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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage was chosen because it shows Daisy building a theology in her own voice. The Old Man's white robe and sandals borrow from Sunday-school iconography; the crooked stick echoes Moses and the shepherd-figure; the vanishing-touch comes from fairy tale. But the addition that is entirely Daisy's own is SADNESS — 'he looks sad though — like maybe he feels sorry about something.' A guardian who grieves is not a punisher; he is a mourner. Copying this passage lets a young writer see how a character builds a cosmology from everything she has ever loved, and how one original word ('sad') can stamp the whole figure as her own.
'Jay Berry,' she said, 'the Old Man of the Mountains is very, very old. He's as old as these hills. His hair is snow white and hangs way down over his shoulders. He wears a long, white robe, and sanda...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Trace the chapter as a sequence of four negotiations. First, Jay Berry bargains with his own arithmetic in the dust of the road. Second, he persuades Papa with the economic argument. Third, he persuades Mama with a reassurance argument (traps, not climbing). Fourth, Daisy counter-persuades HIM with a moral argument embedded in a folk cosmology. Each encounter gives Jay Berry something different and asks something different in return.
Discussion Questions
- Jay Berry's inability to add the hundred-dollar monkey into his column of two-dollar monkeys is played as comedy, but Wilson Rawls is also making a substantive observation about cognition. Analyze the relationship the chapter implies between imagined wealth and the capacity for careful calculation. What does the scene suggest about why the rich-feeling part of the mind and the counting-part of the mind interfere with each other?
- Mama grants permission with a striking compromise: Jay Berry may hunt, but only when Papa is 'close by in the fields.' Her reasoning closes with the line 'maybe between him and Rowdy, we could at least find your body.' Characterize Mama's method of parenting in this scene. How does she use humor, condition-setting, and an unsentimental acknowledgment of real danger to release her son without releasing her responsibility?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Large natural elevations of earth rising far above the surrounding land; here also the domain Daisy's guardian is said to protect.
Item 2
The parts of the human body where the arms join the trunk; a place from which hair or a robe can 'hang way down.'
Item 3
Open footwear held on with straps; in iconography, often worn by biblical and ancient figures.
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Critical Thinking
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