Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde did a wonderful job illustrating to her readers her educational experience that was the first grade. The way it was written made it very easy to picture the scene’s   she was painting and it felt like you were there with here experiencing her emotions and her life. Readers could tell that this was a big life event for her and that it was one that was still extremely vivid for her. Examples of this are when she is describing what happened between her, her mother and the librarian, “My mother was pinching my ear off one bright afternoon, while I lay spread-eagled on the floor of the Children’s Room like a furious little brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death.”  This sentence is a great example of how well she paints the pictures of her experience right before she found she wanted to learn to read.  A few great examples of her school experience with Sister Mary of Perpetual Help is when she sent a note home with Audre to give to her mother that stated, “…Not to dress me in so many layers of clothing because then I couldn’t feel the strap on my behind when I was punished.”  Another is, “She [Sister Mary of Perpetual Help] had divided up the lass into two groups, the Fairies and the Brownies. In this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don’t have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies.” Though these great descriptive sentences it is easy to tell that she went to school in a time where teachers were mostly disciplinarians and were able to use physical punishment in order to get their students to do their work.