Unit 1: Telling Details: "The First Day" by Edward P. Jones

My mother has uncharacteristically spent nearly an hour on my hair that morning, plaiting and replaiting so that now my scalp tingles.

Whenever I turn my head quickly, my nose fills with the faint smell of Dixie Peach hair grease.

The smell is somehow a soothing one now and I will reach for it time- and time again before the morning ends.

Behind my ears, my mother, to stop my whining, has dabbed the stingiest bit of her gardenia perfume, the last present my father gave her before he disappeared into memory.

I am carrying a pencil, a pencil sharpener, and a small ten-cent tablet with a black-and-white speckled cover.

My mother does not believe that a girl in kindergarten needs such things, so I am taking them only because of my insistent whining aVid because they are presents from our neighbors, Mary Keith and Blondelle Harris.

The women are as precious to me as my mother and sisters.

All the way down , the sidewalks are teeming with children.

At I Street, between New Jersey Avenue and Third Street, we enter Seaton Elementary School, a timeworn, sadfaced building across the street from my mother’s church...

She is enveloped in a perfume that I only know is not gardenia.

My mother shakes her head vigorously.

For as many Sundays as I can remember, perhaps even Sundays when I was in her womb, my mother has pointed across I Street to Seaton as we come and go to .

But one of the guardians of that place is saying no, and no again.

I am learning this about my mother: The higher up on the scale of respectability a person is—and teachers are rather high up in her eyes—the less she is liable to let them push her around.

I am learning this about my mother: The higher up on the scale of respectability a person is—and teachers are rather high up in her eyes—the less she is liable to let them push her around.

We find our way to the crowded auditorium where gray metal chairs are set up in the middle of the room.

Strewn about the floor are dozens and dozens of pieces of white paper, and people are walking over them without any thought of picking them up.

The girl’s hair is arrayed in curls, but some of them are beginning to droop and this makes me happy.

On the table beside the woman’s pocketbook is a large notebook, worthy of someone in high school, and looking at me looking at the notebook, the girl places her hand possessively on it.

My mother slowly enunciates each word of my name.

Few of the papers are needed here, but it does not matter and my mother continues to pull out the documents with the purposefulness of a magician pulling out a long string of scarves.

She has learned that money is the beginning and end of everything in this world, and when the woman finishes, my mother offers her fifty cents, and the woman accepts it without hesitation.

We go into the hall, where my mother kneels down to me.

Her lips are quivering.