ENCW 101 Spring 2019

“The First Day,” a short story by Edward P. Jones, was first published in 2003 in Lost in the City, a larger collection of Jones’s work.  The story of a young girl’s first day of kindergarten is told in first-person present tense, despite the fact that the position of the narrator is that of the young girl later in her life reflecting back on that first day.  This reflective point of view allows the narrator to keep the childlike naivete of her younger self in matters concerning her relationship with her mother, but add details that only an adult would notice or understand. We see this in the tense change in the very first line of the story:

“In an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.”

This line also associates the girl’s mother, who is the main subject of the story, with shame.  This is interesting because, in the story itself, the girl herself feels no shame. Instead, it is the reader who feels ashamed of the mother for the girl because the girl does not know to.  That shame is disconcerting because all of the mother’s actions in the story are admirable; she exposes herself to the judgment of others and the associated embarrassment in order to get her daughter to a good school.  If, perhaps, the narrator didn’t begin by saying that later she learned to be ashamed of her mother—though we don’t know when or how, which adds to the conflict—we also wouldn’t feel shame when it’s revealed that her mother doesn’t know how to read.  But because the narrator primes us to be ashamed, it’s difficult to overcome that initial judgment of the mother. This neatly parallels the reactions of the other characters who interact with the mother in the story, each of whom is prepared to judge her or look down upon her, just as the reader is.  

Throughout the story, Jones uses a recurring sentence structure to draw attention to both the strength and fragility of the mother.  Several key phrases interspersed in the story begin with “This is my mother:”

“This is my mother: When I say the word in fun to one of my sisters, my mother slaps me across the mouth and the word is lost for years and years.”

“This is my mother: She says, ‘One monkey don’t stop no show.’”

“This is my mother: As the questions go on, she takes from her pocketbook document after document, as if they will support my right to attend school, as if she has been saving them up for just this moment.”

These quotes highlight minuscule details about the mother yet reveal a shocking amount about her character, and the story itself does the same about the narrator.  Her first day of school is a relatively small moment in her life, yet what she noticed and what she felt about her mother that day reveal much more about her than expected.