Jamaica Kincaid _ Girl

This story is just a list of demands as a daughter listens and only occasionally responds to. The reasoning behind her being spoke to this way is not defined, but I could see it being this way for more than one reason. It could be that her mother is just natured that way and was always very demanding and she only seen her mother as a “word of correction,” or she could want her daughter to do well. Sometimes people do not really act a certain way for any particular reason other than that is just the only way they know to be maybe because they were raised that way and do not know any other way to be. She could also just want what’s best for her and this is just a daughter poking frustration about her mother being on her all the time about doing right. It could also be a mother who is terminally ill and she wants to get all of this said before she dies. She may not speak an appropriate manner all the time, but she may just need to say some final words. She could also be talking to a teenager who been nothing but trouble in her life and she has been saying these things for so many years and now she is just speaking them all at one time just to make sure she has covered everything she mean to say. She could also just be a pushy and somewhat abusive person looking to just correct and force “right and justice” on her. Over all, I just think she is stressing the heart of a mother trying to say all the things a mother would want to say to a child throughout the molding of child. Many of these saying are the same or quite similar to the things my own mother use to say to me.

Shiloh – Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason is a present day writer who writes stories during spans of time that I have lived through which makes her writings quite interesting. In this story she writes about Leroy and Norma Jean and her mother Mabel. Leroy is a truck driver who has been injured and doesn’t appear to be going back to work. Norma Jean works at Rexall drugstore and she works with cosmetic and she has gotten quite knowledgeable about them. Leroy just sits at home, but he has gotten creative with creating crafty things with craft kits. He also has a Lincoln Log Set and uses it to brag and show how he plans to build a log cabin. Norman Jeans wants no part of it. She seems to be unhappy with Leroy being home every day. One day, Norma Jean’s mother walks in her house and finds her smoking a cigarette. This is hard on them both. Mabel doesn’t realize that her son-in-law smokes marijuana. After the two of them lost a child after first getting married, they have grown somewhat distant. Norma Jean’s mother keeps suggesting they go to Shiloh Georgia where her and her husband went after they first got married. She convinces Leroy it will be good for the marriage. She even refers to it as a second honeymoon. After they leave for Shiloh, they have many gaps of conversation. As each of them try, they both feel awkward and just get quite again. While in Shiloh, they see a few cites, but do not find it as appealing as Mabel made it seem. While there, Norma Jean tells Leroy she wants to leave him and they argue back and for a few times.
I enjoyed this story so much. I just wish it wouldn’t have just ended the way it did. I wonder if they did get divorced or find some kind of common ground again. I suppose Norma Jean just got too use to having her own time with him being gone so much as a truck driver.

Amy Tan - Half and Half

Half and Half was an interesting story to me. Amy Tan gave us all a new perspective in racial prejudice. We usually do not think of inner racial marriages that do not just pertain to black and white couples. In this story, we see a family who is Chinese and they have 7 children. The narrator is talking about her life as a child and as an adult with her husband. As a child, she tells of a story when they go to the beach and with her being a middle child, she is asked to watch the younger children. While her father is out on the rocks fishing, there is a moment of turmoil and one of her brothers, Bing, slips and falls into the water and just vanishes. Her mother, Janice, searches and searches for her son, but it as if he just disappeared. This causes her mother to lose her faith and start using her Bible as a placement under the table to keep it level.
The narrator has come back home to see her mother and tell her that her and her husband Ted are getting a divorce. She knows her mother will be against it. Her husband use to be a man in control of their entire marriage and lives. After he is sued for malpractice, he loses faith in himself and has begun to lay every responsibility of their marriage on his wife and this has been the root of their troubles. The doubt in her stems from the death of Bing. She has been responsible for him and she blames herself and with this, she doesn’t want such a major responsibility. During this visit, she realizes that all these years that she has thought her mother was saying ‘fate” she was actually referring to “faith. “ There is a show of irony here. As the Bible is referred to as being white, it also kept clean and is the piece needed to keep the table balanced.
I really enjoyed this story. I did think the title being “Half and Half,” I assume it was a title involving her race, but as I read it, I think it is referring to being half cold and half hot.

