when she was only nine, and if her father was not out of the house drunk, then he would be in the house drunk. At the very beginning of the book she described her family like this, “Everything was so wrong like somebody had knocked something loose and my family was shaking itself to death. Some wild ride broke and the one in charge strolled off and let us spin and shake and fly off the rail.” (2) Communication is a key factor in having a “successful” family. One could never find Ellen’s father communicating with her positively. If he ever talked to her, he was demanding from her food, or sex. One day at Ellen’s school her father came in the middle of naptime saying that he would pay Ellen for sex. This is the closest he came to being actively involved and part of Ellen’s educational career. “Get the hell out of here is what he told me to do… he stepped out of the truck waving some cash money and telling Ellen dammit to come back he would pay for it” (54). Ellen was very used to this behavior; after he left she was not worried about him, all she wanted to know was if he had left the money. Another time when her father communicated with her was when her mother had taken an overdose of pills and was dying. Ellen remarks, “ Well I’ll just go to the store and use the telephone.... But my daddy says he will kill me if I try to leave this house.” (9) Ellen had to be a very strong person to put up with such a terrible father.Ellen changes her view on people with different cultural/racial/and ethnic backgrounds drastically throughout the book. At the beginning of the book, she would not even eat a biscuit at her friend Starletta’s house because they were black even though she knew that she was starving and might not get something to eat that night: “Starletta slides out of her chair and her mama says to take something you better eat… She came at me w...
