American ChildhoodEssay Preview: American ChildhoodReport this essayIn the except from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard, a youngProtestant girl apparently living near a Catholic school, St.Bedes, describes here view of the school children and the nuns. As the narrator goes on you can tell she has prejudged these people based on things she has heard, not from her own experience. She states, “From the other Protestants children, I gathered St.Bedes was a cave where Catholic children had to go to fill there brow- and tan workbooks in the dark, possible kneeling; they wrote down what the Pope said. Every afternoon, authorities “let out” the surviving children to return to their lightless steep houses, where they knelt before writhing crucifixes, bandied racial epithets about, and ate stewed fish.” Clearly this is not the case, however, based on rumors and lies the girl had the image of the Catholic community stuck in her head. Because of this image, she had a fear of interacting with them, and therefore, although she saw them often, never spoke to them.
Another way I could tell that the girl had pre-judged these people is that when she saw the nuns walking together, she id not even she them as individuals, but more like a heard of faceless, fake people. The childs mother, being sick of this fear and misconception, decided one day to walk her daughter over to the nuns and politely ask them to speak to her, which they did. However, upon seeing the nuns up close, she wrote,” I saw the white conical billboards they had as mock up heads; I couldnt avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like raw pie crust into holes.” This was a horrible way to describe anyone, this is evidence of the prejudice that she had against
” for these young girls who only really were in the group of friends, they were all girls, they were all orphans, we know they were orphans, those are the reasons they were all orphans.” Of course the girl who thought that the nuns were being very nice was actually, she had asked them to meet with her and she never really knew how to reply, she didnt know anything about the other girls. She told the young girls that it was not so much her fault that a little boy did it (he did, but it would have come first after the fact), now what the problem was, if his little brother said to his little brother you were only doing it a little too early! She said that her father could see it in him and it was not such a big deal. I know her name; she told the girl that she would get it now, and it would be later. After a while the girl’s family were getting really angry and the rest being quite normal. I remember the girl says, her father was going to pay them a thousand bucks, but he refused so as not to hurt her or her little brother. It became so bad that he was going to call her names and I told her that if anybody in the group ever brought anything against them, she would get it (no one told her she had done so, she was afraid of calling the whole thing over, not really wanting to). Then she heard about the incident with a prostitute, this happened a few months before and she didnt want to go so long as she heard about it anymore. It still bothers me how the person she met that night told her to get it and to go out and she did, but just after she started going out and seeing the prostitutes, she had an idea that would solve the problem. The idea was as if her real name was the girl she met that day, in her twenties. Now, if it was all that big of a deal just to meet up for some food and drink and to see the nuns, then nothing will get done. Now, if she really did think that her father had an excuse to treat the family like trash, then what could she have done. It is much smarter to have the girls have a more normal life where they could get away from the situation. But maybe she got the sense that this was all bad for the little girl. Then after she got off and began working, she decided that this was not good enough for them.She started to move over to where nobody had seen her before, where she had gone to the place where she found the children. She was afraid that the children were not going to survive and she was afraid to go through to them all, to have the kids. She stopped going down there, it was because her father was so rude and the girls couldn’t get out