Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self
Storyboard Text
- That girl's a little mess
- Two Years Later
- "When I rise to give my speech I do so on a great wave of love and pride and expectation."
- "One day while I am standing on top of our makeshift "garage" pieces of tin nailed across some poles-holding my bow and arrow and looking out toward the fields."
- If you tell, we will get a whipping. You don't want that to happen do you?
- "I feel an incredible blow in my right eye. I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun."
- "Both brothers run to my side. My eye stings, and I cover it with my hand."
- "If I do not say this is what happened, I know my brothers will find ways to make me wish I had. "
- "Confronted by our parents we stick to the lie agreed upon."
- "He asks, looking into my eye and shaking his head. "Eyes are sympathetic," he says. "If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too."
- Why did you wait so long to come?
- "For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head."
- "When I don't answer (I cannot decide whether is was an "accident" or not), they shove me, insist on a fight."
- What's the matter with your eye?
- A couple years later
- Congratulations
- "My brother, the one who created the story about the wire, comes to my rescue. But then brags so much about "protecting" me, I become sick."
- "Understanding my feelings of shame and ugliness he and his wife take me to a local hospital, where the "glob" is removed by a doctor named O.Henry."
- Mommy, there is a world in your eye.
- "Now that I've raised my head classwork comes from my lips as faultlessly as Easter speeches did, and I leave high school as valedictorian..."
- "She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands."
- "Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyerlike as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: Mommy, there's a world in your eye."
- "Yes indeed, I realized, looking into the mirror. There was a world in my eye. And I saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision."
- Work Cited Walker, Alice. "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self." Women in Literature, edited by Dodie Forrest, Bedford/St. Martin's Macmillan Learning, 2019, pp. 109-115.
- "That night I dream I am dancing to Stevie Wonders' song "Always." As I dance, whirling and joyous, happier than I've ever been in my life, and another bright-faced dancer joins me."
- "The other dancer has obviously come through all right, as I have done. She is beautiful, whole and free. And she is also me."
- Image Attributions: (https://pixabay.com/vectors/thinking-thought-bubbles-153993/) - OpenClipart-Vectors - License: Free for Most Commercial Use / No Attribution Required / See https://pixabay.com/service/license/ for what is not allowed
Image Attributions
- https://pixabay.com/vectors/thinking-thought-bubbles-153993/ - OpenClipart-Vectors - (License Free for Most Commercial Use / No Attribution Required / See https://pixabay.com/service/license/ for what is not allowed )
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