Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 1

To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother.

To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother.

The ones who did, who accepted her invitations to tea and envied the doctor’s big dark house of twelve rooms and the green sedan, called him “peculiar.”

If he did manage to slip by his sisters and avoid their casual malice, he knelt in his room at the window sill and wondered again and again why he had to stay level on the ground.

If he did manage to slip by his sisters and avoid their casual malice, he knelt in his room at the window sill and wondered again and again why he had to stay level on the ground.

She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving.

He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.

The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had.

He had lived up to his family’s accidental surname.

Starling. Distant cousin to the mockingbird. He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart’s own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer.

Troy: Your mama told me you done got recruited by a college football team?

You go on and get your book-learning so you can work yourself up in that A&P or learn how to fix cars or build houses or something, get you a trade.

You go on and learn how to put your hands to some good use. Besides hauling people’s garbage.

Cory (hesitant): Cause you like me.

Troy (slow, methodical): Woman...I do the best I can do. I come home every Friday. I carry a sack of potatoes and a bucket of lard. You all line up at the door with your hands out. I give you the lint from my pockets. I give you my sweat and blood.