Joy Boothe Short Story

Joy Boothe´s short story “Jesse”, has to do with a young girl named Jesse. Throughout the story, we are following Jesse´s point of view as well as thoughts. The name “Jesse” encounters several times and appear as a meaningful name for the narrator. Themes such as racism, love, and ignorance, which will be accounted for later on. Joy Boothe leads her readers in many directions, she is changing the narrator’s perception throughout the story which makes it more interesting to read. It all ends out surprising the reader, despite the overwhelming start at the story.

The story takes place in 1957 at first where the narrator, Jesse, only is 5 years old. We are being thrown into the story “Jesse. I am five years old and I hate the name. It reminds

He is working at a plywood mill, this is not satisfying for the family, especially not for the narrator’s mom. She mentions that she wants him to get another job, but he answers by determining how difficult it is to get a job, which highlights the employment situation back then. The settings around his workplace is described in a degrading manner, “The mill is made of tin, roof and walls, and the tin is rusted full of holes” It is understandable that her mother is not happy about the father working there, because she is obviously concerned about

The narrator can tell that her dad likes him, “I like it when Daddy starts talking about a man named Jesse on his crew, mostly about what a hard worker he is or something funny he has said or done. I can tell Daddy likes him”. Jesse becomes an important character to the narrator, and one she looks up to. Although her dad likes Jesse, it does not change the fact that he cannot eat inside the house, because he is black. He is not allowed to eat with the narrator´s family, because blacks did not have the same rights, as white people at the time the story takes place. Our narrator has, in the beginning, a judgemental view on black people. This is because of her granny, “Granny has brought me up on stories about what nigger men do to little white girls if they get the chance. Some nights I have screaming dreams about her story of turpentine niggers raping and strangling a poor little white girl who took a wrong path on the way home from school and stiffing her dead body in a hollow log”. Once again racism is a factor, also the fact that they are referring to them as “niggers”. In spite of the narrator’s point of view, in the beginning, she begins to have her own opinion, this is because of Jesse, her dad’s workmate. Jesse is a victim of a terrible accident at work, which led him to lose his arm, but it was not only him who was hurt by this. The narrator´s dad was as