) that we miss the process level altogether.
Do you hate people who are racist? Do you tend to quickly judge those who are prejudiced? Do you think men tend to be sexist? Do you understand why these questions are funny (or at least ironic)?
It's embarrassing to read comments from young people who think they know anything about the civil rights movement (or education, for that matter) in the 1960s. I am embarrassed because it means I had to have been horribly presumptuous as well, a parrot when I imagined myself profound, and -- Oh God! -- so different from my parents or those poor, unenlightened fools who lived before I was born.
Just for fun, answer the following questions honestly. Did you assume this song was written by a white person or a black person? Did you think the teacher selected it, or the child? Did you picture the teacher as being African American or white? Female or male? How about the child? Do you believe this song would have offended black parents? How about white parents? What about the song, if anything, put you off and why?
That's why I threw in the Blake.
Amanda M. Ros seems to be pretending she "faked" this find to trick us all! Good one! But I don't buy it for a second.
Huh?
1.) I'm not the finder.
2.) There's no trick.
3.) The find is not taken from the Blake.
I thought the poem made for an interesting comparison, having been published in 1789 in the "The Songs of Innocence and Experience," along with such better-known poems as,
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I hoped it might provoke some thought. I apologize if I was mistaken.
don't you fret or cry because no child in this country is being taught the real and honest history of the great u, s an d a.
...still. these days. this minute.
I agree with Daniele. I see nothing bigoted at all about this, and it surprises me that so many of you do. And it is lovely. If an 8th-grader wrote it, they have quite a talent!
PS CHILL, in estrus!!!! I hope you don't use comments like that in everyday conversation. If so, you must wonder why no one comes by to chat.
It's probably not from 1965 at all.
Just a creative writing assignment for some kid.
DOn't believe this was found on the street. it's too clean. Go ahead, bite my head as usual. you guys are geting so serious and not fun anymore. That's why I barely come by anymore. It was so much fun back in the "Good crap is hard to find" days. Sigh. Scroll through if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Erika, this is so totally 1965, the handwriting, the sentiments and all -- why so cynical?
Junky, maybe they have clean streets in California! Agree with you about the site. Don't lose faith though -- keep the fun comments coming!
It's just a child's journal entry from 1965 - that's it. Come on guys. Some of you are digging too deep.
Amanda, your first line - "Every person who labels someone a bigot is a bigot" - was enough to convince me that you are the same kind of full-of-shit, idealistic idiot that I was about 10-15 years ago. Reading the rest of your post only served to confirm that impression. The whole "if you hate racists, you might as well be one" mentality is total horse shit.
I am justly rebuked. Everything after the first sentence is horseshit. I have no idea why I posted this rant.
On the other hand, based on your response, I don't think you understood the first sentence at all. And since I didn't say "if you hate racists, you might as well be one," that's on you, Flargy.
Perhaps you weren't so full of shit 15 years ago. :-)
Kahlua in helltown Washington:
How nice of you to throw in your own two cents, without having a bigger mentality than the person in 1965 graduating from 8th grade.
If your typing is horrible, then your penmanship must be as well. You can't type like an idiot online and have perfect spelling/grammar on paper. It usually doesn't work that way. Your brain tells you what to write either way.
I wonder why only some of the spelling mistakes have been corrected?
I at first thought this song was incredibly racist for an 8th grade recital, then I looked at the date. It all makes sense now.
It's possible that the entry was written recently. I have my students assume a role from history and write a fictional journal entry.
Seems I was a bit ornery the day this was posted. I have no idea why I thought Kahlua's comment was worthy of an award that day. Maybe I was an idiot in 2007, too.
Yeah Flargy, what the hell were you thinking? Ah, who cares, you pretentious asswhole.
Over 6 months later, it stills smells like pretentious farts in here. Will someone please light a match or something?
"Bango". LOL Redneck bigots are hee-larious!!!
Rest Easy, Flargy. I'm going with the theory that you were employing sarcasm.