Everything That Rises Must Converge

This story is very melancholy. I immediatley recognized the relationship between the mother and her son as one I've seen before a million times. A woman who talks too much, a man who puts up with her because he's obligated or feels bad. Julian's mother seemed to be completley oblivious in her own little world. Throughout the story she talks a lot of her past, her mind seems to be stuck there, ""Since this was a fashionable nieghborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child." (O'Connor 401). Julian's mother embarrassed him with her old fashioned ideas and way of thinking. She views african americans almost as if they were like pets, or a horse or something. Her grandfather owned a plantation with over 200 slaves. She thought they were better of that way, and talks of how she cared for them like you would an animal. When she talks like this her son becomes angry, and makes a point to sit by an african american man. I do not necessarily think badly of her, she was a widow and worked to put her son through college and support him. Her family came from money and she sacrificed everything, I believe that living in the past and constantly thinking about better days was her escape so she didn't need to see how bad things had gotten. She could be proud of who she was in the past.