“The First Day” is a short story by Edward P. Jones first published in 2003 in the book Lost in the City, which is a collection of Jones’s work. The narrator recounts the events of the beginning of her first day of kindergarten. The story is mainly written in first-person present tense with a few exceptions where certain parts of sentences are written in first-person past tense. This is a story in which the narrator reflects on how life was for her when she was brand new and not yet jaded about the harsh realities of life and society.
“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 is the very first sentence, and it provides so much information about the story. The narrator says that she is not yet ashamed of her mother, which implies this takes place before overly complicated emotions and experiences were a thing in her mind. This is just a little girl’s experience of getting ready for her first day of school. This isn’t the only example of the narrator showing how innocent she was as a child.
“Out playing one day, I have overheard an older child, speaking to another child, call Miss Mary and Miss Blondelle a word that is brand new to me. 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.”
The narrator’s innocence of the world clearly merges in this quote. She is still learning new words and cannot tell whether or not they have a positive or negative connotation. It is a common thing for children to just mimic what they hear from people around them. The fact that it was a word that was used to describe her female neighbors, who are likely to be also women of color, the word could have been a slur against their race, gender or socioeconomic status. Luckily for her and her mother, as soon as she was punished for saying the word, she was able to easily forget the word entirely for years.
The “younger” narrator’s innocence and the older one’s reminiscing create a sense of regret in both how innocent she was of the world, and of how she views life as someone older and more jaded.
Sidenote: The second quote also reminds me of this time when I was like seven years old and I told my dad the guy in the car behind us was “pissed.” My dad was so shocked that he pulled over on the highway and yelled “Where did you hear that word?” and I was really shocked by his reaction, and I couldn’t remember where (still can’t). He then just said that I shouldn’t say it again.