Have you ever felt safe somewhere, but realized your only protection was ignorance? In Jacqueline Woodson’s When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, she introduces the idea that as you grow and change, so does your meaning of home. Over the course of the story, Woodson matures and grows older, and her ideas about the town she grew up in become different. When she was a nine year old girl, Woodson and her sister returned to their hometown of Greenville, South Carolina by train. During the school year, they lived together in Downtown Brooklyn, and travelled to. Once Jacqueline has tasted the sweet life of freedom and privilege in New York, she realizes how ignorant she was about Greenville. Her Grandmother had been protecting her from the racism and segregation that permeated the town like a disease. Through metaphor and character growth, it seems obvious that Woodson is trying to convey the theme that perceptions of home can grow and changes as one grows older. One inference to be made in the story is when Woodson’s Grandmother warns her to stay away from the poison ivy slowly choking the base of a tree in their backyard. “...We’d been warned to stay away from the small patch of ivy that grew around the base of one tree in my backyard. But until that year, the consequence had been as theoretical …show more content…
“I spent long periods of the day bent over the ivy, fascinated by the promise if its danger – a danger I believed I was protected from – and would continue to be.” This quote is explaining how she was interested in the danger the ivy offered, and thought that it wouldn’t hurt her. The quote includes an example of how the poison ivy was a symbol of racism and how that changed her perception of home. Ever since Woodson was little, her home had always been racist. It just took her time to grow up and realize what was happening around her; to realized she wouldn’t always be
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Show MoreEatonville is a place of repression, what with how Janie worked in the shop, and how gossip ran rampant through the town if deliberation occurred. Eatonville is not a negative and antagonistic place, but simply a place of high standards, which did not suit the independent nature of Janie Crawford. Opposing this place, the rural location known as “The Muck” has almost entirely different motifs. The Everglades was home to farmers and common workmen, not the high-class citizens of Eatonville. People were also free to come as they were, and be treated equally.
Being a black woman raised in a white world, Ann Petry was familiar with the contrast in lives of African Americans and whites (McKenzie 615). The Street, centered in 1940’s Harlem, details these differences. While Petry consistently portrays Harlem as dark and dirty, she portrays the all-white neighborhoods of Connecticut as light and clean. This contrast of dark vs light is used in the expected way to symbolize despair vs success.
The author, Silas House, takes offense to the put down of his hometown. The article maintains an angry tone as he describes all of the good of his homeland and all the things reporters that “ don’t know what they’re talking about” say. I agree with Silas, that the region of eastern Kentucky does not get enough credit for the good things is possesses, like “passing fair ordinance laws to protect all people from discrimination”. Silas talks about how people have worked so hard in this community, about those who try their best to defeat the stereotypes of outside people. I know many people who have worked hard and long to make something of themselves in this area.
In the novel, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, Johnny has an issue with his arrogance. Johnny Tremain lived in the 1700s in America, he was a silversmith until he burnt his hand on hot silver. Johnny’s hand is now disabled so he cannot be a silversmith anymore. His pride caused him his downfall now he lives with the aftermath. His pride has also made him confident and successful at things.
According to the story Kindred by Octavia Butler during the antebellum South, the slaves were treated very badly such as being forced to work for the white people. According to the story of Camp 14 in the 60 Minutes video, the prisoners were treated harshly as well. But they were not like the slaves because they were prisoners and they only worked for the government (camp). The slaves and prisoners both tried to escape from where they were at.
Janie ran away to Eatonville to escape from a life she didn’t want to live, however, Eatonville represented the oppression that has continuously tormented her. In Eatonville, although Janie lived with the reassurance of financial security, she was limited in other aspects of life. Chained to the life Joe made her live, Janie slaved away at work, deprived of the social interactions she desired. It was evident that Joe held a grasp over the town and everyone in it, including Janie, “something else made men give way to him… Take for instance that new house of his.
