“Pick it up,” she ordered.
“No!” defied Little Man.
“No? I’ll give you ten seconds to pick up that book, boy, or I’m going to get my switch.”
Little man bit his lower lip, and I knew he was not going to pick up the book.
Little Man is very intelligent for his age as he was able to read even before he began his school tuition:
She regarded me impatiently, but did not look at the book.
“Now how could he know what it says? He can’t read.”
“Yes’m, he can. He been reading since he was four.
He can’t read all them big words but he can read them
Columns…”
Little man is very naive to the racial intolerance of the white people and has yet to understand the reasons for the dislike between both sides in society:
“How’s come they didn’t stop for us?”
“‘Cause they like to see us run and it ain’t our bus,”
Stacey said, balling his fists and jamming them tightly
into his pockets.
“Well, Where’s our bus?” demanded Little Man.
“We ain’t got one.” “Well, why not?”
Cassie, Little Mans older and only sister is also our protagonist. She is portrayed as a very strong character. The author gives us the impression that she is a tomboy. However, this is not surprising as she is raised in a home where she is surrounded by other males i.e. her brothers:
I hated the dress. And the shoes. There was little I could
do in a dress, and as for shoes, they imprisoned freedom
-loving feet accustomed to the feel of the warm earth.
Cassie is a very strong-minded individual. She is very confident and outgoing and is not going to let any one walk all over her:
“You can’t sit here,” objected Gracey. “I’m saving it for
Mary Lou.”
I glanced back at Mary Lou Wellever depositing her
Lunch pail on a shelf in the back of the room and said,
“Not any more you ain’t.”
Cassie is definitely her own person. She is very individual and is determined not to be told what to do by any other person or be like any other person:
“YES’M, MIZ CROCKER,” the children chorused.
But I remained silent. I never did approve of group
responses.
Cassie always seems to look on the bright side of things. Her personality expresses great optimism:
Although being eyeball to eyeball with miss Crocker
was nothing to look forward to, the prospect of being
warm once the cold weather set in was nothing to be
sneezed at either, …
Cassie is very loyal to her brothers she shows great strength when she has to choose between being selfish and being loyal.
I was on the verge of blurting out the awful truth
about the bus and the men in the night, but then I
remembered the pact Stacey had made us all swear
to when I had told him.
Christopher-John, Cassie’s other younger brother, is a bit less witty and courageous than his siblings. He is a rather pudgy character and is less outgoing and single minded than the rest of his family. He is prepared to sit back and accept things as they are rather than go and put things right:
“But we all wanted to do it,” I comforted.
“Not me!” denied Christopher-John.
“All I wanted to do was eat my lunch!”
Stacey the oldest child but still only thirteen, is the main male role model in the Logan household, prior to the arrival of Mr Morrison. Stacey feels responsible for his younger brothers and sister and feels the need to protect them:
Stacey glowered at T.J. a moment longer, then walked
swiftly to Little Man and put his long arm around his
shoulders saying softly,
“Come on, Man. It ain’t gonna happen no more, least
not for a long while. I promise you that.”
Stacey is not only loyal to his family but also loyal to his friends. When he is faced with the decision to either be truthful to his mother or face a punishment as a result of being loyal to T.J. he chooses loyalty and therefore suffers the consequences. The society the children live in forces them to mature much more rapidly than in our society. Stacey is very mature and he is well aware of the differences between right and wrong:
Despite any effort to persuade Stacey otherwise,
when Mama came home he confessed that he had
been fighting T.J. at the Wallace store and that Mr
Morrison had stopped it. He stood awkwardly
before her, disclosing only those things he could
honourably mention.
T.J. is Stacey’s best friend. He is very self-centred and is loyal to no one except himself. He seems to have no conscience and is very sly:
“…At first T.J. wouldn’t do it, but then he seen Miz Logan
startin’ toward ‘em and he slipped Stacey the notes…”
Jeremy is an exception to the rule. He is a white boy but he disobeys his parents and continues to socialise with the black children. This even surprises the Logan children:
I’t was only then that I realized that Jeremy never
rode the bus, no matter how bad the weather.
To help us visualise the setting of the novel Mildred D. Taylor uses occasional light, evocative description. She uses just enough for us to understand the image she is trying to portray without using too much which could cause us to loose interest. These short paragraphs of description are very effective, as she does not tell us directly what the scene is like but through similes and metaphors:
Before us the narrow, sun-splotched road wound
like a lazy red serpent dividing the high forest
bank of quiet, old trees on the left from the cotton
field, forested by giant green and purple stalks,
on the right.
The Difference between the Great Faith school for black students and the Jefferson Davis school for white students is acute.
The Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School…was a dismal end to an hour’s journey. Consisting of four weather beaten wooden houses on stilts of brick, 320 students, 7 teachers, a principal, a caretaker, and the caretakers cow, which kept the wide crab grass lawn sufficiently clipped in Spring and Summer.
Jefferson Davis County School, a long white wooden building looming in the distance. Behind the building was a wide sports field around which were scattered rows of tiered gray-looking benches.
The Jefferson Davis School for White Students gives an image of wealth and prosperity in comparison to the Great Faith school for Black students.
The Logan Household is warm and inviting. The features shown in the house show that the Logan family were very skilful people. They seem to be a lot wealthier than other black people at this time:
The furniture, a mixture of Logan-crafted walnut and oak, included a walnut bed whose ornate headboard rose halfway up the wall to meet the high ceiling…
The theme of this novel is racism and discrimination towards the black people at this time. There are many occasions in the first four chapters alone which express this racism. The most white people feel they are superior to black people in every way. They feel that if a black person steps out of line by doing the slightest thing they have the right to punish or even murder them. They seem to have no hesitation about taking the life of a black person as they feel black people are there to be taken advantage of
Something as simple as saying something offensive to a white man:
Mr Barnette says, “you callin’ me a liar, boy?”
And Mr Tatum says, “Yessuh, I guess I is!”
Could end up with a black man being severely punished by a gang of white night men:
“Tarred and feathered him!” T.J. announced hastily.
“Poured the blackest tar they could find all over him,
and plastered him with chicken feathers.”
The children cannot understand why the white and blacks are separated; however they are forced to understand as a matter of life and death. They are robbed of their childhood innocence long before they should be due to the dangers they would face if they stepped out of line.
The author is also trying to put across the message that because of the discrimination towards the black people they live in extreme poverty. The Logans are better off than most black families as they own land, however they need money so badly that the father is forced to work away from home on the railroads for money. The schools are given books for the first time however, they are not the long awaited books they were hoping for, but torn worthless books which were no use to them.
In concluding, Mildred D. Taylor has successfully portrayed the hardships the black population of the southern states of America, had to endure in the early 1930’s. In the first four introductory chapters, she set the scene using descriptive tactics. She introduced us to most of the main characters and told us a bit about their physical appearance and their personality. And she most importantly explained to us the difficulties the Logan family and generally, all black families faced, due to their race and how unfair society was towards them. We learn how white people took the law onto themselves, carrying out vindictive murders at the drop of the hat. Even in the first four chapters, Mildred D. Taylor has evoked sympathy for the black people.
By Emma-Jane Reilly 11E Mr Devlin!
