Therefore, the theme in "The Piano Lesson" shows the complexity of African-American attitudes toward the past and black heritage compared to plans for the future. ... The two main characters in this play were Berniece and Boy Willie with the rest of the family as supporting characters. ... The setting of this drama took place in the 1940s in the home of Doaker Charles, Berniece's and Boy Willie's uncle. ... More revelations of their family history are told by the rambling, traveling, drinking man nicked named Wining Boy. ... Some family members, especially Boy Willie, challenged the ...

• Word Count: 1379
• Approx Pages: 6

Many white people wanted to have nothing to do with blacks. ... The white players refused to play on a team that consisted of blacks along with a black coach and vice versa. ... "Listen to me, Sophia-reading's not only no good for a black boy like Fred; it would do him harm, make him discontent, miserable, unhappy with his lot..." ... "I ain't selling that piano, Boy Willie. ... She felt that her and Boy Willie's dad died for the piano and they owed it to his memory to keep it in the family. ...

• Word Count: 1924
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

At school the rambunctious boy gets dirty, plays baseball while his sister and her friends, in little skirts, play house with dolls, a miniature stove, washing machine and car. When he masturbates, he is told it is ok, when she, at six, is caught under the bed with one of her boy friends, the column in the paper says it is just a stage. ... Alongside the starched, flattened, white-boy blues came the first inklings of racial integration. The same year Rebel without a Cause came out, Rosa Parks was dragged from the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and three black students were let into U...

• Word Count: 1332
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

Faulkner places heavy emphasis on the sensational details that the boy feels. ... The boy says that "If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again" (p.167). ... He forces his boy to submit to the pull of blood by making him his accomplice. ... The terrifying images of rigidity and blackness are gone. The boy listens to his father telling a story and we see him divide the food with his two sons. ...

• Word Count: 1422
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

A yellow organdy dress to wear for her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suite that she made from an old suite someone had given her." (2128) She was well educated and knew what life had to offer her so she was determined to get it no matter what she had to do. ... Then she would sit with him at the kitchen table" (66) Jameel (Jimmy), his son, on the other hand was a boy who knew how to watch someone and learn how to do it. ... They are both two independent people, even though Jimmy is a little boy. ... "Some day the boy will own his own business and sell all the f...

• Word Count: 1355
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

Maya was an African American girl with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth. ... Momma Henderson was a woman of substance, who was respected for being the only black female entrepreneur in town. ... She questioned herself if she might be a lesbian but decides to prove she is not by having sex with a neighborhood boy. Unfortunately, Maya soon learns that she is pregnant by the neighborhood boy. ... She gave birth to a baby boy which became the love of her life. ...

• Word Count: 1681
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

A young boy gets molested and killed in the parking lot of the local shopping mall. ... She had drawn snakes around its arms, made its breast into red-and-black targets, given it a verdant bush of green pubic hair surrounding a brown phallic blob. The face was colored half black and half purple. ... She also demonstrates knowledge of sexual behavior, telling Marsha that a boy's "thing" looks like a thumb. ... There are many examples of these in this story: Luann and her obviously bad experience with her parents; the molestation and murder of an innocent young boy; a family where the fathe...

• Word Count: 1475
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

His parents, James Hughes and Carolina Mercer Langston, separated when he was a very young boy in 1903. ... At night they would read him stories from such works from popular black authors such as W.E.B. ... They would also tell him stories of black history, and encourage him to try to make positive changes someday. ... In his autobiographical novel, Hughes said as a young boy, "For the first time loneliness strikes me, strikes me terribly settling down in a dull ache round about, in the dusk." ... Even as a young boy he was ready to take chances in life. ...

• Word Count: 1483
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Before his death, he was one of the Seven Days, the small group of men devoted to keeping the balance of blacks and whites equal, which is one of the causes of his desire for an escape from life. As he says in his note, he had become one of the Seven Days for love of black people, not for any hate of whites. ... Milkman, born Macon Dead, the third to bear that name, is born the day after Smith's flight off Mercy Hospital and is the one most affected by the image of flight presented in the book, even from his infancy. " When the little boy discovered, at four -that only birds and airplanes...

• Word Count: 1472
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

The opening scenes of the film Billy Elliot, directed by Stephen Daldry, helped introduce me to one of the main themes of the movie; that the realization of one boy's dream will be barred by three different hurdles on the way to achieving his goals. ... The camera tracks him as he dances around the ring, and the screen cuts to black when he is knocked out with one punch. ... In this world of miners who do physical, rough work, a boy doing ballet is a ridiculous idea. ...

