She's One Tough Motha...

The first page and all the imagery of rural Louisiana immediately brought to mind Faulkner describing the living conditions for Jackson Fentry in "Tomorrow." To hear such a serious story from an innocent eight year old boys perspective makes the difference. He doesn't necessarily understand why his mother behaves so but Gaines gives significant details about who she was and is. The Minuit details of how the mother carried herself showed so much of her personality. She was obviously raising a family alone, her husband was "in the army," hinting that the father was dead or at least long gone. The son saying that his mother use to stay up late and now she seems to worry all the time, I have those friends at home. People who are forced to grow up faster than they are ready too, is that what made the mother so angry to hit her son with a switch when he wasn't ready to kill small birds? Is she hard on her son because she wasn't prepared to grow up to be a single mother with a mess of children, are they then growing up together? I think the mother leads an exhausted life with a lot going on in her head and doesn't see a change, so she is preparing her boy for the same life. She gets frustrated with her son because he is young and doesn't want to do certain things. She's young and doesn't want to do certain things as well. The mother was the most interesting character in this story because she was described by a small boy who didn't know everything that was happening inside his mothers head.