The first day is about a little girl and her first encounter with the school system and her first experience of her mother as an illiterate.
This September morning the little girl in this story is being dressed up in new clothes inside and out to go to school for the very first time.
Her mother spends a lot of time making the girl pretty for school, she plaits and replaits the girls hair and she even lets her borrow some perfume, which the father had given the mother as a gift and after having eaten milk and oatmeal with brown sugar the girl is ready for school.
The two main characters of this story, the girl and the mother, walk through the city from their home on 1227 New Jersey Avenue to Seaton´s Elementary School at I street.
The school is old and has seen better days, but it is across the street from the mother?s church.
A woman in Seaton´s Elementary School tells the mother that they are in the wrong school, and that they have to go to Walker-Jones instead.
The mother asks a lot of questions as to why they cannot stay in this school, but after a while she resigns and as they leave the school the little girl asks: Mama, I can´t go to school? Where after the mother replies: One monkey don?t stop no show.
When mother and child get to Walker-Jones, it is revealed to the little girl that the mother is capable of neither reading nor writing; luckily a woman who is also enrolling her daughter in Walker-Jones can help the mother filling in all papers needed to enrol the daughter in school.
Ironically the woman who helped the mother by filling out all the forms is to be the little girl?s teacher.
After the enrolment the mother leaves the school and all the little girl can hear is her mothers foot steps as she walks away, leaving the girl behind.
This abstract was checked by WhiteSmoke Solution.
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