Girl

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” has always been a favorite of mine. The words and sentences are mashed together, a seemingly endless list of instructions and guidance with no break or pause. It occurred to me in this reading that a child would interpret it that way— never-ending but well-intentioned advice from parents and others. The mother in this story is trying to make sure she imparts all the useful knowledge to her daughter, like how to do the laundry, the best way to make her clothes and grow vegetables, because those things are basic necessities of life. She tries to teach her valuable social lessons, like how to behave in public, in church, how to dress, etc., because she wants her daughter to be a successful, normal person who can interact with others. She is concerned about the girl’s morality, so she instructs her on her to behave with boys, and how not to be the “slut I know you are bent on becoming”. The mother may have some issues relating to her own past, and that is why she is so fearful for her daughter. She instructs her daughter how to be independent, by telling her how to catch a fish, how to “bully a man”, “how to make ends meet” and how to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. When the girl expresses doubt about being able to confront a baker, her mother assures her that if she does all that she has been taught to do, she will not be the kind of woman easily intimidated by a baker.
The way the mother gets her point across may be a little odd to some of us, but I think the bottom line is that she loves her child and is doing what she thinks is best to ensure her future as an independent woman. It is clear from the many things listed in the story that much is expected from women in that culture, and all the more important for her to take care of herself and grow up the right way.

Half and Half

I have been trying to figure out what the title “Half and Half” means. The story is almost half about the present situation, the narrator’s divorce, and half about her younger brother’s drowning; her marriage is half and half, she is Chinese, her husband is American, and after the accident, the remaining six children are evenly split by sex- three girls, three boys. Then I realize it’s in the last bit, “fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention”. Rose has believed all the time that her mother has given up on faith, the Bible under the table a sure sign to her. Similarly, Rose believes that she caused her brother’s death and the death of her marriage, both due to inattention. When she opens the Bible, still pure white even after all the years under the table leg, she sees her brother’s death written in “erasable pencil” and realizes that although her mother pretends to have abandoned her beliefs completely, she has not. She begins to understand that when “you lose something you love, faith takes over … You have to undo the expectation”. Rose sounds as though she may try to work it out with her husband, believing that it may be time to think for herself, to “pay attention to what [she] lost”.

Shiloh

I have to admit, I really did not find too much here to keep my interest. Possibly the whole “woman seeks to re-invent herself” theme has been so over-done in the last thirty years that I don’t appreciate those who initially did it so well. I appreciated the down-home feel and the wonderful nods to popular culture, many of which probably have gone by unappreciated by younger readers. "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lover Come Back" are two great movies. My aunt had that same gosh-awful fake wood organ. Mushroom soup casseroles. Log home kits. Civil War battleground. It is all familiar, and that does help it feel realistic, but I just don’t care about them. Mabel, the overbearing mother-in-law, is a trouble-maker who inspects her daughter’s closets. How crazy is that? The book said her husband died of a bleeding ulcer- coincidence? I think not. Leroy is so mixed up from not driving his truck anymore, that he spends his time doing crafts and smoking dope. I can’t see this ending well. Norma Jean has lived her life a certain way for so long, she couldn’t handle the change. She wanted something new, she wanted to change her life. We are left to believe that when she married, she had little choice, because she was pregnant- her mother made her get married. But now that she is older, her husband is underfoot all the time, she realizes that they really don’t have that much in common. She is ready to start her life over. While Leroy was concentrating on an “empty house”, she was “flexing her muscles” of independence. It is ironic that their marriage is ending on same battleground where so many died.

