The fact was that I had left home in September gleeful and smug. I took it as divine justice that now I felt as if I no loner belonged anywhere (100).
I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naivety. HP were probably what they'd meant by fine—for black scholarship kids, Maybe that's what they'd been saying all along, only I hadn't heard it (87).
"...but I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like, different..." (86).
It couldn't be just that I was to become like them or hang onto what I'd been. It couldn't be that lonely and pointless (86).
"You don't know them, and believe me, they could just be waiting for you to make a mistake. Do you hear me? Don't you go running to those people" (40).
I looked at Ruthie hard and tried to judge whether or not I could trust her. All I could see as I looked at her, however, were her snow boots. She always had the appropriate footwear, I thought, conscious of my wet feet. Ruthie tossed her cornsilk hair...
"Listen, Ruthie. My friend is here. He'll be here, at school, in minutes." (105)
I thought I loved this muscular young man with the sparkling smile. I could not understand why I was relieved to see him go, or why his ardent letters embarrassed me (112).
That, I thought, was real stealing, done, no doubt, by some rich kleptomaniac, the same one who had probably eaten my cheese and crackers the week before (113).
Well, you probably didn't see much of this coming (besides Jaliwa who read Chapter 5 already). Lorene is a mess. "Everywhere I felt out of place." Her ambitions are being reduced as she struggles through her classes. The girls ask her about black men's masculinity ("the old song of the South" [84]). Can she trust the well-to-do white kids? Does she listen to her mother who urges her not to trust them? She's raped by her beautiful boyfriend Ricky. She begins to steal from her classmates.
She tells no one what is happening with her. And what is happening to her is something terrible.
So what's going on with Lorene? Why not reveal herself? Why not reach out? Why not hit Ricky? Why not tell her girlfriends at school the way their questions make her feel? And how much of what is going on with her can be laid at the feet of St. Paul's School, which she makes fun of to her hometown friends, but where she can hang with the pimply young white science kids on the Astronomy Club and laugh—away from her "cooler friends" (103)?
Write an answer of the usual length, okay? And quote 2-3 times in your response. And feel free to respond to your classmates: agree, disagree, question. See you all tomorrow.
First, I think Lorene is like any teenager. During these years, the cliché is that you care what people think, you want to have good social standing, and you're not yet sure of who you are or what you want. However, I think that Lorene is dealing with more than just the usual teenage issues, yet thoughts of social standing do play into her decisions. It is difficult to call out her friends on the questionable statements they make because she wants them to like her. And as her dream shows us, she doesn't trust them. The dream is at first joyful: "bears held paws and danced around me in a circle. We sang together. They protected me and adored me" (81). This could apply to more than just her peers, but I think it definitely can be connected her peers. They like her, but they also commodify her because she is different than them, but then at the same time they refuse to grapple with their differences. Next, the dream turns dark: "they began to leer and sneer. Their eyes shone with malice. they closed in about me" (81). This shows Lorene's fears. She cannot trust these 'friends' because they may like her for the wrong reasons or like her without understanding her, and they can turn on her at any moment. They are in greater numbers than her, so she can do nothing to stop them. When the bears close in, she says "I knew [it] would happen, the foreknowledge lending betrayal to their song" (81). Lorene has an innate distrust of those around her, and calling her friends out could cause them to turn against her. Also, calling them out would reveal something about Lorene. As the bears close in, Lorene is "naked" (81). By revealing that something offends her, or by saying something too controversial, she makes herself vulnerable, and she seems to be afraid of that.
ReplyDeleteShe is afraid of how everyone will perceive her if she says how she really feels. Even her friends back home might judge her for how she has been altered by the school. And she still doesn't realize that anybody else could be feeling this way, so it may be hard to open up because she thinks nobody will relate.
At the same time, she cannot admit some of her feelings and experiences because she views them as failures. When she thinks of the "sex debacle" she is "overwhelmed with shame" (114). She feels an enormous pressure to do well for her community, so if she acknowledges that things are going wrong, then she will feel like she is not succeeding and possibly failing her community. She might feel undeserving of what she has.
