the children!

It would be easy to take something from my presentation and add it to the blog, but I don’t really want to do that. I decided to talk about something that Dr. Mitchell brought up when he was talking about the children.
Coral is almost too smart for her age, but she doesn’t seem to flaunt it with the whisky priest. With him, she is more interested in taking care of him. I think, because her father was away so often, she had to take care of her mother because her mother wouldn’t take care of herself. With the whisky priest, she seems to have felt a wanting to take care of him; maybe not in a loving kind of way, but more of a puppy kind of way because he couldn’t take care of himself. At that point, he was too afraid to leave the area because he was convinced that he was going to be captured and killed. Perhaps, though, when he drew the crosses in the barn, the reason that he drew them was a way to show Coral to not give up on her faith. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before I gave my presentation, but oh, well. I thought of it now.
Captain Fellows knows that his daughter is smarter than he is, and that doesn’t seem to bother him too much. When he comes back to his home for the first time in the book, he says that she has an answer for everything, “but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness.” I think he’s kind of scared of her because she has a worldliness that a thirteen year-old girl shouldn’t have. She’s lived in the same place—a banana plantation—and yet she knows more about how the world works than her father does. I have to think that would scare him.
With Brigitta (who is hilarious to me), she does remind me of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. I think that Pearl knows that her life has come out of a “sacrilegious” union between Hester and Arthur. When she meets him in the forest, she never lets him get really close without winding herself out of his arms. That reminds me so much of the whisky priest and Brigitta’s meeting at the trash heap. Both Pearl and Brigitta know that they are not treated like the other children because of who their fathers are, but I don’t know that they always act like they are less of a human because their parents were not supposed to have had relations.