Freedom's Faults -Feathers

In "Feathers" by Jacqueline Woodson, Frannie lives in an almost all african-american neighborhood. Across the highway there is the all white neighborhood. No one really knows much about the other side, but they imagine it. Frannie's brother Sean says, "Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side." Frannie gets upset because she thinks that life is just as good over here as it is over there, and she doesn't understand what he would want to see there that he couldn't see here, on their side.

One line that really stood out to me was "Seems kids on this side of the highway were always trying to figure out ways to fly and run and cross  over things... to get free or something." She says this both after her brother talks about building a bridge to the other side, and after a boy in her school gets hurt trying to jump over the fence from a swing. The way she said "to get free or something" is what really stood out to me. Free from what? Maybe freedom always has boundaries, you always imagine it much better than it is.

Growing up, I've always wanted to have freedom. Freedom with my parents, my teachers. But then there's always the down side that the more freedom you have the more responsibility you have. If you think about it you're never actually free from your parents, because in the back of your mind every decision you make you are thinking about what they would want you to do and what they would do. So without even being there they are still sort of controlling you. So freedom has these boundaries that you maybe can never break out of. Then what would be free about going to the other side? It wouldn't be as good or as free as you thought it would be

Across The Highway

I just started reading "Feathers" by Jacqueline Woodson in which a sixth grader named Frannie goes to a public school that only has African Americans attending. "Across the highway" there are other schools where only caucasians go. Until a new boy shows up at the school, a new white boy. This boy is picked on by the other students and told straight up by one of them that "no pale faces go to this school. You need to get your white butt back across the highway." Frannie says "It's the nineteen seventies, not the fifties. There's no more segregation..." That's what I was thinking too... But white people only going to the schools "across the bridge" and black people only going to this school, that sure sounds a lot like segregation to me.

This book is set a good 40 years ago, and some things have changed since then, but i still think about segregation today. Growing up in New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world I still think about what has changed since segregation (which is of course a lot) and what hasn't changed that much. I've always gone to public schools that are plenty diverse, but just because the school has many different races doesn't mean they're all going to get along. At a certain age we all begin seeing the differences between everyone, and because maybe we think that how we were brought up and what we look like is the one good way to be, or maybe because we don't feel that comfortable with people that don't look and act exactly like us, we end up mostly friending people of similar backgrounds to us and who look like us.

Something that stood out to me is how the author keeps saying "across the highway". I know that in the story there is a real place "across the highway", but is it really to the people talking about it? I feel like these kids imagine this place where the white people are as a rich, snobby, happy place where nothing goes wrong, but it probably isn't anything like they imagine it, and they had just imagined a stereotypical white neighborhood. But don't stereotypes affect how we imagine things a lot?

I'm going through the New York City high school process, and one thing that has had a big part on which school I want to go to, is who goes there. Some schools people had said were "ghetto" or in a bad neighborhood. And so I got these stereotypical images in my mind about how those schools were. But one or two of the "ghetto" schools turned out to be so different than I had imagined and a pretty good school. We let stereotypes control how we think about certain places or people, and I think that may be the one big thing keeping us from really seeing who these people are, and that they are actually not so different from us.