Can someone help with this(ps the question is at the bottom!!)"Come out into the yard," I say. Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless
person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough
to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this,
so chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned
the other house to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She's a
woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other
house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel
Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her
in little black
papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open,
blazed open by
the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet
gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she
watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick
chimney. Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her.
She had hated the house that much.
I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the
money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta' to school. She used to read
to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us
two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a
river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily
need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away
at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation
zo from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she'd made from an old
suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her
efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off
the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew
what style was.
COMMON CORE RL4
Language Coach
Informal language
Reread the paragraph
that begins with line 52
Walker uses sentence
fragments such as "Ten,
twelve years?" and
"And Dee." to create an
informal tone. What
other fragments do you
see on this page? (Hint:
look for sentences that
lack either a subject or
a verb.)