When I was reading “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones there was one line that surprised me and it was when the kid said “long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother” and I was like why would anyone be ashamed of their own mother. While I was reading through the passage it just showed how the mother and the kid went to the wrong school and when they got to the right school the mom had to fill out a piece of paper. The mom then asked for help to fill out the paper because she didn’t know how to read or write. The author shows the mother as protective and caring because the passage shows how the mom went through all the trouble to get her child to school, towards the end of the passage it even talks about how the mother kept on giving the person who was helping her fill the form every type of document she had on her.
English 2100 Fall 2021: Language, Identity, and Representation
A Blogs@Baruch site
I agree with you that the story highlights the mother’s care in lots of different ways, as you’ve described here. She clearly is a loving and attentive mother who wants the very best for her daughter. When the narrator tells us that she later learned to be ashamed of her mother, that doesn’t mean that she thinks her mother deserved her shame, but rather that she learned lessons from society that make her think that she ought to be ashamed at her mother’s lack of education or perhaps her poverty, even though those things are not things that anyone should feel ashamed of.