1. 500-600 words; 5-paragraph structure (can have more than five).
2. Your idea about the story itself\u2014the value of the story (at least a paragraph)
3. How it applies to life in general (at least a paragraph)
4. How it applies to you. \u00a0Write about an item that is important to you, one that has been passed down to you or one that you hope will be or an item that you have that you will plan to pass down to someone (at least a paragraph). .
5. Be sure to supply
a. A parenthetical reference
b. A Works Cited
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.
Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that \u201cno\u201d is a word the world never learned to say to her.
You\u2019ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has \u201cmade it\u201d is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other\u2019s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft.seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.
In real life I am a large, big.boned woman with rough, man.working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls dur.ing the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head fumed in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.
\u201cHow do I look, Mama?\u201d Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she\u2019s there, almost hidden by the door.
\u201cCome out into the yard,\u201d I say.
Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She\u2019s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie\u2019s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red.hot brick chimney. Why don\u2019t you do a dance around the ashes? I\u2019d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.
I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks\u2019 habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make.believe, burned us with a lot of knowl edge we didn\u2019t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serf\u2019 ous way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her grad.uation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she\u2019d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.
I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don\u2019t ask my why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good.naturedly but can\u2019t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I\u2019ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man\u2019s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in \u201949. Cows are soothing and slow and don\u2019t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don\u2019t make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we \u201cchoose\u201d to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, \u201cMama, when did Dee ever have any friends?\u201d
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well.turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in Iye. She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn\u2019t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.
When she comes I will meet\u2014but there they are!
Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. \u201cCome back here, \u201d I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.
It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat.looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. \u201cUhnnnh, \u201d is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. \u201cUhnnnh.\u201d
Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoul.ders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go \u201cUhnnnh\u201d again. It is her sister\u2019s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.
\u201cWa.su.zo.Tean.o!\u201d she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with \u201cAsalamalakim, my mother and sister!\u201d He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.
\u201cDon\u2019t get up,\u201d says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without mak\u2019 ing sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead.
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie\u2019s hand. Maggie\u2019s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don\u2019t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.
\u201cWell,\u201d I say. \u201cDee.\u201d
\u201cNo, Mama,\u201d she says. \u201cNot \u2018Dee,\u2019 Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!\u201d
\u201cWhat happened to \u2018Dee\u2019?\u201d I wanted to know.
\u201cShe\u2019s dead,\u201d Wangero said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.\u201d
\u201cYou know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,\u201d I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her \u201cBig Dee\u201d after Dee was born.
\u201cBut who was she named after?\u201d asked Wangero.
\u201cI guess after Grandma Dee,\u201d I said.
\u201cAnd who was she named after?\u201d asked Wangero.
\u201cHer mother,\u201d I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. \u201cThat\u2019s about as far back as I can trace it,\u201d I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.
\u201cWell,\u201d said Asalamalakim, \u201cthere you are.\u201d
\u201cUhnnnh,\u201d I heard Maggie say.
\u201cThere I was not,\u201d I said, \u201cbefore \u2018Dicie\u2019 cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?\u201d
He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.
\u201cHow do you pronounce this name?\u201d I asked.
\u201cYou don\u2019t have to call me by it if you don\u2019t want to,\u201d said Wangero.
\u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t 1?\u201d I asked. \u201cIf that\u2019s what you want us to call you, we\u2019ll call you.\u201d
.
\u201cI know it might sound awkward at first,\u201d said Wangero.
\u201cI\u2019ll get used to it,\u201d I said. \u201cReam it out again.\u201d
Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim.a.barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn\u2019t really think he was, so I didn\u2019t ask.
\u201cYou must belong to those beef.cattle peoples down the road,\u201d I said. They said \u201cAsalamalakim\u201d when they met you, too, but they didn\u2019t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt.lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.
Hakim.a.barber said, \u201cI accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.\u201d (They didn\u2019t tell me, and I didn\u2019t ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.)
We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn\u2019t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and com bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn\u2019t effort to buy chairs.
\u201cOh, Mama!\u201d she cried. Then turned to Hakim.a.barber. \u201cI never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,\u201d she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee\u2019s butter dish. \u201cThat\u2019s it!\u201d she said. \u201cI knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.\u201d She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it crabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.
\u201cThis churn top is what I need,\u201d she said. \u201cDidn\u2019t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?\u201d
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.
\u201cUn huh,\u201d she said happily. \u201cAnd I want the dasher, too.\u201d
\u201cUncle Buddy whittle that, too?\u201d asked the barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.
\u201cAunt Dee\u2019s first husband whittled the dash,\u201d said Maggie so low you almost couldn\u2019t hear her. \u201cHis name was Henry, but they called him Stash.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaggie\u2019s brain is like an elephant\u2019s,\u201d Wangero said, laughing. \u201cI can use the chute top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,\u201d she said, sliding a plate over the chute, \u201cand I\u2019ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.\u201d
When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn\u2019t even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt ftames on the ftont porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Stat pattetn. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had wotn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jattell\u2019s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra\u2019s unifotm that he wore in the Civil War.
\u201cMama,\u201d Wangro said sweet as a bird. \u201cCan I have these old quilts?\u201d
I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.
\u201cWhy don\u2019t you take one or two of the others?\u201d I asked. \u201cThese old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.\u201d
\u201cNo,\u201d said Wangero. \u201cI don\u2019t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.\u201d
\u201cThat\u2019ll make them last better,\u201d I said.
\u201cThat\u2019s not the point,\u201d said Wangero. \u201cThese are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imag\u2019 ine!\u201d She held the quilts securely in her atms, stroking them.
\u201cSome of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come ftom old clothes her mother handed down to her,\u201d I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that I couldn\u2019t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.
\u201cImagine!\u201d she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.
\u201cThe ttuth is,\u201d I said, \u201cI promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she matties John Thomas.\u201d
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
\u201cMaggie can\u2019t appreciate these quilts!\u201d she said. \u201cShe\u2019d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI reckon she would,\u201d I said. \u201cGod knows I been saving \u2019em for long enough with nobody using \u2019em. I hope she will!\u201d I didn\u2019t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were old~fashioned, out of style.
\u201cBut they\u2019re priceless!\u201d she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. \u201cMaggie would put them on the bed and in five years they\u2019d be in rags. Less than that!\u201d
\u201cShe can always make some more,\u201d I said. \u201cMaggie knows how to quilt.\u201d
Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. \u201cYou just will not under.stand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!\u201d
\u201cWell,\u201d I said, stumped. \u201cWhat would you do with them7\u201d
\u201cHang them,\u201d she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.
\u201cShe can have them, Mama,\u201d she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. \u201cI can \u2018member Grandma Dee without the quilts.\u201d
I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn\u2019t mad at her. This was Maggie\u2019s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.
When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I\u2019m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did some.thing I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero\u2019s hands and dumped them into Maggie\u2019s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
\u201cTake one or two of the others,\u201d I said to Dee.
But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim~a~barber.
\u201cYou just don\u2019t understand,\u201d she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.
\u201cWhat don\u2019t I understand?\u201d I wanted to know.
\u201cYour heritage,\u201d she said, And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, \u201cYou ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It\u2019s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you\u2019d never know it.\u201d
She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and chin.
Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.<\/p>\n
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Sometimes I dream a dream Top Premier Essays.
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\u201c\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. 500-600 words; 5-paragraph structure (can have more than five). 2. Your idea about the story itself\u2014the value of the story (at least a paragraph) 3. How it applies to life in general (at least a paragraph) 4. How it applies to you. \u00a0Write about an item that is important to you, one that has … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academicwritersbay.com\/answers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}