Wild Child's Funeral

So the Wild Child's funeral doesn't exactly go as planned. Awkward. When you look a little closer, however, you'll realize that the scene serves as a metaphor for the progression of the Movement over the course of novel.

Things start off okay, as far as funerals go. No one knows much about the Wild Child, except that she's a homeless kid who recently got pregnant and was hit by a car after Meridian tried helping her. It's a sad story.

In response to this tragedy, however, something beautiful happens. A group of students and community members, "resplendent [...] in their Sunday-best outfits of red and yellow and peacock blue," try to bring her body to the student chapel and bury her on campus (1.3.50). This echoes the early days of the Movement, when students and working-class protesters were united in their mission.

Enter the Saxon College administrators. The funeral procession is stopped before it can reach the Saxon chapel, likely because the bosses are "scared of [...] a commotion that could get in the cracker papers" (1.3.17). The students are growing more agitated by the minute, but the community members "appeared to melt away, slinking farther and farther back until they had vanished" (1.3.50). These folk have lived a life full of injustices like this, and they know how painful it is. The students, on the other hand, are operating on ideological grounds—not necessarily from personal experience.

And how do the students respond? They riot. The irony is that they completely fail to achieve their mission: Wild Child is buried in a segregated graveyard off-campus. Plus, the students don't even destroy anything worth destroying—by the end of the night, "the only thing they managed to destroy was The Sojourner" (1.3.55).

In their anger, the students have destroyed a thing that was truly important to them instead of redirecting that anger into positive action. Besides Meridian, this seems to be the fate of most of the novel's civil rights activists.