Feathers
by: Jacqueline Woodson
In Feathers, Frannie experiences life in the 1970s on one side of the highway that divides the town between the white people on the other side and the African-American people on hers. She did not give the divide much thought, but soon a white student joined her classroom and the teacher read a poem of hope, and her thoughts suddenly became very profound for a child.
I loved this book. I started placing note cards in the pages that had something I wanted to mark. I just counted; I placed 33. When the point is to use note cards to remind me of important bits that I want to talk about, I think I placed too many. First, I love this poem by Emily Dickinson. I appreciated that it was referenced throughout the book, and not in some artificial, awkward way, but in a way that shows how a child might be able to grasp a concept so profound.
Frannie was amazing with wonderful insight and a very compassionate heart, but I find myself really wanting to discuss her friend Samantha, and especially what her character illustrates about hope. Samantha spends a large portion of the book convinced that the new kid is Jesus. Her reasoning is a little iffy here (and I'm not going to get into the political ramifications of the popular claim in the book that Jesus is white), but this is what she knows, and she finds hope in this. She has placed her hope in her religion, but she, like so many other people do, saw a chance for physical proof of her hope and when that was taken away, she was unable to find any hope in her life on their side of the highway, even the hope that existed before the Jesus Boy was known.
This doesn't seem to make sense in light of Emily Dickinson's poem. And I think this is a key point. True hope, the kind displayed by Frannie doesn't give up, it "never stops at all." What then did Samantha have? I am not exactly sure, but it was not real. She placed a blind faith into something, into a little boy, but she didn't have hope. Her reaction to Frannie's comments ("Maybe there's a little bit of Jesus inside of all of us...maybe Jesus is that hope you were feeling."), "You don't make any kind of sense," showcases this perfectly. Frannie sees the world with maybes, trying to find the good, trying to find the point of it all, living with hope. Samantha can't see it because she doesn't have the hope that Frannie had been jealous of most of the book. Hope is not something to hold over people or feel superior because it is had, it is the friend who goes to church just because you ask her to, the friend who plays pinball with new student who doesn't know where he belongs. Hope is not something you look for or depend on other people to provide, it is something found within yourself, something you cherish, something that can't be destroyed. Frannie kept her hope. Frannie's mother kept her hope despite the devastating pain of her past miscarriages. But Samantha is still looking for hope because outside of herself, and she can't find it there because like the poem says, it's in her soul.
