|
|
It is human nature to look for happiness. Some people find it in material possessions, some find it in money, but most of us find it in love. To find true love is a difficult task especially now in the times of cell phones and Jaguars. Money and power play a big role in today’s society, and some people would rather have those things than a love of another human being. In some rare cases it is not even a person’s decision who she (almost every time it’s a woman who is being given away) will marry. Although it does not happen very often, there are still cases where a woman is being married off to a man by an arrangement made by her parents, to insure stability and security of that woman. The standing in the community means a great deal. Janie was raised by her grandmother. Since Janie’s mother ran away it was just the two of them. As a kid Janie lived in the house where her grandmother was a nanny for a white family. She was treated the same as the white children, they ate together, played together, even got punished together. Janie, unlike most of the blacks at that time, did not see any discrimination while she was growing up. That was the building block of her strong personality. There was some teasing in school about her living in a white folks home, but she did not pay much attention to that. Nanny’s dream was for Janie to maintain a position of security in society, “high ground” as she put it. Nanny felt that it is both her right and obligation to impose her dreams and her ideas of what is important in life on Janie. From that, of course, came a big conflict. As the book shows the strong relationship between mother and child is important in the African-American community, and the conflict between Janie’s idyllic view of marriage and Nanny’s wish for her to marry for stability and position is a good illustration of just how deep the respect and trust runs. Janie had a very romantic notion of what marriage should be. “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace .
|