I believe that Lorene has bottled up so many of her emotions and experiences because she feels that if she reveals her struggles and her mistakes to the St. Paul's community, they will use it as an opportunity to justify their racial prejudice. She says, when talking about Janie Saunders, that she “suspected as I always did that she mistook my skin for attributes of character” (113), suggesting that she always conscious of the way people perceive the confluence of her identity and her race. If she lets slip that she let Ricky sleep in the same bed as her, and then was raped, how would that reflect on her? How would that also reflect on black masculinity? She's been defensive about black masculinity before: “Black manhood seemed at stake. Everything seemed at stake” (84). I believe that she feels as though she needs to disprove the white people that believe she's going to be a stereotype, or atleast the white people she thinks that believe she's going to be like other black people just because of her race. She says so earlier : “I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naivete. Hps were probably what they'd meant by fine—for black scholarship kids” (87). Its not enough just to have good grades, she needs to have a perfect life—to appear as though she has a beautiful and loving boyfriend who sends her letters, that she is a spotless Student Council member, and she is an agreeable and popular girl. In her quest for perfection she even ends up creeping around other girls' rooms, trying on their shoes as if she was them. She lusts after their power and strives for it, so she can't compromise it by revealing her mistakes and failures.
ReplyDeleteI think Lorene is in a very though position. She's at a school where she feels different and not in that teenage “I don't fit in” way. She is one of the few people of color at St. Paul's and she feels this sense of pressure and responsibility to her whole race. The way she sees it (and is not all in her head), she has to be perfect in every aspect of life in order to have the respect of her peers and teachers. Unlike her white peers, she is seen as less than and unqualified to be there so she has to work twice as hard just to be at the same position they started at. She even wondered if “anyone here had ever expected me to do better than this” (87) when talking about her warning grades. She wasn't there just to be an average student she went to St. Paul's to “turn it out” (85) because it had to mean something “…after Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s assassinations, we kids sweated together in sports, ate together at Seated Meal, studied and talked together at night. It couldn't be just that I was to become like them or hang onto what I'd been. It couldn't be that lonely and pointless” (84).
ReplyDeleteThis obviously makes her feel that perfection is what she's at St.Paul's for because otherwise she's wasting an opportunity that another kid could use. These feelings are not something that the white kids at St.Paul's feel because they don't have to disprove stereotypes or prove themselves to their peers and teachers. They had no doubt that they “deserved our good fortune” (83), “they took it as their due” (83). Constantly feeling like she has to be perfect, Lorene keeps her struggles both school related and social inside. She feels like she can't let anything that goes wrong for her slip out of her mouth –not even the fact that she was raped because she was the one who snuck him in and slept in the same bed as him–. Failure or any sort of screw up was not something she wanted to share because “everything seemed at stake” (84). To her, her only choices were to fix it herself –like her grades– or to just deal with it by herself – like her rape–.
Many teenagers are self-contained. Sometimes it’s easier to try dealing with thoughts and feelings on your own rather than communicating - this is exactly what Lorene is doing. She’s experiencing a lot of very difficult and traumatic things, and she’s opting for working it out herself because she feels discussing it will alienate her even further - she already feels out of place, and she’s afraid of exacerbating that. Perhaps worse, she seems to believe that her previous joy is now being atoned for by this feeling, “The fact was that I had left home in September gleeful and smug. I took it as divine justice that now I felt as if I no longer belonged anywhere,” p100. She is motivated and capable; disappointed with her own grades, she states, “I returned to St. Paul’s that winter with a definite agenda. I would earn at least straight honors. I would get myself elected to the Student Council if I had to make nice with every girl in my house,” p101. She signs up for six classes, pushes herself and succeeds - she knows that she is capable, and that makes it that much harder to admit that from time to time EVERYONE needs help. Foremost among her goals, Lorene came here to “turn it out”; she came here to succeed and to make a difference. Those goals are largely personal and, she thinks, must be achieved alone. Yet she ignores opportunities to do just that - rather than correct her classmates’ racist remarks, she thinks, “[my purpose] was not to run my ass ragged trying to wrench some honesty out of the most disingenuous of God’s people. I had come to St. Paul’s to turn it out,” p85. What better way to turn it out than to tackle issues case-by case, face-to-face with the transgressors - especially if those transgressors are your friends? Wasn’t that how her mother “turned it out,” arguing with the shopkeepers who wronged her? Lorene is smart and driven, and it is because of that that she can’t realize she needs help, and that there are things she doesn’t know how to deal with, or how to feel about. When Ricky visited, she was excited - she loved him, and he loved her, she thought - but when he attacked her, she was at a loss. She trusted this person, she loved this person - and she didn’t know how to feel about his assault. “We comforted each other in the awkward way of adolescents, each of us absorbed in ourselves, unable to console the other,” p108. He apologizes, and they try to make up, but neither is thinking about the other - and he never mentions it again, as though his apology made it all better. The next day, when she learns he has a child, she asks about the baby, about the mother - Ricky writes off the girl as a whore. Lorene is disturbed. Her understanding of their relationship shifts. “I thought I loved this muscular young man with the sparkling smile. I could not understand why I was relieved to see him go, or why his ardent letters embarrassed me,” 112. She doesn’t know how to feel about this - it’s completely new. Only later does she understand how much she hated him, only later does she understand that she wasn’t the only one feeling alone, only later does she know HOW to understand these things - and that’s why Lorene doesn’t reach out. She visits home and speaks with her friends, “They asked how St. Paul’s was, and whether or not I liked it. I wanted to answer them honestly. […] But I did not have enough words or time to make them see it and feel it with me,” p98. She believes that she needs to be able to communicate perfectly before she even tell anyone she’s distressed. She thinks telling them will push them away, and show them how much they’ve all changed while apart. Lorene is convinced that she is too capable to need help and has changed too much to connect like she used to - this self-confidence and insecurity combine to make her bubble herself up and trudge on alone.
