How we cite our quotes: Paragraph
Quote #4
[On television] I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue. (5)
Assuming the narrator is right, why would Dee want her mother to be a skinny, sassy, shiny-haired woman with skin like pancake batter? What does this tell us about Dee?
Quote #5
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 […] 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." (12)
Wait a minute—the narrator spends her time and energy fundraising with the church so that Dee could go to a fancy school and in return Dee treats her to this awful story-hour? Some thanks that is. It's a pretty tragic irony that the narrator has done so much to make sure Dee could have the education she herself missed out on only to discover that Dee turns around and uses that education to belittle the narrator and Maggie.
Quote #6
"You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie," I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her "Big Dee" after Dee was born. (28)
So we all know that Dee wants to give her oppressors a big kick in the teeth by changing her name to Wangero… But is her name change a snub to the black members of her family with whom she shares the name and thus a kind of severing of her connection with them? What do you say to that, Dee? Huh? Huh?