Alice Walker - Everyday Use

Alice Walker is a black woman who allows her personality and her personal characteristics to flow through her writing. Her most famous writing to me would have to be “The Color Purple.” Most people this day and time mainly remember it as a movie.
This short story focuses on a mother, who is the narrator, and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. It is immediately evident that the two daughters are quite different. Maggie is more reserved and homely and she has burns on her body from a house fire from some years past that seems to me could have been set by Dee. Their mother is a stoutly, thick woman who has the physical ability to work as hard as any man but only has a second grade education. Dee wants a better life that what she was given as a child, while Maggie seems satisfied.
As the girls have grown up, Dee is coming back home with her fellow named Asalamalakim. She came home to show off the place and the things she calls history to Asalamalakim. She wants thing from the house to take home with her to display and not use. She mainly wants a quilt that was made by her grandmother to hang on a wall. Her mother isn’t very happy with this. Dee and her mother argue over this as well as the other relics. Mother explains how her sister Maggie was to get these things because she would appreciate them in a way Dee never could. This angers Dee and she can’t seem to understand why her mother thinks she will not appreciate it appropriately. Dee feels she is the only would who could actually appreciate these things appropriately when however she appears to be the one ashamed of her history. She wants these things to show as something in the past, but it is also a part of her family’s current lives.
This was an alright story for me. It was somewhat boring and I searched for a climax that I never found. I was glad to see Maggie show a little personality at the end.

Tillie Olsen - I Stand Here Ironing

Tillie Olsen is a writer who taps into real world scenarios and real life experiences. This story touches the heart of all mothers who have struggled in life especially those of us who have tried to survive as a single parent trying to raise children on our own. During the time frame of when this story was written, women’s rights were somewhat new and gender equality was not in existence with jobs, wages, and labor rights and when a man left his family, he was not held accountable with any financial responsibility to his children. This mother was left with many difficult choices in life and when she is asked to come and talk about her daughter, Emily, who is now 19, she is forced to look back and when she does, she is flooded with guilt and responsibility. As a single mom, she was forced to work hard for less pay as a man would receive, and by doing so, she had to make sacrifices; one being her daughter who for many years suffered and lacked happiness and a place in her world. She was a thin, foreign-looking child, who was behind in academic development. Her mother had to work and when younger, she was in child care places that had evil teachers that Emily hated, but eventually her mother convinced herself that Emily was old enough to finally be left alone, but she really wasn’t. Eventually, her mother remarried and had more children. This is when it became more obvious to her that Emily was different and then the clinic convinced her mother to place her convalescent home. This home wouldn’t allow love or any real contact with family and this is when she got worse and her experience there almost shed Emily of her ability to be close and personal with people. It took her mother 8 months to get her out of that awful place, and it almost seemed the effects were irreversible. However, as Emily grew up, one day while in school she won an amateur show and this changed everything she had been and unveiled the true “Somebody” that she had finally became.
I was glad to see that they finally had victory over their hardships in life. At first this story was sad and depressing. I began to wonder if Emily was set up to just commit suicide or end up as a serial killer. I was very pleased that this story didn’t end up this way. I always love a happy ending and this story definitely had one!

A Good Man is Hard to Find - Glannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor was an interesting writer. She seemed to like to write about the unexpected. Most of us are looking for the climax of a story to go in the other direction. We want the story to have a happy ending of the “happily ever after,” but that’s not what you get with Flannery O’Conner. In her story of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” was a story full of surprised and shock. It may have been a short reading, but it kept me on my toes. As I read, I said many of times, surely that now what’s really happening. I didn’t expect them to all of a sudden have a car accident. That was one of those all of a sudden unexpected events in a story. The only thing I can say I could predict were the men in the car that approached them directly after the car accident. When the Misfit instructed Bobby Lee to get the boy John Wesley and his father Bailey, I thought he was just going to take them to the woods to strip them of their clothes, especially when the grandmother made it evident that the Misfit did not have clothes on and when Misfit said they had burned them. Then when the shots were fired, I didn’t really think they had actually been shot until Bobby Lee returned from the woods alone. Another surprise was when the mother was asked did she want to join her husband and son in the woods and she willing went with the baby in her arms along with June Star, I was flabbergasted! All along the grandmother kept trying to somehow will and deal with the misfit about being from a good family. This is when I thought this woman was the crazy one and should have been the first one shot. After the mother, baby and June Star were shot, I knew then the grandmother had to go next. After I finished the story, I couldn’t help but think that if the grandmother had just kept her mouth shut, maybe they would have all be alright, but then again, it was the grandmother’s fault they went down that dirt road to start with.

