color

Colors can be used to describe a person’s actions and personality. The color that I feel describes me is black. Black is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown, such as black holes in space. It usually has a negative meaning, in words such as blacklist, black humor, Black Death. Black represents strength and authority, and is considered to be a formal, elegant, and prestigious color, in clothing such as a black suit and tie. A black suit or dress can make you look thinner, when designing for a gallery of art or photography; people usually use a black background to make the other colors stand out. Black contrasts well with bright colors, and when it is combined with red or orange, it creates a very aggressive color scheme.

I feel black is the descriptive color of me. I feel this because of its association with mystery. Not many people know me well, and think I am somewhat mysterious, or have no opinion whatsoever. People usually label people they do not know as a certain type; I feel that not many people know me well enough to put a label on me. The mysteriousness of the color black describes me, due to not many people knowing who I really am or anything like that.

Sig Obj

There is a broken quad rack in my garage. The quad rack is very beat up, and is useless. We moved into our new house during my 8th grade year, and stayed at my grandpa’s house, while he was still alive, during 7th grade, so I would guess that is was about the summer before 6th grade, and school had just let out for summer. Our pool was open and the weather was nice outside. My friend, Chase, and I went cruising around on one of my family’s quads in our back woods, which had awesome quad and dirt bike trails. Anyway, we went “off-roading” in a sense because we had left the trails. Behind the trails, in the back woods, there is a somewhat shallow stream in which was about a foot or two deep. Chase and I decided we wanted to cross the stream and go riding over by Wantage Avenue. The banks of the stream were somewhat steep, and some had lips on them that your tires would get caught on, and cause you to flip over. I decided to give it a try and tried riding up one of the banks which had a lip. It was a very bad move. We had made it all the way to the top of the bank, and then terror struck both of us. The quad flipped up at a 90 degree angle, and somehow did not land on us. Both, Chase and I, fell off, him first because he was riding on the back of the quad. Then I landed on him, which softened my fall. As Chase fell onto the rocks at the bottom of the stream, the back rack of the quad fell off due to some corrosion, and screws falling out. The rack was mangled. Chase and I did not know what to do, we had just had a near death experience, and the back rack of the quad had broken off, and we felt that it was our fault, and that it had fallen off. We panicked, and thought that we would get in a lot of trouble and never be allowed to ride a quad again. After e pushed the quad back over onto its tires, we tried to fix the rack, and make it look like it had never fallen off. Right after we finished our satisfactory job, we turned the quad around and drove back to my house, which was not a far ride at all. Once we had arrived back to my house, my dad noticed right away that the rack did not look right, and questioned us on why it looked different than what it did before. We told him the story of what happened and he understood, and was happy we were okay. Neither Chase nor I got in trouble for the broken rack, because it was neither of our faults. Soon after my dad questioned us on the rack, he too it off and put it into the garage hoping to maybe repair it and put it back on the quad sooner or later. Years have passed, and we have moved from place to place, and we still have the mangled rack from the quad. It sits right in our garage between my dad’s Acura and my Honda. I walk past it every day, and it reminds me that I need to live life to the fullest, and that there is no guarantee that I will be back tomorrow. That rack symbolizes how close to death or serious injury I really was, and that I am lucky to still be here today.

Color of Water Review

The authors recreate a vivid picture of many settings throughout the memoir. A majority of the memoir takes place in the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn, New York, and in Suffolk, Virginia. The authors describe location and feeling, which allows you to feel like you are there. The authors’ descriptions help to allow you to close your eyes, and see a picture of the location.
The authors allow you to feel like you the main characters on a personal scale. James stated, “Mameh's sisters were more about money than anything else, and any hurts that popped up along the way, they just swept them under the rug. They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.” The characters can be seen through colorful descriptions of the characters actions throughout the memoir. James also said,” I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.” I like the characters, the authors’ descriptions of them allow me to see who they really are, and everything seems to be properly in place, and the way it’s supposed to be.
The memoir is told through two point-of-views, James and his mother, Ruth. James is one of 12 children, and his father died before he was born. His mother, Rachel, whom changed her name to Ruth, is a white Jewish woman, while James is an African-American boy. Ruth is one of three children, and her brother died in World War II. Ruth was disowned by her family for marrying an African-American man. Her father was a very religious man, and cheap, but paid for things that could make him money in the future, such as sewing lessons for Ruth and her sister.

The Color of Water

"Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bad to stand upright."--Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin tells of how people’s spirits are down when they are poor. The McBride family proves him wrong. James is happy, although his family is deeply in poverty, and they have very little possessions. Besides being greatly in poverty, his whole family is black, other than his mother. His whole family lives in the projects of New York City and both of his fathers have died, his biological father and step father. He, and his mother, was discriminated against by a store keeper because James had purchased sour milk, and his mother wanted to return it, and the store keeper went nuts on him for being black, and also his mother for having a black child. He keeps his head up high, although his family is in horrible poverty.