By far and away, my favorite part of the novel is Handful's reflection on her moments of rebellion.
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I'm not familiar with everything in the medical world, but what I do know, is that hospice is another word for "death bed." I crowded into a 10 by 15 foot skilled care room with two beds in it, along with my mother, father, grandmother, and two of my uncles from Iowa. My grandpa was on the bed, with enough morphine to leave him senseless, but still not enough to dull the pain of breathing. Chronic pneumonia had wrecked his body; his muscles had atrophied to the point that he could no longer shift positions on the bed, let alone leave it. My grandma refused to leave his side, and the rest of my relatives were all standing around, telling stories. "He would have made one hell of a priest," said Uncle John, and I smirked a little at the irony, but no one else noticed. For most of the night, I sat on the adjacent bed reading The Invention of Wings, and by some twisted coincidence, I read about Sarah's father becoming ill.
I happened upon meaning during the passage where Rosetta is whipped by the missus. Kidd gives us brutal imagery, saying, "Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals" (10). I only noticed upon the second reading that the name of the slave: Rosetta. The blood on her back sprouts like petals, just like those on a rose. I think that there are several interesting devices that Kidd uses here, including the verb tense of the passage. Suddenly, Kidd switches from past tense to the present. I find that often when people talk about traumatic events, at least on TV, that they switch from past to present tense. Kidd does this here to convey that Rosetta's beating is a traumatic event in Sarah's life. Kidd ends the passage with the words, "Nothing comes. Not a sound" (11). Although this phrase is in the context of Sarah being unable to speak to her mother about not running away again, I think that it holds a deeper meaning for the passage. It starts the trend of Miss Sarah's speech impediment, and signals an instantaneous change. I think that it also signals Sarah's mangled thoughts about the whole experience. She can try as she likes to come to a conclusion about the experience, but she cannot ever succeed in doing so. Because of this, the experience always haunts her.
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