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Courtney Malott
Doctor Murdock
English 2089-Intermediate Composition
September 29th, 2015
Defining a Community, Defining you.
The neighborhood that John and Robby grew up in was not a very good one.
Communities were divided by controversy. The African American community were treated
unfairly in an attempt to establish the separate but equal clause, separating the Caucasians and
the African Americans. According to the beginning of the story Gar, a friend of Robbys was
admitted into the hospital and was ignored. The doctors and nurses did not believe he was
actually sick and just sent him on his way with some antibiotics. However, it came down to Gar
actually being deathly sick and he ended up being admitted into the hospital. An excerpt from the
story to support this was “They hid his messy death under white sheets, perfumed it with
disinfectant, pumped him full of drugs so he wouldn’t disturb his neighbors.” (Wideman 424)
The communities were torn apart by racism, gangs and drugs.
Gar was a good man who was dealt a bad hand. He didn’t ask to get sick and he certainly
didn’t ask to die. “Gar was gone when they stuck him up in the hospital bed.” (Wideman 424)
He had been sick the whole time but was never properly treated for it. Gar was like a brother,
like family to Robby and John. It was hard for the boys to see him being neglected. “Garths grin
was money in the bank, you could count on it like you could count on a good word from him.”
(Wideman 424)
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The neighborhood that the two grew up in could be described as a community where
everyone was family. This is important because it meant that they could trust one another with
everything, including their lives.
“My mother had been raised in Homewood. The old Homewood. Her relations with
people in that close-knit, homogenous community were based on trust, mutual respect, common
spiritual and material concerns. Face-to-face contact, shared language and values, a large fund
of communal experience rendered individual lives extremely visible in Homewood. Both a
person’s self-identity (“You know who you are”) and accountability (“Other people know who
you are”) were firmly established.” (Wideman 433-4)
The neighborhood relationships had an important aspect of the story because it meant that
the area that the two grew up in was a place that shaped them for the rest of their lives. John and
Robby were very different types of students. John was a good, educated student and Robby
would be described as a ‘rebel’ that wanted to stand out and he yearned to bend the rules as
much as possible. John and Robby both had different language styles, Robby’s language was
more of a ghetto slang kind of language, “Hey youall. We got to drink to Gar one last time.”
(Wideman 427) and John’s was a more educated and sophisticated language because he actually
wanted to learn something by absorbing as much information as possible,
“Whenever I visited home, sooner or later I’d find myself alone with Mom and she’s
pour out her fears about Robby;s wildness, the deep trouble he was bound for, the web of
entanglements and intrigues and bad company he was weaving around himself with a
maddening disregard for the inevitable consequences.” (Wideman 428)
There are several connections between the family/community and Robby’s upbringing.
Robby was filled with hatred and hardened by his past. The neighborhood streets were not a
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good place for young boys to grow up. They were very ruthless and evil. Since Robby was
exposed more to the kind of gang relations, he had experienced things that forced him to grow up
faster and be exposed to things that no young boy should ever have to be in contact with.
Drugs were a common thing that Robby seemed to be exposed to when it came to the
neighborhood, along with robbery. Robby actually supposedly participated in robberies before he
was placed in prison. John never affiliated himself with things that were bad for him then he had
a good moral upbringing. Whereas Robby wanted to be a rebel and affiliated himself with drugs
and hung out with the wrong people, that had a lot to do with Robby’s situation. Once Robby
ended up in jail nobody from his “crew” ever came to visit him, one day he was on top of the
world and in the blink of an eye he had hit rock bottom, hard.
“Whenever I visited home, sooner or later I’d find myself alone with Mom and she’s
pour out her fears about Robby;s wildness, the deep trouble he was bound for, the web of
entanglements and intrigues and bad company he was weaving around himself with a
maddening disregard for the inevitable consequences.” (Wideman 428)
Living in a specific community, you tend to adopt the principles of that community.
Humans are a species that spend their whole lives trying to fit in because they are are taught to
be unique but then are judged for it. So they find a community, or a group of people and we stick
with them even though they don’t necessarily like what they do. Being alone makes them
vulnerable, so they tend to stick with people in groups where they feel protected. Robby
happened to stick with the wrong crowd because the community he grew up was brutal and
ruthless. He stuck with the group of people and ended up paying for it. Robby needed someone
who was going to be able to send him off in the right direction, but instead he surrounded
himself with people whom only brought himself destruction and hardship.
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As humans we are identified by who we choose to affiliate ourselves with. Once we are
in a group of people, even though we may not be exactly like them, we will be identified with
them. Robby was not necessarily like the people he hung out with but they had a known
reputation and a lot of people knew this, and so they judged Robby as they judged the rest of his
“crew.”
Communities affect us all, but in different ways. They play a major part in how we
mature and how we grow. They are something that will stay with us forever, even long after we
have left them behind. Bad communities will leave deep scars, though they may not be visible,
they will always be there inside of us. Good communities will leave us not wanting to leave, they
keep their positive mark in our lives forever, a sense of pride and joy. Communities define us.
How does yours define you?
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Works Cited
Wideman, John Edgar. "Our Time." Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. David
Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, and Stacey Waite. Bedford/St. Martin's 2014. 422-59.
Print.