Scott Russell Sanders describes a community as a shared life of giving and receiving. Holloway's short essayThe Thursday Ladies?, we see examples of Mr. Sanders?community.?.
InThe Thursday Ladies?, two young girls live with their mother and father on the fringes of a small Michigan town in which they were the only black family. The girls parents stay away from the town as much as they can and one their sons was actually killed by a car in town, probably a racist crime. The two girls describe their mothers Thursday get together with her friends as a strange community that entered our kitchen?. The women that came over every Thursday were all black women that worked as servants for the white families in town. These women and the girls? mother were involved in both giving and receiving. The mother received the memories of the town that she avoids and she gave the women someone to talk to about their white enslavers. .
There is one thing that Holloway provides in her reading that Sanders does not give you in his description of community. That is the exclusion of people or things from a community and the effects that they have. The mother and father in the story move their family from the town to protect them from the harshness and reality of the other community. The town is racist and that is why the mother became upset at the end of the reading when her daughters were making fun of Mamie for coming to their home to use the bathroom. The fact of the matter was that Mamie was not welcome to use the bathroom at the picture show in town because she was black. Yet because of the exclusion of the blacks from the town they created their ownThursday community?.