post 5: theme (Natalia)

Theme: The theme in the book is mostly about the irrationally of racism.

[31- 33]

We came to Sylvan on the worst side of town. Old houses set up on cinder blocks. Fans wedged in the windows. Dirt yards. Women in pink curlers. Collarless dogs.

After a few blocks we approached the Esso station on the corner of West Market and Park Street,generally reorganized as a catchall place for men with too much time on their hands.

I noticed that not a single car was getting gas. Three men sat in deinette chairs beside the garage with a piece of plywood balanced on their knees. They were playing cards.

"Hit me," one of them said,and the dealer ,who wore a Seed and Feed cap,slapped a card down in front of him. He looked up and saw us, Rosaleen fanning and shuffling, swaying side to side. "Well look what we got coming here,"he called out. "Where're you going, ni***?"

Firecrackers made a spattering sound in the distance. "Keep walking," I whispered. "Don't pay any attention."

But Rosaleen, who had less sense than I'd dreamed, said in this tone like she was explaining something real hard to a kindergarten student, "I'm going to register my name so I can vote, thats what."

"We should hurry on," I said, but she kept walking at her own slow pace.

The man next to the dealer, with hair combed straight back, put down his cards and said "Did you hear that? We got ourselves a model citezen."
I heard a slow song of wind drift ever so slightly in the street behind us and move along the gutter. We walked, and men pushed back their makeshift table and came right down to the curb to wait for us, like they were spectors at a parade and we were the prize float
"Did you ever see one that black?" said the dealer. And the man with his combed black hair said, "No, and I aint seen one that big either."
Naturally the third man felt obliged to say something, so he looked at Rosaleen sashaying along unperturbed, holding her white-lady fan,and he said, "Where'd you get that fan, ni***?" "Stole it from church," she said. Just like that.
I had gone once in a raft down the Chattooga River with my church group, and the same feeling came to me now of being lifeted by currents, by a swirl of events I couldn't reverse.
Coming alongside the men, Rosaleen lifted her snuff jug, which was filled with black spirit, and calmy poured it across the tops of the men's shoes, moving her hand in little loops like she was writing her name Rosaleen Daise just the way she'd practiced.
For a second they stared down the juice, dribbled like car oil across their shoes. They blinked, trying to make it register. When they looked up, I watched their faces go from suprise to anger,then outright fury. They lunged at her, and everything started to spin. Therewas Rosaleen, grabbed and thrashing side to side, swinging the men like pocketbooks on her arms, and the me yeliing for her to apoligize and clean their shoes.
"Clean it off!" Thats all I could hear, over and over. And then the cry of birds overherd, sharp as needles, sweeping from lowbough trees, stirring up the scent of pine, and even then I knew I would recoil all my life from the smell of it.
"Call the police," yelled the dealer to a man inside. by then Rosaleen lay sprawled on the groound, pinned twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye. It curved under her chin the way tears do.
When the policeman got there, he said we had to get into the back of his car. "You're under arrest", he told Rosaleen. "Assult,theft and disturbing the peace." Then he said to me, "When we get down to the station, I'll call your daddy and let him deal with you."
Rosaleen climbed in, sliding over on the seat. I moved after her, sliding as she slid, sitting as she sat.
The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small aound like that could fall across the whole world.


This passage explains how African American people were treated, that they werent allowed to register to vote.The white people would beat up the African Americans just to register. I chose this passage as the theme of the story because the book is about the irrationally of racism and how it affects the town that Lilly lives in. The significance is that this is the passage were Rosaleen gets treated unfairly.