Standing by my mother’s living-room window, I tried, tentatively, to ask her why our world was burning, burning. She gave me a forbidding look: Boy, be quiet so you can survive, her eyes seemed to say.”What AL means by this quote is there is corruption within her community and as she grew older her awareness of these corruptions grew stronger. Her mother’s gaze is the gaze of a mother trying desperately to protect her children from the cruel world but might not be able to.

“The world around us was not the one we had worked hard to achieve but the quiet, degraded world that our not-country said we deserved. We couldn’t keep anything, the elders said, not even ourselves” What AL is expressing with this quote is that her family were hard working citizens but they weren’t repaid for it. They were treated unfairly so much so that she couldn’t identify herself with the country she was living in, expressed by the words “our not country”. She can’t identify with a country who has treated her family unjustly because of the color of his skin.

“My mother had her own room, where the door was always ajar; she didn’t so much sleep there as rest between walks up and down the hall to watch and listen for the safety of her children” I found this quote very powerful because sleep can be symbolism for peace. When someone is restless that shows the state of mind they are in. As it pertains to this situation she was not at peace with her surroundings, constantly having to look out for her children. I wouldn’t blame her for being that way, there was  an increase in drugs and gang violence even racial tensions and that is a truly terrible thing to have to endure.