"When I rise to give my speech I do so on a great wave of love and pride and expectation."
"One day while I am standing on top of our makeshift "garage" pieces of tin nailed across some poles-holding my bow and arrow and looking out toward the fields."
If you tell, we will get a whipping. You don't want that to happen do you?
"I feel an incredible blow in my right eye. I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun."
"Both brothers run to my side. My eye stings, and I cover it with my hand."
"If I do not say this is what happened, I know my brothers will find ways to make me wish I had. "
"Confronted by our parents we stick to the lie agreed upon."
"He asks, looking into my eye and shaking his head. "Eyes are sympathetic," he says. "If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too."
Why did you wait so long to come?
"For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head."
"When I don't answer (I cannot decide whether is was an "accident" or not), they shove me, insist on a fight."
What's the matter with your eye?
A couple years later
Congratulations
"My brother, the one who created the story about the wire, comes to my rescue. But then brags so much about "protecting" me, I become sick."
"Understanding my feelings of shame and ugliness he and his wife take me to a local hospital, where the "glob" is removed by a doctor named O.Henry."
Mommy, there is a world in your eye.
"Now that I've raised my head classwork comes from my lips as faultlessly as Easter speeches did, and I leave high school as valedictorian..."
"She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands."
"Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyerlike as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: Mommy, there's a world in your eye."
"Yes indeed, I realized, looking into the mirror. There was a world in my eye. And I saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision."
Work Cited Walker, Alice. "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self." Women in Literature, edited by Dodie Forrest, Bedford/St. Martin's Macmillan Learning, 2019, pp. 109-115.
"That night I dream I am dancing to Stevie Wonders' song "Always." As I dance, whirling and joyous, happier than I've ever been in my life, and another bright-faced dancer joins me."
"The other dancer has obviously come through all right, as I have done. She is beautiful, whole and free. And she is also me."
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