When We Look Up

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When We Look Up Linda J. Gibens Ivy Tech Community College English 111 When We Look Up The story written by Alice Walker “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” (Reid, 2011, ps. 94-100) is a story about a girl who has to overcome an accident that physically changes her life. She has a large family that has very little money. The setting is a bright summer day in 1947, back in time when things seemed to be a lot simpler, or were they? Her father worked as a driver for a rich old woman and her mother worked as a maid and took care of the children. In the summer of 1952, Alice was playing “cowboys and Indians” with her brothers and she was hit in the eye with a BB gun pellet causing her to become blind in that eye. She suffered permanent eye damage and facial disfigurement from the accident (GradeSaver, 2013). A once happy, bubbly, outgoing little girl now becomes a girl who doesn’t even what to be around others. You know how cruel others can be when you are not perfect. The problem she was having was not that she was blind but that she looked different. There is now a big white “blob” in the middle of her eye and “prays every night for beauty not sight” (Reid, 2011, p. 98). Just before her accident her family had moved to a new town. She was doing so poorly in the new school that her parents decided to let her go stay with her grandmother that way she can go back to her old school where her friends were. She lived with her defective eye until one day when she was 14 years old, her brother Bill, who she babysat for, feels sympathetic for her took her to a doctor in Boston where they removed the “glob” out of her eye. Almost immediately she regained all of herself that she had lost so many years ago. She continued to go on with her life with a better outlook even when things are bad she still has an uplifted spirit. She finally realizes how

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