Everyday Use

I really liked this story. I found it to be humorous in places, and very relatable in others. The matriarch of the family and younger daughter Maggie await the arrival of Dee, and while they wait we find out that she was not happy to be raised poor and in the country. It sounds as though she may have hated her older house so much that she burned it down, causing Maggie to be burned in the process. Maggie is portrayed as a homebody, perhaps a little bit simpler, but devoted to her mother and the traditional ways. I can’t quite see Dee cooking or gardening. When Dee arrives, she is in traditional African clothing, with a boyfriend who is Muslim (Nation of Islam?) She has changed her name, as it came from “the people who oppressed [her]”. Maggie and Mama found that a little amusing, as she was named after her aunt and grandmother. Although Dee spent her childhood expressing her distaste in everything around her, she is now taking Polaroid pictures of everything she sees, as though it is brand new and freshly authentic. She enthusiastically ate a meal that she probably would’ve turned her nose up at just a few years before, and then went looking for antiques and other things around the house that represented her family history. Things that she never would have touched, much less knew how to use, she wanted to take with her. Maggie knew the history of each piece, who “whittled” what, etc. Then she wanted some of the hand-pieced quilts, quilts that she had previously refused because they were “out of style”. Dee/Wangero only wanted them to hang on the wall, to show them off because of her new interest in her “roots”. Even though Mama had promised them to Maggie when she married, Maggie, used to being overrun by Dee, offered them to her sister. But Mama wasn’t having it- she knew that Dee didn’t really appreciate the quilts; Maggie did. Her compromise to Dee was ignored, and Dee said that the other two women did not understand their heritage- but it was she who didn’t. Mama and Maggie lived their heritage every day, in the sweeping of the yard, in their church, their cooking of certain foods, their quilting using old clothes, using furniture handed down for generations, etc.- that was their heritage. Dee was pretending, and as soon as she tired of it, she would move onto something else, still not understanding or appreciating where or whom she came from.

A Good Man

This was an odd story. The grandmother was not a very likable character, as we see in story— she is a racist and a snob, to put it simply. She has a very selfish streak, and was only concerned about her own pleasures and wants. Just the fact that she brought along a cat when her son didn’t want her to irritated me. She felt as though she had the right to do as she pleased. When the family had an accident, thanks in no small part to the grandmother, her first reaction was to complain of an injury, an attempt to throw anyone off the track of the missing house. She didn’t ask about anyone else, especially the missing mother and baby. Astounding. When they are confronted by the strangers, the grandmother recognizes the “Misfit” and is arrogant (and stupid) enough to tell him so. When it becomes clear that they are in danger, the grandmother pleads not for her family, but for her own life. One by one her family is killed, and yet she still begs for her own life. At that point, I was thinking, why? I would be begging to go with them. In desperation she asks the Misfit to pray, and he tells her of his conflicted religious issues, and in the last minute she reaches out to him like he is her son. The misfit shoots her. I haven’t quite decided what happened here. Was she confused, or did she think that he, even as a sinner was a child of God? I don’t know. The Misfit wasn’t confused by her rhetoric though, as he said in the second to last line, “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life”. He is saying that not until she was faced with death did she extend any offer of kindness to anyone. I think the title is a bit of a play on words, as it almost should say, “A Good Person is Hard to Find”.

I Stand Here Ironing

“I Stand Here Ironing” is a poignant piece, written obviously by a real-life mother. The narrator in the story, a mother, begins to flash back to memories of her daughter’s life when she is asked to speak to some professional about her— perhaps a school counselor, teacher, we do not know. The mother goes over the whole of the girl’s nineteen years; we see how she begins to blame herself for her daughter’s illnesses, her learning difficulties, and her lack of happiness. The story seems to bring front and center the problems women had with no forced child support system, lack of suitable employment for women and most importantly, serious deficits in quality child care and early childhood programs. The mother was forced to work and although she frequently had no choice, she still regretted and blamed herself for the outcome. When she remarried and had more children, they seemed to thrive and be all that her first child, Emily, was not. In the end, Emily found her own ways to cope, through humor, and finally found her place. I found the beginning interesting, where the mother starting describing her as a “beautiful baby”, then as Emily became sad and ill, she was dark and “foreign looking”, and then at the end, when Emily finally grew into herself and became “Somebody”, she was “so lovely”. I think she must have looked how she felt.

