Sandra K. Friday
Throughout the novel Ellen narrates two stories side by side, the story of her daunting past, trying to survive her dysfunctional family, and the story of her present where she lives in comfort with her new mama whom, she tells us, "I looked over plenty good before I decided she was a keeper" (Gibbons 95). Gibbons crafts this juxtaposition of Ellen's past and present to great advantage. Ellen's perspective and description of things she values in her present family serves to give the reader insight into the nightmare that was her past family.
My students will mark and discuss and then compare and contrast Gibbons' first juxtaposition of Ellen's past and present because it is a key element in the way the novel is crafted. Once they are alerted to the technique, they will begin to observe how one plays off of the other; much of what Ellen tells us about her present home with her new mama is in stark contrast to life as she knew it in the past.
Ellen begins her narration with a rather startling revelation:
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When I was little I would think up ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this
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or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. The way I liked best
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was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead
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and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the
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rescue . . (Gibbons 1).
My students will have their own books and will mark and discuss the whole paragraph, not just the first lines. As they work their way through the six steps, there are probably no words they will not know, but there will be plenty to circle and make notes in the margins; for example, Ellen obviously played her father's death over and over in her head, even down to her body language when she finds him dead, and when the rescue squad comes. "I would shudder to find him so." "When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock . . . I stand by the door and look like I'm shaking all over." How bad does one's daddy have to be for a child to think up multiple ways to kill him when one is little?
Ellen also introduces in this paragraph about her death-plan for her daddy that the rescue squad is "two colored boys heaving her dead daddy onto a roller cot." And as a result of there being "colored boys," she says she will not know how to act. Some students will pick up on her describing them as "colored" and "boys" and her reaction. Students will want to consider how significant this information is since Ellen has chosen to include it. She does not say simply that the rescue squad comes and throws her daddy onto a cot.
She wraps up this first half-page scenario by saying that her daddy "drank his own self to death, and "I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive."
Her very next sentence introduces the reader to her present life:
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I live in a clean brick house and mostly I am left to myself. When I start to carry an
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odor I take a bath and folks tell me how sweet I look. There is plenty to eat here
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and if we run out of something we just go to the store and get some more. I had me
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a egg sandwich for breakfast, mayonnaise on both sides. And I may fix me another
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one for lunch (Gibbons 2).
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Again, because my students will have their own books, they will include the next few sentences in their close reading activity. Ellen confides that "Two years ago I did not have much of anything. Not that I live in the lap of luxury now, but I am proud for the schoolbus to pick me up here every morning. . . ."
Some students may also pick up on and question her dialect: "He drank his own self to death." "I had me a egg sandwich . . . I may fix me another one . . ." At one point when Ellen is forced by law to live with her mama's mama, she tells us that she has practically stopped going to school. Students will gradually come to discover that the challenges she faces and the role models she has had in what is at least a rural, if not a backwoods, southern setting make her substandard grammar rather incidental.
Students will close read each of these passages that Ellen narrates to introduce herself, and then put them side-by-side to play off of one another. They will be able to discern the words and phrases she uses set a clear tone in each passage. We will do this compare/contrast activity as a class because it is their first reading of the novel.
