Unit 9: Vocabulary from Readings 1

At least
Not the
Subversive
Jazzy
Melodies
She favors
In
My
Dream.

Those days when to visit her was to be drawn into a serene cocoon of memories and present-day musings and to rest there, in temporary retreat from the rest of the world, as if still an infant, nodding and secure at her breast.

Those days when to visit her was to be drawn into a serene cocoon of memories and present-day musings and to rest there, in temporary retreat from the rest of the world, as if still an infant, nodding and secure at her breast.

I took solace in the fact that it was at least hugged by spacious lawn on one side, and by forest, out the back door, and that its isolated position at the end of the street meant she would have a measure of privacy.

Her move into the projects—the best housing poor black people in the South ever had, she would occasionally declare, even as my father struggled to adjust to the cramped rooms and hard, unforgiving qualities of brick—was, I now understand, a step in the direction of divestiture, lightening her load, permitting her worldly possessions to dwindle in significance and, well before she herself would turn to spirit, roll away from her.

Each time I visited her I marveled at the modesty of her desires.

For the blue bowl especially was a cauldron of memories.

In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was.

A gray, decaying, too small barrack meant to house the itinerant tenant workers on a prosperous white man’s farm.

The blue bowl stood there, seemingly full forever, no matter how deeply or rapaciously we dipped, as if it had no bottom.

The history of the woodland Anishinabe—decimated by disease, fighting Plains Indians tribes to the west and squeezed by European settlers to the east—is much like most other Native American stories, a confusion of loss, a tale of absences, of a culture that was blown apart and changed so radically in such a short time that only the names survive.

Anishinabe historian Basil Johnston notes that ‘such was the mystique and force of a name that it was considered presumptuous and unbecoming, even vain, for a person to utter his own name...'

They had to have grown up sensible, hard-working, undeviating in their attention to their tasks.

She might have been speaking to whomever it was who held the camera, still a novel luxury.

That house, long sold and gone, lay over one hundred miles due east and still Virginia Grandbois charged ahead, no matter what lay in her path—fences, sloughs, woods, the yards of other families.