Literacy Narrative Draft

Storm E. Fort
Mr. Harland Jones
GSW 1110
1 September 2015
Where Can I Get More?
“Is it really only the first chapter and I’m in this deep? I might read ahead because this is so good.” I’ve never been so excited to read an assigned book from school. Usually the things we’re assigned to read for English classes are a little more critical or boring. I knew I loved me Ms. Taylor for a reason. I didn’t love my teacher just because of the book, but because she was genuine all of them time. She proved me right after reading this book.
Every year in Ms. Taylor’s 11th grade English class she uses the same curriculum for every 11th grader she gets. All the upperclassmen from Ms. Taylor’s previous years told her current students that they’d like the end of the year. I wondered what was special about the end of the year in an English class, specifically. Maybe it was Ms. Taylor’s English class and it was. There were two books, No Disrespect by Sister Souljah and The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore. I thought it would be a gender based because one book was solely about a man and one was solely about a woman, but that wasn’t the case either. Each student could choose between either book. It was a catch to one book No Disrespect; we had to get a permission slip signed. Apparently it was too vulgar for juniors in high school so our parents had to sign off for it. Anything getting my mom’s permission to read a book seemed interesting so I chose that one to read.
Ms. Taylor assigned the first 40 or so pages on the first night because she was out of her mind. Those 40 pages were equivalent to the length of the first chapter. “Read the first chapter” sounds a lot better than “Read the first 40 or so pages” to me. 40 pages or 40 chapters I still had to read the section for our class discussions. I began reading the first chapter and she’s explaining her family and who they were. She gave vivid descriptions of their looks which was not the most intriguing thing, but that was prepping the audience for something unexpected.
The author explained how her life wasn’t easy living in the projects in New York as an African American. Sister Souljah and I had two things in common: spirituality and Afrocentricity. Sister Souljah’s story changed my mindset about my myself and the people around me. I wanted to learn more about the author’s life because it was so much different from mine. The big surprise about No Disrespect was Sister Souljah only shared significant points in her life. Each chapter was in a different time frame and led up to where she was at the moment. I thought that was pretty cool because it wasn’t a cliché autobiography about herself. The second chapter pulled me into the book itself and at that moment I was all in. Each word and emotion felt like they were my own and that’s how I treated them. I laughed, I cried, I thought long and hard about the questions being asked to each character in the book. I got anxious about what would happen on the next few pages that I’d peak at the next few pages. I fell in love with the thought of love for other people. I enjoyed hearing stories about tough love, romance, and heartaches.