The Character Analysis Of Jesse By Joy Boothe

Jesse by Joy Boothe
Jesse is a novella which is fictional, as the title says its written by Joy Boothe. The text is written in a 1st person narrative. The text spans over a period of approximately 22 years. We miss some of the story in between the time jumps for example when the text goes from the narrator being 5 years and then skips to being 14 years old. However the time period is always in chronological order and there is no use of flashbacks. The story is about a girl. You never get to know her name. But you could easily think, that she is the one called Jesse. However she hates the name Jesse, because it reminds her and everyone else, about her alcoholic uncle Jesse, who shot himself. They are all Christians, and the 1st person narrator attends Sunday school. Her father also works at the plywood mill.
Her father befriends a man called Jesse at work. Jesse and her father make good friends, and Jesse often visits them at home. He brings joy into their home, and he actually makes the girl laugh. He also makes the mother in their family laugh; “Mama laughs with us when Jesse makes sounds like toad frogs and crickets.” But they can’t have Jesse inside their house, because he is a black man, and according to their grandmother, and actually also the society, black men did not have the same rights as white men did at the time being.
The narrator has never touched a black man before, because her grandmother has always told her bad stories about black men. Stories about