ReplyDeleteAt this point, Lorene’s self-confidence has been depleted to such an extent that she can’t help but question everything she says and thinks. She’s questioning her beauty, her ability to fit in, and even her intelligence, something which was previously at the core of her identity. At first, she thought that even getting into St Paul’s School affirmed her worthiness and her intelligence, but now, “I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naivete. HP were probably what they'd meant by fine—for black scholarship kids. Maybe that's what they'd been saying all along, only I hadn't heard it” (87). In turn, this lack of self-assurance has led her to passively accept many of the events that transpire at St Paul’s, such as her classmates’ insensitivity, her professors’ bias, and, of course, the horrific rape. In a sea of whiteness and privilege, she’s lost her sense of self. And even worse, she seems to think that she deserves this feeling of isolation: “The fact was that I had left home in September gleeful and smug. I took it as divine justice that now I felt as if I no longer belonged anywhere” (100). I experienced a brief glimmer of hope when Lorene went to the Astronomy club meeting and seemed to feel at home amongst “the school science buffs, white boys, pimply, young,” with whom she “made corny science jokes”(103). For a second, I thought that her story would take on an upwards trajectory from that point on. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and I was disappointed by her account of her thievery. I’m still hopeful, however, that Lorene’s resilience will keep her from going down the path of despair.
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ReplyDeleteWhile a lot of the issues Lorene faces have to do with the fact that she is a teenager, I think it would be naive to write them off as purely or even mostly age-related. Yes, Lorene deals with boys, school, and a feeling that she doesn't fit in just like every other kid her age. But I think there is a fundamental difference that must come back to race. The other white kids at the school feel that they "deserve [their] good fortune" (83). Thus, even when they feel like they have lost everything, they feel somewhat secure in their life. The safety nets of whiteness and the class privilege that comes with it gives them assurance that even if they fail, society will still take care of them. On the other hand, Lorene feels that whatever was given to her can still be taken away; she and the other black kids see it as "their school" (5). This disparity adds a sense of desperation to everything Lorene does; she knows that one wrong move could send her back to Philadelphia. Furthermore, it seems as if Lorene has already given up her life in Philadelphia; when she goes back to her friends they don't understand each other anymore. She has to go forward despite the immense difficulty, because she cannot turn back. She has been changed forever by her experience at St. Paul's. So it feels like we can conclude that she is trapped in an identity crisis; that is why she does what she does. She feels as if "she no longer belongs anywhere" (100). She can't connect with the white kids cause she feels like they will betray her, but she is beyond blackness too. So all she has left is her ambition, but even that is trapped between an impossible way forward and an even more impossible way backwards. So it seems.
ReplyDeleteBut does that explanation really explain everything? Why does Lorene steal? Why does she allow herself to be in a situation where she could be raped? Does a sense of desperation really account for this, can it really make her lose that much sense? Does it if we account this to "teenage" anxiety and hormones? In someone who is sure of their position, sure. But Lorene is not sure. She could lose it all any second. All Lorene has left is her ambition. All she has left is the one in one hundred chance that she will somehow be able to "turn it out" (85). Why would she squander this? Why do people undercut their only goal?
