When A Southern Town Broke A Heart By Jacqueline Woodson

MY BOOK PROJECT I read the book “My brother Sam is dead” that was wrote by the Author James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier. It is a Historical Fiction book wrote during the American Revolutionary war. This book is about a boy named Timothy Meeker that lived in Connecticut. Tim's father is a Loyalist at great Britain but Sam (Tim’s older teenage brother) came home from Yale and announced that he joined the Continental Army to fight against the British. His Father was outraged and yelled and fought with him like they normally did and Sam ran away and hid in a little hut for a little while.

Art is a form of expressing the inner feelings, emotions, and imaginations. Artists such as James McDougal Hart and Mattie Luo O’Kelley delivered strong messages and relived memories of the past through their artworks. Mattie O’Kelley is an American, folk artist who painted the Yardsale in 1979. Much like her other works, it portrays a busy country scene from her early life in rural Georgia. James McDougal Hart is another landscape artist and a Scottish-born American cattle painter.

The main character is completely changed by the places he visits. His time in his small-town home shapes his adult life very obviously. The residents are stereotypical small-town inhabitants, out of place if the story was set in the city or suburbs. More importantly, however, is the time. The author acknowledges this several times throughout the novel, writing passages like "…but this was far less common in those days than it is now.

Both living and dying are both parts of life. In the healthcare field, death can not always be prevented. In Living and Dying in Brick City by Sampson Davis, MD, Sampson. Davis takes the reader to a journey that Davis has experienced.

In the story, When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, Jacqueline Woodson uses a variety of symbolism and metaphor to show that when you get wiser, your perception of things change. One example of Woodson conveying this theme is when she writes, “When the deep green beauty revealed my place and time in history and laid claim to that moment all children know, when the tendrils of adulthood move toward us, showing themselves long before we are ready to see.” This quote describes when she realized the nostalgia of her home was masking the bitter and unfortunate side that “adulthood” is showing her. This directly relates to the theme because as she becomes wiser and more experienced, (the tendrils of adulthood) her perception changes. (showing themselves long before we are ready to see.)

Although she is young, she can comprehend the financial state of her family and the instability they live with. Moody watches her father start gambling, pick up with a new woman and leave her mother, who she calls Mama. As a result, Moody’s family is left traveling to relatives, attempting to scrape up any work Mama can find. They eventually settle near Centreville, Mississippi. At this point in Moody’s growth, her African-American identity is not on her mind.

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).

Home and Belonging When the theme “home and belonging” is present in a novel, characters are developing a positive sense of who they are, and trying to feel that they are respected as a part of their family, in addition to their community. Harper Lee’s recently released novel, Go Set A Watchman, portrays Jean Louise’s homecoming to Maycomb after her being away for a considerable amount of time, so the idea of home and belonging is a vital one. The majority of the plot in the beginning of the story contains flashbacks to Jean Louise’s past, where, as she was growing up, Jean Louise felt out of place in Maycomb.

Instead, she realized she was living in a town more flawed than expected, with many racist people. At the end, Woodson no longer feels secure in a town that used to be the safest place possible. By observing how her character changes over the course of the plot, it seems evident that Woodson is trying to convey to the reader that when growing up, one becomes aware of new things that used to be hidden from them. One example in the story happens when Woodson is nine and beginning to see Greenville as not an amazing and sheltered place, but more of an unsafe town. “The summer I was nine years old, the town I had always loved morphed into a beautifully heartbreaking and complicated place” (pg.1).

Anne Moody’s autobiography “Coming of Age in Mississippi” describes different sections of her life stretching from childhood to a student in college. From the time she was four years old, she experienced racism and discrimination. She thrived through these situations and allowed it to mold her into the civil rights activist that she became. Childhood, High School, College, and The Movement all contain vital events in Moody’s life. Anne Moody, despite going to school, and doing exceptionally well in her academics, had to work to help support her family.

Frequently in life, it is said that the harmony and relationship between positive and negative must coexist in every situation. To Kill A Mockingbird, a novel written by Harper Lee, tells the story of a young girl, Scout, and her brother Jem, as they grow up in a segregated American south. Their critical coming of age lesson can be seen in the children’s experiences with Mrs. Dubose, an angry, insulting woman who is later revealed as a courageous figure that battles her morphine addiction by her own means. In chapter eleven of To Kill A Mockingbird, Jem acts out against Mrs. Dubose in defense of his father and family through destroying her prized, beautiful camellia bushes. As punishment, Jem’s father Atticus condemns Jem to read to Mrs. Dubose

According to the story Kindred by Octavia Butler during the antebellum South, the slaves were treated very badly such as being forced to work for the white people. According to the story of Camp 14 in the 60 Minutes video, the prisoners were treated harshly as well. But they were not like the slaves because they were prisoners and they only worked for the government (camp). The slaves and prisoners both tried to escape from where they were at.

Her experience is necessary for her determining who she is and what she hopes to get out of life. Also, her exile precedes her nephew, Milkman's,

The life she has between her child and husband is different than the one with her mother, father and brother. She says her husband doesn’t understand anything that goes on in her family. For example, she says “Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.” (Didion 2) So

Beyond the Walk to Natchez A historical great piece of literary art, “A Worn Path” published in 1941, is a story of an old woman’s journey to town through the forest. The setting is rural Mississippi in the 1940’s, a time when racism was a way of life and a trip to town, especially for an old black woman, was often a long journey and thus a trip not often taken. The old woman’s name is Phoenix Jackson and she has quite an adventurous trip through the forest to town. One is made to believe this is just an average walk down the path for this old woman; however the reader is entertained by Phoenix’s mannerisms and realizes there is deeper meaning of the story.