The First Part Last, By Angela Johnson

Most people wake up and never think about being murdered by someone they once loved. Tracy Allen most likely thought the same way until one fatal night Garland Allen, her ex-husband and the father of her two children, took her life. In this episode of Cold Justice, Kelly Siegler and Yolanda McClary uncover how the crime was solved, the typology of the crime and the motivation for the crime. As Wolf (2014) wrote in the episode, on May 18, 2001 in Altus, Oklahoma was the last time anyone saw or heard from 27-year-old Tracy Allen.

Imagine walking down an empty, gloomy street deserted of people, engulfed with death, tingling with the sorrow for lost loved ones, and blanketed with the feeling of uneasiness and fear. Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson describes this world that the protagonist, Matilda Cook, a fourteen-year-old, lives in during the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia. The book outlines her life and how her personality and feelings dramatically change during the few months of the fever. Towards the beginning of the book, she is lazy and does not enjoy working, but in a few months when the fever turns her life upside-down, she has to mature and work extremely hard to survive.

Your mother is stranded,your town has become a ghost town and pestilence is roaming . In 1793 the state of Philadelphia battled against a deadly enemy,deadly yellow fever . It took the lives of 5,000 citizens . Matilda’s story may have been fiction however for many people this was very real . In the novel “Fever 1793” by Laurie halse Anderson, Matilda finds herself struggling with the fever.

The story of The Glass Castle takes you on a journey through childhood from the point of Jeanette Wells. Jeanette lived through a lot of incidents that can be tied into social psychology and how people react to the situations they are put into. While we may not relate to her life of moving and extreme poverty, we can boil down her life situations into concepts that everyone can relate to and has been through. The Glass Castle starts with Jeannette as an adult witnessing her mother rooting through a dumpster in New York City.

Another symbolic object representing Bobby's coming of age is his basketball. When K-Boy asks Bobby to play basketball in the park he almost makes it around the corner but realizes he forgot his child. Bobby runs back to the house and drops everything. "I lay my basketball down and it rolled out the door into the hall toward Mary's room.

In a person’s childhood, most of their major decisions that they are faced with in life are made by their parents or guardians. Parents make the decisions for them because they want the best for their children, and want them to have a good chance to survive in the real world when they reach adulthood. After childhood however, they must make decisions for themselves, which will eventually lead them towards their dreams or the life their parents were afraid of. In the book The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore, the decisions that were made for the author Wes Moore, led him away from living the life of a criminal, to living the life of a very successful man. In his life, Wes’s mom (Joy) made most of the important decisions that led him to success.

Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi takes place during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. During this period of time African Americans did not have much say in society. Most African Americans acted as if they were deaf and blind puppets that had no reaction to anything that the White man said or did due to fear. Anne Moody, takes the reader through her personal journey, enduring extreme poverty growing up to joining the Civil Rights Movement where she found “something outside [herself] that gave [her] meaning to life”  (Moody 286).

Your dreams dying, your activities fading, and your friendships, all rollaway for a little face that will change your life forever. "I layed down my basketball and it rolled out the door into the hall toward Mary 's room"(Johnson page 23). Bobby has to give up his dreams, his actives, and his friends every time they want to go play basketball. Bobby 's life is going to change and with that he is going to have to change too.

Life has changed so much since the times of witch trials that it is difficult to believe they are real. The writings of Mary Easty and Tituba are hard for me to take seriously because the stories and claims seem so outrageous to me. I found myself wondering how modern court trails, judges, and lawyers would handle these claims. I also wonder why some people volunteered as being guilty of witchcraft or even entertained the idea of being somehow involved in witchcraft. Tituba’s story really made me wonder why she said everything that she did.

Anne Moody wrote the autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi where it begins in 1944 highlighting the struggles of her childhood as it progresses to her adult life in 1964. Moody sought a different path than the rest of her family which led her to be apart of the civil right movement that occurred. Coming of age in Mississippi starts by introducing the narrator of the story, Essie Mae. She discusses her childhood where her father left their family for another woman, and her mother struggles providing for her family. Essie Mae had a traumatic experience in her time on the plantation to where in her adult life she was “still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr.Carter’s plantation.”

Bobby Phillips is an invisible boy until they find a cure for him. Bobby was scared in the beginning because he didn’t know what to do and he was plain scared he wouldn’t be normal again. Bobby’s personality to this is scared but chill at the same time because he’s not freaking out like he is screaming and that stuff he’s just like I need to find a way to fix me now. Bobby is determined to get himself back to normal because he is tired of hiding and going through all of the trouble In one part of the book where it was really scary was when his parents got in to a car crash.

In Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, she discusses the hardships that “negroes” faced during a time when segregation was prevalent. Anne Moody, or Essie Mae, as she was often referred to in the book, was a black rights activist. Certain events lead her to be such a strong advocate for African Americans. Her first memory of being separated from white people was at the movie theatre. Children were the last to see color, so they did not realize how sternly the segregation was enforced.

I read the book Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. This story is about a girl named Mattie who lives with her mother and grandfather. In their house they run a coffee shop that they all work at, Eliza is a women that is a good friend of the family who works at the shop and cleans the house. Everything is going good until the yellow fever comes to the little town they live in. Hundreds of people were dying every day.

Eric Bartels analyzes the difficulties of modern-day marriage in his article, “My Problem with Her Anger,” by examining his own marital experiences. By optimistic confrontation and resolution of his family’s problems, Bartels believes that not only will he save his marriage, but he will also be rewarded for his sacrifices (63). The author claims he realized the separation between men and women during his late night chores (57). To illuminate this separation, Bartels acknowledges that his wife contributes more to childcare than he does, but asserts that he tries to reduce as much of this pressure as he can through cooking, cleaning, and shopping (58). Despite the author’s attempts, he contends that his endeavors to decrease his wife’s stress

In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros reveals the importance of growing up in the main character, Esperanza, and her friends. Throughout the story Esperanza and her friends experience many parts of growing up whether from trying francy shoes to the understanding of the world around them to getting a job to earn money. First, In the vignette And Some More, Esperanza, her younger sister Nenny, and her friends Lucy and Rachel look up to the sky and observe the clouds. In this vignette you can see the age difference of Esperanza and her friends to Nenny, this is shown when Esperanza says, “That’s cumulus too.