Summer part 2

I read the post by HMK about the first half of the book. The points she made were very good about the two passages she picked.
The first passage she picked was talking about the treatment that Charity received from Mr. Royall and Miss Hatchard telling her that she needed to just put up with Mr. Royall because she owed him for taking her out of the mountain. I too thought Mr. Royall to be awful in the first half of the book but as I read through the second part of the book I did notice that he seemed to really care for Charity. He had many flaws but he never let himself disrespect her or give her reason to fear him. Even after she has turned him down twice when he asks her to marry him, he still treats her somewhat decent and lets her live in his house. I saw that he was an okay man to Charity and even though she didn't love him you knew at the end of the book that he would take care of her.

The second passage that HMK picked was the passage where Charity and Harney go to the brown house. After leaving there Charity breaks down a little and cries. Harney comforts her and they share a moment. I agree with how HMK made comaprisons to the stories "Schooldays of an Indian Girl" and "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eruasian", in all of the stories the girs are made fun of and looked down upon for where they have come from, their background. I also thought of a comparison to "When I was Growing Up" when I read the book Summer. Both the asian girl in the poem and Charity in the story wish they were different and see themselves as unfit or "unclean" because they are from different places. I also noticed how odd it was through the book Summer, that at first Charity doesn't want to be from the mountain people, then she decides to join them, then she retreats from their ways again and finally decides that is no place for her and her child. She struggles throughout the book with being from the mountains. This reminded me of a sort of narrative one might see today in our culture, either someone struggling with being from the ghetto or from the trailer park or etc. There are so many movies that depict this struggle that it seems that it is a narrative overlooked a lot of times. But I still feel that it is one that is given too much attention. I think that at the end of the book however that Charity has overcome a bit of the struggle. She gets some closure by seeing her mother's body and then realizes that no matter what, she does not belong on the mountain and her final thoughts are what really set her mind to leave. Her final thought was that the mountain was not the place she wanted to raise her baby. Even though she doesnt like where she is from she still accepts it in the end I think.