Where The Lilies Bloom Character Analysis

Throughout Where the Lilies Bloom by Vera and Bill Cleaver incidents happen after another that affect the Luther family. The Luthers are growing up on farm land and are sharecroppers. Roy Luther, the father, is very sick and knows he isn’t going to live much longer. The Luthers do not have much money and their father passes away. Before he dies, he leaves a list of rules for Mary Call to obey whether she agrees or disagrees. Mary Call has a great amount of responsibility and is having trouble with life. When the family faces the crisis of the roof collapsing and the chair shattering from the blizzard, Mary Call reacts differently from her emotional siblings Romey and Devola. When the roof falls Mary Call was different in the way she reacted to the falling of the roof. Mary Call is emotionless and jokes about the situation. When her siblings all gather in the room to see what happened, she says, “Nothing… I just thought the ceiling would look better lying on the floor than hanging up. What do you think? Come in and have a seat and tell me” (153). Mary Call is surprised that the ceiling fell and shatters their mother's rocking chair. She already has

Like their rocking chair, Romey is shattered by the loss of the one valved. Romey, “Knelt and put both his hands down on the fractured back of the rocker. His face silently convulsed. He stoked the rocker and the tears came to his eyes” (154). Romey gets very emotional and is sad that their mother’s chair is broken. He gets very upset that the roof broke the last thing left they had from their mother. However, Mary Call thinks he overreacts. She thinks that he didn’t need to cry over it. She says, “A sissy, I thought. My brother’s turned into a real sissy, sniveling over a little thing like this… no backbone” (155) Mary Call is calling Romey a sissy, just like her father. Romey reacts differently then the way Mary Call reacts to the shattering of the rocking