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Family Ties Gloria Watkins wrote a passage called, “Keeping Close To Home,” which is about her leaving her family to go off to college and the hardship it caused. Watkins tells the reader about her many differences with her family and the conflicts they had to overcome as she left for college and pursued what she desired in life. She was the first of her family to love to read and believe that being smart could make her a better person and help achieve her goals. On the other hand her family was against her continuous thirst for knowledge and truly thought that reading too much would drive her insane. Watkins is a very strong woman and although at first she hurt her family, in time, they overcame their differences and became connected once again. Watkins was an eighteen-year-old African American woman who lived a pretty sheltered life in a small town in Kentucky. She had come from a working class background and had never been on a city bus, never traveled by plane, and never even had stepped on an escalator. As she was brought up she loved and valued reading books, her parents would always supply the books but then would threaten to burn them if she did not conform to their expectations. They also, as I had said before, told Watkins that reading too much would drive her insane and their ambivalence nurtured to her like uncertainty about the value of intellectual endeavor that took years for Watkins to unlearn.
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