Nikki Giovanni's Poetry

In Nikki Giovanni’s Poetry, I really enjoyed all three of these poems. The first one, “Nikki-Rosa,” is apparently a poem about herself and her childhood. But this poem brings up some very good points. Usually when people have hard lives, they usually complain and end up being bitter in life, but with this poem she is trying to show that overall her life was her life and to her it was a good one. This poem shows strength, hope, love and pride in being in the skin the good Lord gave you. This poem gave me a pleasing feeling and I was actually glad to read something positive and uplifting. It was a change compared to some of our readings this week.
Her poem of “I’m Not Lonely” seemed to a poem about a little girl trying to cover her fear of being left by a parent; probably her mother. She appears to trying to convince herself that she isn’t afraid and that she is old enough to be alone. There is also a recognition of previous bad dreams, but I think that when she states that she doesn’t have these bad dreams anymore, it’s really her way of saying they are no longer dreams, they are her reality.
The poem called “Poem for Black Boys” seems to be about what people perceive black boys should play in the way of games since they are black. However, she is using sarcasm to the fullest extent! She is stating that just because the boys are black, they must somehow just play the things that show ignorance since they are black, and games that teach them and enhance their life of crime and indecency. She is basically pointing at white people to show their ignorance about black people.
I was really impressed with her poems because they were easy to follow and they really just made sense. They left you with the feeling of knowing you just learned something about what a good decent person can experience in life through difficult times and end up surviving and succeeding in life.

Ron Rash – Serena

First let me say I LOVED THIS BOOK! This was definitely one of those books I could relate to and actually visualize….. literally! The setting being set in the mountains of North Carolina was wonderful. Ron Rash is a very talented writer and I was very impressed with his knowledge of the surrounding area and of logging.
Serena was a very interesting character. Her personality was a hard one at first to unveil, but her true self was slowly peeled away. At first her drive was mainly focused upon their business of logging. She was very knowledgeable about logging and at first everyone was impressed and envious of her. This became the center of her and Pemberton’s lives.
In the beginning of the book, it was first made known that Pemberton was just arriving back in the NC Mountains from Boston and he brought with him his new bride, Serena but awaiting him was a young pregnant girl named Rachel Harmon with her father. Rachel was just 16 years old while Pemberton being somewhere around 50 and she was pregnant with Pemberton’s baby. When Rachel’s father approached him, he revealed he came to kill Pemberton, but in return, Pemberton kills Rachel’s father. Rachel is now alone and left with trying to raise her son alone and she struggles and longs for Pemberton to return to help her and take her for his own.
When Serena becomes pregnant, she continues to live life like she is invincible but eventually she ends up losing the baby for reasons unknown. When this occurs, she also loses her ability to ever have any more children. While Serena was having issues with her pregnancy just before losing it, she goes to Dr. Cheney and he just brushes her off and tells her it’s probably just gas and to eat some peppermints. Later after she recovers from her miscarriage, they find the doctor dead in a bathroom stall with his tongue cut out, holding a peppermint in each hand. This is when Serena starts knocking people off more rapidly.
Galloway was working and training someone and when he accidently got his hand chopped off, Serena helps save his life. Galloway and Serena become partners in crime at this point and he begins to follow and assist her in deeds of murder and deceit. They kill several people who get in their way and Pemberton kills one of his partners, Buchanan, himself. Galloway and Serena stalk Rachel and Galloway tries to kill her, but she manages to escape, but he does kill the Widow Jenkins who has been a mentor to Rachel and has helped her with her son.
Pemberton manages to get a picture of his and Rachel’s son and he also gives the sheriff $300.00 to give Rachel, but she never finds out where it comes from and she uses it to runs off to Seattle where she and her son lives the rest of their lives. Pemberton and Galloway go off hunting one day seeking a mountain lion they have been looking for since they first arrived. This is when Pemberton is told by Galloway that Serena (who has already bought her husband's coffin) has put poison in the sandwich he just ate, he also just got bitten by a snake, then he fell off an embankment, then eaten by the mountain lion.
Then the story jumps into the future to the spring of 1975. Serena has spent the past 45 years in Brazil and Jacob has come to seek his revenge. He first kills the one hand man sleeping on the floor next to Serena’s bed (assuming this is Galloway), then Jacob, Rachel & Pemberton's grown son, planted the knife that was used to kill his grandfather into Serena's stomach and she walks out on the veranda and dies.
The ending was a little surprising, but I was glad Serena finally got what she greatly deserved!