How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The Indian child was a girl. A girl, poor thing. That fact had already burdened her life with a kind of misery I could not imagine. I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl. (1.150)
The sexual abuse of children is one of the clearest targets of the novel's criticism. Taylor's horror at the abuse Turtle has suffered is what inspires her to keep the child for good.
Quote #2
Signatory to the United Nations something-something on human rights, Mattie was saying, and that means we have a legal obligation to take in people whose lives are in danger. (7.104)
Although Mattie argues that the U.S. has a legal obligation to take in refugees, she also believes that every individual has a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering, and whose lives are threatened by danger. She makes the legal argument because she knows it has broader appeal: it's harder to convince someone of their moral responsibility than it is to prove their legal obligation. And even if Taylor can barely can wrap her head around the legal side of the argument, she sure gets her chops as far as the morality stuff's concerned.
Quote #3
A man with a microphone clipped to his tie asked her, What about legal means? And something about asylum. They were standing against a brick building with palm trees in front. Mattie said that out of the some-odd thousand Guatemalans and Salvadorans who had applied for this, only one-half of one percent of them had been granted it, and those were mainly relatives of dictators, not the people running for their lives. (7.105)
In the face of a bureaucratic system that perpetuates injustice rather than helping to stamp it out, Mattie and others like her are willing to do things that the state calls "criminal." In The Bean Trees, justice isn't defined by law: it's defined by basic principles of right and wrong. Even if it's still questioned by people who are in power or have microphones clipped to their bodies.