• Word Count: 1374
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

The responder can see there that the father is blind to the boys needs, he can only see that the boy continues to love him and believes that that is all that matters. ... They arrive from America believing that they are a superior race and above all blacks. ... The girls realise that they are going to have to accept their black counterparts, as there is no other children to play with. ...

• Word Count: 1417
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Rosa Lee`s parents were black rural share croppers from the South who moved to Washington D.C. in order to escape racial oppression, economic exploitation and segregation and to find a better life and work there. ... That is an example for racism and colour consciousness within the black community. ... At the age of seven, Bobby got raped several times by a neighborhodd teenage boy who used to babysit him and his younger brothers and sisters. ...

• Word Count: 2335
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: High School

Like many parents before mine, and many who do the same for their children after my passage through this world is over, my story is no different from any other story of a boy who grew up in a distant country in South America during a military dictatorship, and a father recently retired after a long and successful military career. ... My grandmother Francisca, a very distinguished and pompous lady, long black hair, and affable smile, whom, after almost 40 years, I still remember vividly in my mind. ... He left on Thanksgiving Day, so that I am convinced that somewhere in the sky he is watching...

• Word Count: 1452
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

The grandmother, Bailey, his wife, June Star (the little girl), John Wesley (the little boy), and the baby make up five or six people, depending on how you view the baby. ... At the very instant one learns of the car headed toward the family, "a big black battered hearse-like automobile" (478), one knows that the confrontation between the Misfit and the family is about to take place. ... Nonetheless, O"Connor foreshadows that the grandmother will meet her demise when the Misfit says, "I never was a bad boy that I remember of I was buried alive" (480). ...

• Word Count: 2114
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

Benjy spends his days being attended to by Dilsey, the Compson family's black maid and her son, Luster. ... Rather it is the act of a boy so in love with his sister and so obsessed with maintaining the closeness of their relationship that he would rather be condemned by the town and suffer in hell than let her go. ... Quentin's feels that the black people should be left alone, and needs to remind himself that they are to be treated differently now, as they are now free people." You have got to remember to think of them as coloured people not niggers I learned that the best way to ta...

• Word Count: 2419
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography

He also witnessed his brother murder two black men in front of him. ... Sweeny is also black. ... It just so happened that the boy was African American and had ties to others that Derek had angered in the past. ...

• Word Count: 1484
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Without say from the children's parents, the grandmother takes it upon herself to keep the peace between them, by telling them a story of a black child mistakenly eating her watermelon with initials from a suitor carved in it reading E.A.T. ... "If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way. ...

• Word Count: 1416
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Without say from the children's parents, the grandmother takes it upon herself to keep the peace between them, by telling them a story of a black child mistakenly eating her watermelon with initials from a suitor carved in it reading E.A.T. ... "If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way. ...

• Word Count: 1416
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Marjane's mum interrupts the group before they can attack they boy with nails between their knuckles, and gently tells Marjane, "It is not for you and me to do justice. ... In this short series of events, Marjane begins to learn how the complexity of viewing the world in black and white. ...

• Word Count: 1625
• Approx Pages: 7

In this scene he shows how bad he felt about his son and says, "Homer I've been confuse about you, I've been mad at you, but boy that is the fist time I'm shame of you I in my life." ... This passage is shown when the mother mentions "Some times I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress failing off her in little black papery flakes" This also let Maggie in a state of inner insecurity scene the fire had caused scars physically and mentally as well. ...

• Word Count: 1757
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

"The Road was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006 and, in 2007, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. ... The boy pleaded to his father to not take all he had but the father refused, "I don't think he should have anything" (McCarthy 149). ...

• Word Count: 1485
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

My life was happy and carefree, until the day the planes began dropping bombs from the sky and the men with the shiny black boots came marching into our city. ... Eventually a met a boy named Joshua who was very kind and offered to help me with my work. ...

• Word Count: 2372
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: High School

She yelled at Wes, until Wes's father reminded her that although "he [needed] to learn what [was] acceptable and what [was] not, that cursing at a young boy wasn't the most effective way of making a point " (6). ...

• Word Count: 2166
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: High School

In this group of workers there happened to be a young man by the name of Hank Spruill who would change the way life was in the small town of Black Oak while he was there. ... Besides witnessing the murder of the Sisco boy, later Luke will see yet another take place. ...

• Word Count: 1855
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

" As Loretta looks at Johnny's plane on the tarmac through the airport window, an old gray haired woman dressed in black tells Loretta she put a curse on Johnny's plane. ... The next morning Loretta is walking home obviously in love in the meantime Johnny has returned from Sicily, his mother did not give her blessing and Johnny, a mama's boy, will ask for his engagement ring back. ...

• Word Count: 2080
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School