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ACTIVITY 1.5 continued
Teacher Notes
22 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 9
SCAFFOLDING THE TEXT-DEPENDENT QUESTIONS
6. Key Idea and Details (RL.9–10.1) What
can you infer from the text as to Lizabeth’s reasons for her final act of destruction? Read paragraph 56. What causes Lizabeth to feel she has lost her mind? What happened at home prior to her act of destruction that led up to this feeling?
7. Craft and Structure (RL.9–10.5) How does the author use juxtaposition to show how Lizabeth has changed through her experience? Read paragraphs 61–62. Describe how Lizabeth the child views Miss Lottie versus how Lizabeth the adult views Miss Lottie.
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22 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 9
ACTIVITY 1.5
continued
Defining Experiences
Furies: in classical mythology, three spirits of revenge
who pursued and punished wrongdoers
My Notes
50 I was pulling my dress over my head. Until now I had not thought of going out. “Just come on,” I replied tersely
51 I was out the window and halfway down the road before Joey caught up with me.
52 “Wait, Lizabeth, where you going?”
53 I was running as if the Furies were after me, as perhaps they were—running silently and furiously until I came to where I had half known I was headed: to Miss Lottie’s yard.
54 The half-dawn light was more eerie than complete darkness, and in it the old house was like the ruin that my world had become—foul and crumbling, a grotesque caricature. It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, because I was haunted too.
55 “Lizabeth, you lost your mind?” panted Joey.
56 I had indeed lost my mind, for all the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled
in me and burst—the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears. And these feelings combined in one great impulse toward destruction.
57 “Lizabeth!”
58 I leaped furiously into the mounds of marigolds and pulled madly, trampling and pulling and destroying the perfect yellow blooms. The fresh smell of early morning and of dew-soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went tearing and mangling and sobbing while Joey tugged my dress or my waist crying, “Lizabeth, stop, please stop!”
59 And then I was sitting in the ruined little garden among the uprooted and ruined flowers, crying and crying, and it was too late to undo what I had done. Joey was sitting beside me, silent and frightened, not knowing what to say. Then, “Lizabeth, look.”
60 I opened my swollen eyes and saw in front of me a pair of large, calloused feet; my gaze lifted to the swollen legs, the age-distorted body clad in a tight cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed Indian face surrounded by stubby white hair. And there was no rage in the face now, now that the garden was destroyed and there was nothing any longer to be protected.
61 “M-miss Lottie!” I scrambled to my feet and just stood there and stared at her,
and that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began. That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood. For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility. She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life. Now at the end of that life she had nothing except a falling-down hut, a wrecked body, and John Burke, the mindless son of her passion. Whatever verve there was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so tenderly cared for.
62 Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awkward and ashamed. The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment, and as I look back upon it, I know that that moment marked the end of innocence. Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that humiliating moment I had looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.
squalor: bad or dirty conditions
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.