Nikki Giovanni

I enjoyed the very powerful poetry of Nikki Giovanni. I found her work to be full of imagery. The words are very simple, but put together in such a way as to stir emotion and thought. I liked “Nikki-Rosa” the most, and it may sound funny because I am not African-American and obviously cannot relate to her in that way, but I do understand aspects of this poem on a certain level. Growing up in the rural Deep South (like I did) has a lot of negative connotations attached to it. Most people assume just as many things about that type of existence as they might assume about the early childhood of Ms. Giovanni. The lines “everybody is together and you and your sister have happy birthdays and very good Christmases” and “they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy” are the most meaningful to me, as they can also be applied to the lives of my family and my friends. We weren’t poverty stricken, but compared to the rest of the world, we weren’t exactly well-off either— it wasn’t a problem. We, and others like us, were fine. Families got together and took care of one another, good times and bad times. By the same token, Nikki Giovanni doesn’t use her childhood to define herself, nor will she let others pigeon-hole her as being deprived of anything just because she is black.

“Poem for Black Boys” was another powerful piece, written apparently in a time of unrest. Although it seems to be telling young black men to accept less than strive for, to forget about being the hero, and run away to the corner and hide, it is actually challenging them. By using humor and sarcasm Ms. Giovanni injects many popular references of the time, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She makes a clever play on the Monopoly game, “DO NOT SIT IN, DO NOT FOLLOW KING, GO DIRECTLY TO STREETS”, calling it “CULLURD” (colored) and saying that it is one game they can win. She advises them to go “natural”, take up vandalism and buy the “Burn Baby Burn” revolution kit, with instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. Her admonition to the young men is not only a reminder of how easily the world can view them as troublemakers, but also how easy it would be for them to be that way if they make the wrong choices. The last stanza tells them to be their own heroes, and that it is time for them to find their own way.

Serena

Ron Rash’s Serena was a page-turner. Not so much as a thriller, but because as a reader, you became invested in what happened to the characters, especially Rachel and her little boy. The scenery was vivid, and the use of local color and real-life people, places and occurrences helped make everything seem more real. I appreciated the detail of the loggers’ lives and hard work, the matter-of-fact way they went about their jobs. A lot of my family logged “way back when”, and although I’m sure the process was much improved from the time of the story, it was still pretty primitive and dangerous.
Serena was an interesting character, and I could clearly see the allusions to Lady Macbeth as others have mentioned, with her seemingly endless plotting of murders and having others to carry out the evil deeds; Serena differs from Lady Macbeth in that she doesn’t suffer from guilt- she expects it be done, and she gets Pemberton to do her bidding by convincing him that they are building an empire, that he is protecting his future, in essence, being a man. She charms him, and ultimately, all the men around her, in one fashion or another. There is also the touch of the supernatural, although in this case there is Galloway’s blind-but-“seeing” mother instead of the witches of Macbeth.
Rachel is the good mother, the scorned woman who suffers for the love of a man and child. Serena does all she does because she is jealous of Rachel and the power she has over Pemberton- Serena cannot provide Pemberton with a child, and she will not allow anyone else to have what she cannot. If these two were the two mothers before King Solomon fighting over a baby, Rachel would have handed over the baby to Serena to save it, Serena would have surrendered it for cleaving in half.
My favorite part of the book was the loggers and the conversations they had among themselves. They were surprisingly articulate and well-read for loggers, and had quite interesting things to say about the state of the forest and the world to come. They were helpful in the progress of the story, as they helped fill-in the blanks of the action, some of the things that we didn’t read about. The beginning of chapter thirty-five is when Snipe’ crew has cut the last tree; the men are discussing not only how the Sheriff has died, but how Rachel and her baby got away. We see how the men were aware of what was going on and how Galloway was involved. The men survey the wasteland around them, and compare what’s left to the annihilation left after WWI. They accurately talk about their part in the destruction, how they had no choice, “had to feed [their] families”, and the most surprising line comes from the recently silent McIntyre, who says “I think this is what the end of the world will be like”.