The move to New York was a crucial moment in her life. She was finally able to start over and follow her dream after years of living in chaos. For Jeannette, moving to New York was a challenging experience. Her family and the only house she had ever known had to be left behind. The move represents Jeannette’s capacity to take charge of her life and improve it herself.
Home is where the heart is, but what if home is no longer safe? Joyce Carol Oates explores this concept in her 1966 short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”. On surface level, this story appears to discuss a rebellious young girl named Connie and her confrontation with Arnold Friend, a stalker. The ending leaves the reader to assume that Arnold Friend plans to sexually assault the young girl.
In fiction, the narrator controls how the audience connects to and perceives the various characters in a story. A good author can manipulate the narration to connect the audience to certain characters and deepen the reader’s understanding of their conflicts. In “Previous Condition” and “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin illustrates themes of loneliness and isolation in the pursuit of finding a space that feels like home. Although this theme is clear in both stories, Baldwin is able to portray it very differently in each story through the relationship he allows the reader to the characters struggling with these feelings. While “Previous Condition” provides a more intimate relationship to the narrator, “Sonny’s Blues” is able to deliver an additional level of understanding by telling the story through Sonny’s brother, therefore disconnecting the reader in a way that forces him or her to share the characters’ feelings of isolation and confusion.
The informal language, creative word choice, and diction used by all of the characters in this story are true to the Southern Gothic genre short story style (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). Southern imagery extends beyond the characters to the setting and language. As we read about dirt roads, southern plantations, “red clay banks”, and crops in the field, we are
As time goes on, a person over time starts to understand the reality known as life, she should mature and leave behind a time that once used to be known as childhood. In this essay the author and her family will be traveling to different places which will show how her mom’s foolishness had an affect on the lives of her and her siblings. First, they go to the desert where things get out of control and Jeannette gets injured, then they go to Welch where Rose Mary tells her kids to do something that is not matured and adult like and at last they go to New York, where Rose Mary was still homeless by making decisions that had a bad impact on her and the others around her. The first place that they go to is The Desert.
“Looks can be deceiving. In Ruth White’s novel, Belle Prater’s Boy, society judges people by their appearances. Gypsy Leemaster was one of Ruth White’s characters most judged by her appearance. Her friend, Woodrow also was judged by society’s expectations of Gypsy. So along with her being affected Woodrow was also affected.
In the story, When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, Jacqueline Woodson uses a variety of symbolism and metaphor to show that when you get wiser, your perception of things change. One example of Woodson conveying this theme is when she writes, “When the deep green beauty revealed my place and time in history and laid claim to that moment all children know, when the tendrils of adulthood move toward us, showing themselves long before we are ready to see.” This quote describes when she realized the nostalgia of her home was masking the bitter and unfortunate side that “adulthood” is showing her. This directly relates to the theme because as she becomes wiser and more experienced, (the tendrils of adulthood) her perception changes. (showing themselves long before we are ready to see.)
Ivy’s blindness is a representation of the village its self and symbolizes how the Elders kept the villagers in the dark about the real world. The blindness makes Ivy more vulnerable to the outside world, yet it also makes her the best candidate for going into the woods, because, per her father, she wouldn’t be able to see the horrors of the outside world. It was also assumed that the creatures would not harm her because they would have mercy on her, as with Noah. However, Ivy’s blindness does, in fact, make her a strong person because she has a different sense of awareness that others can’t experience. Although she was terrified of walking through the woods alone, Ivy ended up exactly where she needed to be.
The narrator and his brother, Blake, grew up in such a horrible town and it makes sense that the social injustice was prominent in the town. The town of where they grew up in is described as by the narrator as “We both were raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, an angrily, heavily black, poor, industrial city southwest of Philadelphia” (Staples, 1). Just by the description of the town, we can deduce that the neighborhood is not a great place to live in. Any poor neighborhoods, typically, have very bad living conditions. The people tend to be ill-educated or at lease educated in the wrong values of life.