The second day in Welch is a Sunday, and the children awake to Uncle Stanley listening to a radio church program. He tells them the strange noises they hear are people speaking in tongues, and the preacher speaks in a hillbilly accent so thick that it's almost as hard to understand as the speaking in tongues. Dad says, It's the sort of soul-curdling voodoo that turned me into an atheist.
Later in the day, Mom and Dad take the kids on a tour of the town. Dad explains that Welch is surrounded on all sides by such steep mountains that it feels like you are looking up from the bottom of a bowl. Nothing can be grown or raised on those hills so it had been mostly deserted until the turn of the century when robber barons laid railroad track and brought in cheap labor to dig out huge fields of coal. The name of the river that runs through the town is the Tug, and the kids think it might be good for fishing or swimming. Dad just laughs and says that is impossible, because the town's sewer system empties into the river. It has the highest level of fecal bacteria than any river in North America.
In the town itself, all the stores, signs, sidewalks, and cars are covered
with a film of black coal dust. It is shabby and worn out, but had once
been a place on its way up. You can tell that the people are still trying
to maintain some pride of place by advertising what they can boast about.
However, even these cheerful signs are faded and nearly illegible. Bad
times had come in the 1950's, and the poverty of the area attracted President
John F. Kennedy, who personally handed out the first food stamps to show
the rest of America that there really was severe poverty in their country.
The road through Welch only leads up further up into the forbidding mountains
and on to other dying coal towns. Strangers in the town are few and far-between
and almost all strangers who come there come to bring misery in one form
or another: to lay-off workers, shut down a mine, foreclose on someone's
house, or compete for the few jobs available. The townspeople don't like
strangers very much. They don't nod, speak or even look their way until
they have passed by. Mom first observes that things have gone downhill
a little since they had been there before, but she grins when she realizes
that there probably aren't any other career artists who live there and
her career can no doubt take off in Welch.
This entire section not only gives the reader insight into how Dad's
character was molded by the family he was born into and the town where
he lived, but it is also a metaphor for Mom and Dad and the life they
have lived together: a little out and faded, depressing and dark, and
going downhill from bad to worse.
On the third day in Welch, Mom takes Brian and Jeannette to Welch Elementary and enrolls them. She has no records from Phoenix so the principal begins to question the two kids to determine their skill levels. His accent is so thick that Mom has to translate for the kids, and then he can't understand the kids' accent. As a result, he places them in special classes for students with learning disabilities.
When the kids leave for their first day of school, Mom advises them to impress others with their intelligence and not to be afraid to be smarter than they are. However, the very fact that they're different is enough to create problems right from the beginning. Jeannette goes to school in a thrift-shop coat that has no buttons, and she is amazed that there is no playground equipment. When she smiles at a tall black girl, the girl smiles back, but her smile is malicious rather than sincere.
Jeannette is in the fifth grade and changes classes over several periods. Her first two teachers don't even take the time to introduce her as if they are as uncertain about how to behave around a stranger as the students are. In her English class, the teacher is mean-spirited and points out to the other students that it is unfair that some people think they are so special that they don't need to have records to enroll in their school. This immediately makes the students laugh at her and become willing to turn on her. The tall black girl who is sitting behind Jeannette then stabs her in the back with a pencil.
At lunch, Jeannette sits all alone and has to eat two pieces of Wonder
bread with lard in the middle, made by Erma. She is the last one to go
out on the playground, because she knows what's going to happen. And she's
right: the girls surround her, and the tall black girl asks if she thinks
she's better than them. Jeannette says that they're all equal, but the
girls aren't satisfied with that answer either, because they want her
to be beneath them. They push her down and begin kicking and hurting her.
There is no stopping them until they have their fill.
The school in Welch is a reflection of the despair and anger the people of the town live under. They turn on anyone who is different as means of claiming even a modicum of power. The adults are just as bad, if not worse, than the kids, and Jeannette becomes their victim through no fault of her own.
Clapsaddle, Diane. "TheBestNotes on A Long Way Gone".
TheBestNotes.com.
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