Anna Deavere Smith's Broken Sentences

In the text “Broken Sentences,” Anna Deavere Smith is informing the reader of the stories of African American females who are incarcerated. Before Smith incorporates the women’s stories into the text, Smith goes into a backstory of her childhood. She speaks of the quality of her childhood and tells it as not only pure, but also as a revealing time period. Also, she speaks of her experience with the prison setting during her time in the Girl Scouts. Smith encompasses this short anecdote to not only set up an ambience of innocences, but to also foreshadow the testimonies to come. Furthermore, her method of writing in this text is very peculiar because she writes in incomplete or “broken sentences.” Throughout the text, Smith first gives a brief

When Smith is going over the description of her room, she states that her room is “an O.K. place with a nice window that looks out over a graveyard which is scary, but she played in the snow there” (Deavere Smith 158). When Smith speaks of her “nice window looking out over a graveyard” she is using the window to symbolize her insight and the graveyard to symbolize the mystery and outrage of morality (Deavere Smith 158). Then, Smith uses snow to symbolize a blanket of obscuring truth and sadness. From this information, one may infer that, as an adolescent, Smith had insight of the horrors that surrounded her, but they were covered up so she would believe that the earth is pure. She understands that problems such as violence and racial turbulence are an issue in society, but she is taught to overlook them and believe that virtue truly exists everywhere. Furthermore, Smith begins to speak about disapproval that her mother displayed to her occasionally. Smith states that her mother “has an uncompromising disdain for run-on sentences, and for incomplete ones” (Deavere Smith 158). The information provided suggests that Smith stating this may foreshadow the writing style of the passage, hence, her writing in “broken sentences” (Deavere Smith 158). Also, Smith writing the passage in “broken sentences,” even though her mother

According to Smith, Vera Baton “is in prison for the murder” of “her boyfriend Sam” (Deavere 159). In Vera Baton’s defense, “she is protecting herself from her boyfriend Sam, who is coming at her with a steak knife, and threatening to kill her” (Deavere 159). During the altercation, Sam dies because “Vera grabs a knife, ‘tousles’ with him, then suddenly, the knife goes into his chest” (Deavere 159). Even though Vera is rightfully convicted of the manslaughter of her boyfriend Sam, she does not deserve to spend “eighteen years” in prison, because she only committed this iniquitous action due to self-defense (Deavere 159). Furthermore, Deavere states that another prisoner, Tyboria Stones, is sentenced because “she is charged with raping a woman” (Deavere 161). In Tyboria Stones’ defense, she says that she did not do it because “she does not see the point in going out to rape an old woman when she already has a woman” for herself (Deavere 161). Also, Tyboria’s case may have suffered from an added amount of prejudice, due to the fact that “she is stocky and muscular, with her hair trimmed very close to the sides, short and curly on the top” (Deavere 161). From this information, one may infer that the women here did not have the opportunities to bring their cases toward the legal system