preview

Florence Gith Joyner Analysis

Decent Essays
Open Document

Sometime in the summer, a silver-bearded prophet came to my house. He discerned pain here, he said, staring into my mother’s eyes. The prophet held her hands and spoke softly until she told him about her nightmares, about how she was a Christian woman but lived in pain and slept without peace. Strolling into the living room, the prophet laid a stack of cards across the coffee table. These intuited the sources and meanings of dreams, he said as we sat on the couch. He arranged the cards in a way that made my mother cry. For Satan roamed free through the house, the cards showed, through the witchcraft in the books.
We didn’t read Harry Potter, Mom replied.
But there’s where so many Christians were fooled, the prophet said. I remember leaning …show more content…

I forgot about the books I had hidden. Every day, I did my homework mechanically. I went to bed on time. Then, I read every book I had left three times or more. I memorized “The Hollow Men” before I knew what it meant. I can still recite the biography of Florence Griffith Joyner. I still know every short story written and illustrated by Joni Eareckson Tada.
When I finally cleaned my room, I found Heir Apparent. I stared at it for a while, in its hiding spot. I held it to my chest and smelled the pages. I decided to relocate it to my bed so I could read it later that night, which is when I found the two Artemis Fowl books. I read all three, cover to cover, overnight. Then, I returned them to their hiding places. I did this at least once a week until my mother forgot what those books were about, and then I placed them in the science section of my library. My mother says she has not had a nightmare since.
The prophet died the year that I went to college. After that, my mother forgot why she, as she remembers, banned the Narnia books. A giant version of all seven books in the series sits on the coffee table in our new house. My sisters read it, but I have not. I haven’t re-read anything that

Get Access
Related
Get Access