I think the answer to this question is that she doesn't feel like she deserves to do well. She has internalized racism. Before St. Paul's she had the view that the rich white kids at the school were "degenerates" like "inbred poodles." Meanwhile, Lorene thinks she's been "raised for it" (57-59). But the cold hard facts are that at least some of the white kids are getting As and she is getting Bs and Cs. This, and the administration doesn't even believe that she can get As. Lorene must be starting to believe this now. She believes that the white kids are better than she is, which is why she undercuts herself. Its why she steals; in her heart she thinks that this is what black girls are meant to do. Its why she lets Ricky come and lets him into her room, she believes that she is a "whore" just like every other black girl.
It's hard to wrap your head around, particularly because Lorene spends so much time trying to disprove black stereotypes. But I feel its the only logical explanation for the disparity between her identity crisis and her actual behavior. Both, probably, are equally true.
Lorene is a teenager, and so am I, so when I read of her downward spiral, I cannot help but compare it to my own life. I’m as selfish as the next 16-year-old, as idealistic, as naïve. I, too, believe silence makes me brave, and that being an adult means not asking for help. Logically, I know none of that makes sense, but when put in positions where the quality of my judgement could called into question, of course I wouldn’t want further scrutiny my parents or friends, even if it meant it would take me longer to handle. Part of growing up is learning how to handle things yourself, and while sometimes that means knowing when to ask for help, sometimes it doesn’t. The line between child and adult doesn’t exist…we will all act like children sometimes and adults other times; teenagers are not the only ones to act selfishly at times just as “grown-ups” aren’t the only ones consider the consequences of their actions. Lorene is at this school to “turn it out” (85) but also to grow up, after all, the teachers are there to “improve you” (99). She’s away from home and making decisions for herself for the first time in her life. Sure, she still has adults watching out for her, but they aren’t her parents; she isn’t their whole world. She has to wake herself up every morning, study every night, and push herself to be the best she can be. She is alone here, as she has said numerous times, and I think this solitude is, in some ways, creating a rather twisted cycle for her. What I mean is that the longer she’s alone, the less she thinks she needs other people, and thus begins her skewed rational for keeping things to herself: the less she shares with people the less she needs to share, and the less she needs other people, the more mature she is. This is a cycle of thinking that I believe we are all capable of falling for, but for Lorene, being away from home has heightened her need for self-sustainability. As teenagers, we are programmed to distance ourselves from our parents and find our own way, but I know I still need my parent’s guidance from time to time, and I’m lucky enough to have that whenever I needs it. Lorene has been thrust into a world of responsibility and independence that she was not entirely prepared for, and her way of coping with that is to try to catch up. By holding everything in, every discomfort and anxiety, she believes she’s being mature and grown-up, and as wrong as that sounds logically, I find it completely understandable if not relatable.
ReplyDeleteI think Lorene has reached a level of awareness of her surroundings, not only at St. Paul, but also within her home, that causes her to feel very alone. I think this new found knowledge creates a separation between her and her peers and family that no one seems able to comprehend. She talks about how even her mother and father fail to bring attention to the fact that something has obviously changed. She says, "Mama pretended not to notice and Dad maybe didn't notice for real. Everywhere I went I felt out of place" (100). I think she maybe doesn't seek help or say anything about how she feels is because it's discouraging when your own parents don't even have an understanding of what's going on. It's also hard to place the blame on anyone or to locate the source of this strange feeling, let alone eradicate it, when you don't even know what it is that you're experiencing. St. Paul has introduced new values and perspectives Lorene would've never been exposed to had she stayed within her neighborhood. She's indulging in new things and she's living an experience that nobody in her realm can even come close to comprehending, making her feel isolated and alone. She doesn't know who to go to because her mother told her not to reveal herself to the people at St. Paul, yet their relationship has been altered in a way that they can't even seem to put into words. Lorene talks about the frustration of trying to talk to her friends but feeling as if she doesn't know them as well anymore, as if there's some sort of barrier that's keeping them from being friends how they used to be. She says "We couldn't anticipate each other anymore" (99). It's like as she gains some knowledge, she loses some. Her understanding of her friends and of the people she used to know has become blurred. Nothing is the same for Lorene and she's fighting for the way things used to be. It's like her old reality is slipping from her hands and all she can do is watch. But admitting this to her friends and family would only confirm this, and even after this is confirmed she can't solidify what made this change. Lorene is losing control and she doesn't know who to go to because she feels so far away from the people she once kept so close.
