My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the profound connection between family and community, particularly in the face of adversity.
Jesmyn Ward reflects on her family's long-standing ties to a working-class background and the strong sense of belonging in a small community. The struggle of poverty is intertwined with a deep commitment to one's family, highlighting how such socio-economic conditions shape the decisions and experiences of individuals within close-knit environments. The inability or reluctance to evacuate during crises underscores the inseparability of family ties and communal identity in facing hardships.
In practice
This quote can be shared when discussing community values during challenging times.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
It is in the home that we form our attitudes, our deeply held beliefs. It is in the home that hope is fostered or destroyed. Our homes are to be more than sanctuaries; they should also be places where God’s Spirit can dwell, where the storm stops at the door, where love reigns and peace dwells
Try to put in the hearts of your children a love for home. Make them long to be with their families. So much sin could be avoided if our people really loved their homes.
Imagine a world where mothers take as good care of themselves as they do their children and a world where mothers are so supported they're able to do that. That's the world we all need to create because our children, families, and communities are depending on us.
Your great puddin' of a son don' need fattin' anymore Dursley, don't worry
There's no perfection in family life, and certainly we aren't perfect, but we're probably about as close as we can be.
My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.
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