“I Yam What I Am.”

Lost in thought while walking down the street, the narrator is struck by the scent of yams, which he explains reminds him of home. This I find to be a pivotal scene of the novel, transporting us from our typical narrative scenario and instead focusing in on the narrator’s senses and what that means for him. In previous chapters, the narrator never would have found himself ordering buttered yams from a street vendor, finding the idea of indulging in stereotypically black food in public to be ridiculous (note the scene in the diner wherein the server suggests the pork chops and grits special). But something different is happening here and the narrator pick up on it. He exclaims, “They’re my birthmark — I yam what I am,” (266) completely succumbed by a feeling of solidarity with all the other black people who have been hesitant to indulge in something like Southern food in public, instead opting to avoid their heritage in favor of not standing out. He does not only enjoy his heritage, engaged here in the form of Southern food, but he finally accepts it as a part of him.

The narrator explains: “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 yam 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 with 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”(264). He is embracing his blackness where he would typically try to smother it, and he finds a newfound freedom in doing so. This freedom, while never explicitly kept from him (he’s always had the ability to eat yams on the street), comes from a sense of pride and solidarity with his heritage that he’d never truly felt before. He explains how the societal oppression of black people causes them to not only dislike those in power of these institutions (the white people) but even to become disgusted by their own culture and shared interests (such as Southern food). This is especially important and persists in society today, where stereotypes about black culture are abundant. Even today, many black people struggle with accepting themselves and their culture and even sometimes reject it completely in favor of something less “stereotypical” for fear of what others might think of them. This passage is particularly interesting to me for the stylistic elements of it; the narrator, completely transfixed on this food and the thoughts of solidarity and homesickness that flow from him, matches his languid feelings in this passage. The sentences are shorter and choppy, as the narrator struggles to find his next words. This passage is much less fleshed out than other parts in the novel, as the narrator speaks directly from the heart.

Another interesting line in this section comes from the vendor. Prompted by the narrator’s insistence that his yams are good, the vendor says, “You right, but everything that looks good ain’t necessarily good. But these is” (264). His words read like an ambiguous warning for the narrator, possibly a warning against the act the narrator is about to take part in, fully engaging his heritage in public and unapologetically, or possibly against the Brotherhood which the narrator is introduced to in the next chapter. The narrator is immediately hesitant towards them, taking the vendors words to heart.