The first section of Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta contains instances of child-like paraphernalia that are realized through the characters’ voices. The descriptions of the voices are not phrases commonly used. When talking about the fictional creature with Tasha, DeShaun says “‘You could tell me. I won’t tell anybody.’ DeShaun’s voice collapsed like a house made…
When I was younger, I watched TV programs immediately coming home from school. A naïve thought I had was that the Disney and Nickelodeon shows I watched were in real-time or that they filmed a new episode every week. How do they get from place to place in that short amount of time? This inquiry…
As of now, what is your central question? (Your central question is the question that each of your takes will take up and to which your project as a whole will respond.) How do we see a physical presence influence an attitude or tone in the novels we’ve read, specifically Leaving Atlanta? Does physical presence…
In my 7th grade Reading Language Arts class, I will be teaching Brown Girl Dreaming this year. In the memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, Black author Jacqueline Woodson details her experience growing up in two places: South Carolina and New York and coming of age in the peak of the Civil Rights movement. Woodson’s memoir is…
In many cultures, particularly Native American and West African, it is understood that a woman’s cycle is deeply interconnected with the water and the moon. For example, in the West African Yoruba religion, Yemoja is goddess who is associated with the moon, rivers, and motherhood. The goddess, Oshun, patron saint of the Osun river in…
When readers pick up Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, we are immediately confronted with claim that she has “too much of the South in her.” Even on this back cover, however, there is a tension between what that means in terms of physical location and spiritual connection. The book summarizes “Indigo, the youngest, is still a…
In the Part 2 of “Leaving Atlanta” Jones writes us a second person narrator who is has intimate insight into Rodney’s interior thoughts and feelings. It would seem on face value that this is an omniscient narrator, but the narrator only knows Rodney. The narrator is centered around Rodney and never provides that kind of…
“”Shh…” said Mama. “I know. you don’t have to talk about it.” She rocked [Daddy] like a grumpy baby. “Mama, let him say it,” Tasha whispered. Only words can undo words. Kids say that to take something back you have to say it backward. Like a filmstrip run the wrong way. Die you hope I.…
Walker illustrates the experience of Black Americans as a kind of motherless children, to quote the jazz standard, who live as second class citizens in America, but are also rejected by the people of their home continent. In a letter to Celie, Nettie describes in near reverent terms: “try to imagine,” she tells her sister,…
After reading and watching “The Color Purple” I thought it would be interesting to look into the context of the book and movie. In my preliminary research, I found a really helpful starting place on Sparknotes which provided basic background info on author Alice Walker. If you are interested in a quick read, I recommend…