FREE ESSAY ON EXCHANGE VALUE BY CHARLES JOHNSON

EXCHANGE VALUE BY CHARLES JOHNSON

Money is Power in Exchange Value by Charles Johnson
Author Charles Johnson provides us with a brief look into human nature and the profound
affect money has on people in his short story Exchange Value.
The plot of the story is simple a basic rags to riches story with a 1990s twist. It
centers around two brothers who live in a poverty ridden apartment. These brothers,
Loftis and Cooter decided to break into an old eccentric woman's' apartment. She has
lived down the hall from them their entire lives and when they do not see her begging for
food on a daily basis as she normally would, they correctly deduce that perhaps she may
have died. After gaining entry into her filthy, smelly, booby trapped apartment they see
all the riches she had hoarded. The brothers feel like they are in Aladdin's cave. They
find various strange items, as the younger brother Cooter describes,
 But her living room, webbed in dust , be filled to the max with dollars of all
denominations, stacks of stock, 
General Motors, Gulf Oil, and 3m Company in old White Owl cigar boxes, battered purses,
or bound in pink rubber bands. It be like the kind of cubby hole kids play in, but filled
with ... things : everything, like a world inside the world, you take it from me, so like
a picture book scenes of plentifullness you could seal yourself off in here and settle
forever.... There be unopened cases of Jack Daniel's, three safes cemented
to the floor, hundreds of matchbooks, unworn clothes, a fuel burning stove, dozens of
wedding rings, rubbish, World War II magazines, a carton of a hundred canned sardines,
mink stoles, old rags, a birdcage, a bucket of silver dollars, thousands of books,
paintings, quarters in tobacco cans, two pianos, glass jars of pennies, a set of
bagpipes, an almost complete Model A Ford dappled with rust and I swear three sections of
a dead tree (524).
The brothers then proceed to transfer the wealth, or steal it all and place it all in
their apartment. They inventory the treasures prior to stealing it and we are told the
total of all the possessions is $879,543.00. The total theft equals almost one million
dollars and they marvel at their big score. This begins the thought processes for the
brothers on how they will handle the this unexpected windfall. The elder brother Loftis
is thought to be the smarter of the pair but in the story it is revealed that in fact the
lazy, drug using but caring younger brother Cooter is the one who realizes the dilemma
that these two have gotten themselves into with this huge amount of wealth. They figure
they are set for life as Cooter says,
 Be like Miss Bailey's stuff is raw energy, and Loftis and me like wizards, could
transform her stuff into anything else at will. All we had to do, it seemed to me, was
decide exactly what to exchange it for (526).
The brothers struggle in finding this exchange value and in their stuggle the older
brother thought to be the smarter of the two undergoes a transformation where he comes to
the realization that money is power and mistakenly he decides to hold on to the power
rather that enrich his life by spending the money.
Money is power, that thought is thrust upon Americans from the beginning of our formative
years till the day we die. We are told to save for a rainy day as young children and
later we are told to save for our children's inheritance after we die. We go to
extraordinary lengths to protect out wealth just as the character Miss. Bailey does in
the story. Cooter explains, 
 There was some kind of boobytrap-boxes of broken glass-that shoulda warned us Miss
Bailey wasn't the easy mark we made her to be(524). All of the characters in the story,
behave exactly as some real people when they fail to see the enjoyment and comfort the
money could provide if they were to spend it. Recently I was introduced to a lottery
winner of twenty-two million dollars who continued to keep her same nursing job. This
woman's life paralleled the life of the story, she was afraid to spend the money for fear
of giving up the power of having it. She continued to work at her same job on the
graveyard shift, no less, rather than retire and live off her great fortune. This is the
same fate that happens to the characters in the story. Rather than escaping the poverty
and using the money which was an inheritance left to Miss Bailey, they become mired in
the decision making process and end up living exactly as she did.
The author makes use of diction to express many different observations about the
characters in the story. The story is written in colloquial diction using common black
slang to help create the feelings. This use of slang makes it somewhat difficult for the
reader to understand and demands that the reader use critical reading skills to be able
to interupt the story. There were a few sentences that I did not understand including the
scene when the younger brother Cooter states, Loftis and me Got Ovuh but I was able to
decipher that that the character was exclaiming his happiness over the newfound wealth
(526).
This story was rich in symbolism and imagery and it proved very descriptive in this
manner. The author used quite a few different images to describe the characters. He
called the old lady in the story, Miss Bailey, A hincty halfbald West Indian woman with a
craglike face...(524). His use of descriptive language is very pronounced when he does on
to describe the death scene when the two brothers come across the old woman dead in her
bed. Miss Bailey, he wrote, be in her long sleeve flannel nightgown, bloated, like she'd
been blown up by a bicycle pump, her old face caved in with rot, flyblown, her fingers
big and colored like spoiled bananas(525).
The characters in the story end up adopting the old woman's ways, even though in the
beginning of the story it is the furthest thing from their minds. The irony of the story
is not lost on the readers when in the final paragraphs Cooter the younger brother
whispers a prayer to himself when he states, Hold tight, it's all right. Me, I wanted to
tell Loftis how Miss Bailey looked four days ago, that maybe it didn't have to be like
that for us-did it?-because we could change(528). While attempting to change they fall
deeper and deeper into the pit of despair that they are so desperately trying to escape
from through any means necessary. The story had a moral message, and that message was; be
careful what you wish for, it just might come true.
Bibliography
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