ReplyDeleteLorene is losing herself because everything that was once constant in her life has changed for the worse. All her thoughts that relate to these changes have built up inside of her in toxic amounts because she has no one to turn to who she trusts to understand what she is going through. She is lonely because she can’t fit in with any of the people in her life. “My new friends and I knew each other’s daily routines, but we had no history––and no future, I thought,” (99) she says. It can’t be good for Lorene to feel like all her relationships at school have no feature. It probably makes her feel like she’s just surviving at St. Paul’s, instead of excelling as she originally planned. She is hypersensitive that the girls she lives with are judging her based on her race so she does not want to tell them how she feels when they say the things that make her feel awful inside. Her fear of being judged and disliked by her fellow students clashes directly with the pressure she faces to turn the place out. “I had come to St. Paul’s to turn it out. How had I lost sight of the simple fact?” (85) To make things even worse, Lorene no longer feels at home in West Philadelphia. St. Paul’s has distanced her from her best friends: “Karen and Ruthie and I, once past the memories, had to work hard just to keep talking.” (99) She feels like an absolute failure on so many levels. She can’t fight against the systemic racism present at her school, she can’t have friends, she can’t have a boyfriend who doesn’t rape her, and she can’t get good grades. She has no one to help her through her situation which makes it much much worse.
ReplyDeleteLorene is understandably furious with most of the people around her. She's been marginalized, stereotyped, and raped. People have repeatedly heard seen not a young woman with a lot of ideas and goals, but her skin. At school, she feels left out due to her blackness. At home, she feels separate because of her education at a predominantly white prep school. However, instead of saying what she thinks, instead of expressing her rage, Lorene turns it inwards. She says, "When I thought of the sex debacle, I was overwhelmed with shame. Like foam spread hastily over an offshore oil spill, my shame soaked up and protected me from the rage underneath. Only now and then did I see the results if that slick, silent anger: tiny moments of self-hatred like dead fish washed up on the beach" (114). She turns all of this on herself. She hides because of her shame for who she is, outside and in. She learns to hate her black skin. Lorene tells us, "I felt like a brutish distortion of those big, black women I so admired" (92). This shame for herself is what makes her hide. She says that when she brings up the topic of race, "there sprang up a hard wall of denial impervious to my inexperienced and insecure assault" (83). Lorene is not confident in her thoughts or ability to express them. She seldom brings them up for fear of being rejected. One place she seems to initially feel comfortable is the astronomy club. She says, "We made corny science jokes together. Away from my cooler friends, I giggled happily" (103). These are white kids, but the they're nerdy; they don't have the popular status that frightens Lorene. However, even here, Lorene says that she was "eager to show off my knowledge, and yet reluctant to reveal how affected I was by my new relation to the heavens. One of the Pleiades hid because of her shame. I looked for her as if she were a friend" (103). Lorene is uncomfortable in her own skin. She has normal teenage problems, but has also internalized the racism around her. She questions herself, her thoughts. This inward loathing prevents her from using her righteous anger to "turn it out" (85).
ReplyDeleteI think that Lorene feels (as many teenagers do) a need to please everyone around her, which contributes to her hesitations with sharing with her peers. She can’t disclose to her ‘cooler’ friends that she enjoys learning about constellation (so much to the point where she confides in the stars) because this entails spending time with the dorkier students of St. Paul’s. Lorene doesn’t feel like she’s a part of any community at her school, but she still wants people to think that she is: “Girls came and went in my room. I liked it that way. I wanted the company – and the prosperous appearance of company” (82). I think that she believes that she can withstand her loneliness without confiding in anyone because it’s all right for her to actually be alone, as long as nobody else realizes this and attributes it to her character or her race. Her unwillingness to share with her peers is heightened (as others have noticed) by her and her lack of self-confidence and self-worth. Lorene knows that other students are struggling: “I learned that their romanticized lusts sounded like mine felt, as did their ambivalent homesickness, and their guarded, girl-ish competitiveness” (83). Lorene thinks it’s ok for others to be struggling, but it’s unacceptable for her to be. She feels that she has to prove herself for black students everywhere, but she also has to prove herself. She has to prove that she is worth her prestigious scholarship and that she will make a contribution to the school as worthy as Tyrone Albert’s would be, as Billy’s and Rita’s would be. If Lorene doesn’t succeed (by her extremely high standards), all of her toil and hard work will be wasted. And in order to succeed, in her mind at least, she can be struggling as much as she wants inside, but she can’t let others see it, lest she face their judgment.
