ENCW 101 Spring 2019

In these two stories, we can have different levels of reading. Indeed, if we only focus on what happens, the stories are really simple and we don’t have a lot of action. In “Rara Avis,” this is the story of a twelve-year-old guy who lives in a little town where a bird is the center of the attention — or at least of his attention. In “The First Day” we read the story of a woman who remembers her first day in kindergarten when her mother accompanied her.

But if we look at the multiple occurrences of two images, the one of the bird and the one of the mother, we can have a different levels of reading that would be more symbolic. First, the stories are both marked by multiple, detailed descriptions that are especially visual or sensual. We can see the environment the characters are in but also feel and hear. Finally, the ends of both stories are marked by the disappearance of the images that have been there all throughout the story. This is very present in the reading as we can hear the steps of the mother but also see the young boy throwing a stone at the bird. In the end, the resolution resulted in an opening: the young boy will have to face the emergence of his sexuality in the future, and the young girl who was living her first day at school is now an educated woman who is able to write about it.

“The First Day” is a story written by Edward P. Jones about a woman narrating her own childhood memory of her mother taking her to the first day of kindergarten. It is evident that over time her perspective about this memory has changed, which has caused her to be ashamed of her own mother. She tells this story from her childlike mindset of the higher respect she once had for her mother.

… dabbed the stingiest bit of her gardenia perfume, the last present my father gave her before he disappeared into memory. Because I cannot smell it, I have only her word that the perfume is there.”

These lines tell the reader about the narrator’s view of her mother at such a young age, how naive she’d been for believing her mother’s word, which causes a change of perspective within their relationship. However, it is more relevant when the mother asks a woman to help her complete a form for the girl to attend kindergarten.

“I can’t read it. I don’t know how to read or write, and I’m askin you to help me.” My mother looks at me, then looks away. I know almost all of her looks, but this one is brand new to me.”

It is crystal clear that at this moment the girl couldn’t understand why her mother looked at her with such despair. The narrator, now realizing after this event that her mother seems to be of lesser value for not being able to read or write, how she once viewed her mother, someone she once thought so highly of, is lessened.

“Rara Avis” captures one of the feelings most definitive of small town living: the quiet, aching need for something to be different.

To the townspeople, the bird is not just a bird, but a change of pace. Many people who live in these sorts of quiet burgs will tell you that the stability they provide is the best reason to live there, but it also becomes the downfall of the lifestyle. Humans aren’t wired to do the same thing every day, so any changes quickly become the town’s collective fixation.

While I’m sure it’s heavy with so many other types of symbolism, the mercy killing of the bird at the end of the story also preserves its mystique. Had it been able to nest, it would have become just another part of the town: commonplace, mundane, even dull. Killing it allows it to be something rare, sanctified, a story the people in the town will continue to tell when the black hole of sheer boredom threatens to overtake their home.

In “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones, a child experiences her first day of school. From the very beginning, it is obvious how in-tune to the world this five-year-old is. The story starts off with simple details: how the girl’s scalp still tingles, how she’s wearing her favorite shoes, how she knows she whined enough to be allowed to bring to school the first day her school supplies. As the morning goes on, she seems to understand things a little deeper, like how the school her mother wants her to attend is right across the street from the place where her mother feels closest to God. She notices how a woman she has never seen before treats her like she has known her forever, and she continues to observe as she watches her mother realize she has lost the battle of having her child attend the school she wants her to attend.

As we move to the school that that the girl is supposed to attend, she watches as her mother admits something she was obviously not comfortable mentioning in front of her child, noticing how other people react to the news of her mother not being able to read or write, which is followed by how her mother doesn’t seem to want to participate in a personal gesture that they created between them. Up until her mother is completely out of sight, the young girl notices and realizes things adults don’t expect her to realize, and she continues to think about the encounters of the morning long after her mother is gone.

“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.

T.C. Boyle wrote “Rara Avis” about the loss of innocence from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy. In the story, there is a bird on the roof of a furniture store in their town. Many of the town’s citizens come to gawk at the animal. The bird is used to symbolize a woman. The last sentence of the story — “I threw the first stone” (109) — implies that the bird symbolizes not only a woman, but also a prostitute. Another way the author indicates the bird’s symbol is on page 109 when the boy notices that all of the spectators still in front of the furniture store are male and all of the women and children have left. Also, throughout the story, the narrator begins to notice the people around him — his father with a woman who is not his mother and the college-aged girl with her boyfriend against the car — involved in sexually tense situations. After this, the narrator goes on to explain a time when he lies during confession:

“In the confessional the priest asked me if I practiced self-pollution. The words were so formal, unfamiliar, but I knew what he meant. So, I thought, kneeling in the dark, crushed with shame, there is a name for it. I looked at the shadowy grill, looked toward the source of the soothing voice of absolution, the voice of forgiveness and hope, and I lied. “No,” I whispered.” (108).

In this excerpt, Boyle indirectly states the boy lies about if he masturbates. This is another moment where the boy’s innocence is implied to have dissipated.

“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.