ReplyDeleteI also think that Lorene doesn’t know how to deal with her loneliness. There are barriers between her and her old friends, between her and her fellow students at St. Paul’s, barriers that (I think) are completely natural given the situation: “Taken together, these girls seemed more certain than I that they deserved our good fortune […] They gave no indication that they worried that others, smarter or more worthy, might, at that moment, be giving up hope of getting what we had ” (83). “Later, I figured, when I understood the school better, then I could talk to them seriously about it. For now, I wanted to make them laugh. I wanted to entertain. I didn’t dare risk being boring or snobbish or cry-babyish about my new school. I didn’t want to lose them” (99). What’s difficult for Lorene is that no one warns her about this, no one helps prepare her for the (I might even say inevitable) loneliness, and she cannot trust those around her. I think this relates back to her need to please people (and fear that she won’t be accepted if she shows her true feelings) and also her lack of self-worth. Lorene doesn’t think her problems are worth sharing to other people, that they are worth being listened to and dealt with.
I think most of the answer lies in the scene with the girls talking in Lorene’s room. As they talked “differences emerged” between, and they stuck out to Lorene. They may not have been noticed by the other girls, which would make sense along with what I'm about say.
ReplyDeleteSimply put, Lorene can't open herself up to the people at St. Paul's because she has identified this “boundary” of “[her] black and their white heritage” and is letting it block connections with other people. The boundary is hard, “impervious to [her] inexperienced and insecure insult.” She describes her attempts at breaking though the barrier inexperienced because she's literally been thrown into this environment in her junior year, with no previous experience.
The boundary only gets thicker considering the people around her. Lorene paints the girls as oblivious to the people unable to revive the benefits they do. They describe themselves as color-blind, saying “it doesn't matter to me if somebody’s white or black or green or purple. I mean people are just people.” Though this color-blind mindset seems righteous, it really just makes Lorene’s situation worse. Lorene wants and needs to share her thoughts and experiences, but they all come from black background. There is no way she can share black experiences to a group of people who've dismissed the idea of different color backgrounds, so she closes herself off. Lorene says her “ethnicity seemed diminished…like they were taking something away from me [her].” If you take away her blackness, you take away all of her experiences. Then, she has nothing left to share. Without anything to share, she has to go in her mind. She has to shut herself out. She can't reveal herself, and she can't reach out.
What happens when she does share what's in her mind, her black thoughts? It's shown in the exact same scene. The girls ask about the difference in white and black men. Perfect. This is the perfect opportunity for her to use her black background to open herself up and share her thoughts. Except, once her experience makes her react, the girls immediately accuse her of “getting all mad.” The white girl’s righteous color blind mindset leads them to targeting her as soon as her black heritage causes her to react, to reveal herself. So she can't.
Outside of this scene, there is also this great quote that comes after Ricky raped her: “We comforted each other in the awkward way of adolescents, each of us absorbed in ourselves, unable to console the other…” At the end of the day, Lorene is just as junior in high school. She's going to have the same problems any other teenager, but Lorene’s problems will be amplified. That'll happen when you're a black person at a prep school in 1970.
Lorene is deeply insecure. She is going through a lot but she cannot give herself even one ounce of credit. She is always looking forward towards the loftiest of goals and if she does glance back all she sees is failure. Lorene is not particularly athletic, and she has asthma, but she pushes herself to the breaking point and when she does fall, colliding with a boy not he opposing team, she is not proud of herself for trying hard. She instead feels like she is failing her race and gender: “I felt like a brutish distortion of those big, black women I so admired, like Sojourner Truth as the actresses portrayed her: ‘Ah kin push a plow as far as a man—And ain’t I a voman?’ ” (92). She pushes herself in academics: “I worked harder the rest of the term than I had ever known I could work.” (92). And she feels like her work ethic is the only thing she has left, the only thing she has that allows her to compete with the other students. Lorene is complicit as a girlfriend to Ricky, as a member of the group of girls talking about black guys, because she is too afraid to speak up for herself. She carries the burden of women and of African Americans and that burden is weighing her down, has infiltrated her so deeply that she cannot break out of her shell, cannot speak her mind.
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