revelation1
The story opens with Ruby Turpin entering a doctor's waiting room with her husband Claud who has been kicked by a cow. As she and Claud wait, she takes hard stock of the other people in the room. There was some white-trash, a "red- headed youngish woman" who was not white-trash, just common, a well-dressed, pleasant looking lady, and her daughter, an ill-mannered ugly girl in Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks who was reading a book titled Human Development. Listening to the Gospel song playing on the radio in the background, Mrs. Turpin's "heart rose. [Jesus] had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you!" A few moments later, agreeing with the pleasant lady in regard to her ugly tempered daughter that "'It never hurt anyone to smile,'" Mrs. Turpin notes, "If it's one thing I am, . . .it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been beside myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' . . .'Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!' she cried aloud." Suddenly the book Human Development
She saw the streak [of the setting sun] as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Challenging God to go on and call her a wart hog from hell, to put the top rung on the bottom, she yells out "There'll still be a top and a bottom!" Shaking with fury, she demands of God, "Who do you think you are?" In a final vision, something akin to the great medieval leveling of death and damnation and salvation forces itself upon her. Badgered into traveling down a rutted dirt road that the grandmother mistakenly thinks will lead to an old plantation, they do have an accident. The vision shows her how--considered by God no more worthy than white-trash, or niggers, or freaks--she can be both a wart hog before the judgment seat of God and saved, too. " Haunted by this command, Ruby Turpin spends the rest of the day in puzzlement and concentration. In painful clarity, Ruby Turpin recognizes, as one critic put it, "the inadequacy of her respectability and the shallowness of her values" (Pepin 26). " And the thought is grimly prophetic. Finally, while hosing down the hog pen that evening she whispers to God in a fierce voice, "What do you send me a message like that for?" "How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?" If students can understand the answer to this question, they can understand the medieval notion of Original Sin. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. Turpin asks "'What you got to say to me?'" waiting, as O'Connor says "as for a revelation. " "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog" [the girl] whispered. " Nurse, doctor, and mother scramble to subdue the ugly girl.
Common topics in this essay:
Ruby Turpin,
Dante O'Connor,
Listening Gospel,
Challenging God,
Human Development,
Original Sin,
Girl Scout,
Jesus Jesus,
Sin Struggling,
ruby turpin,
wart hog,
thank thank,
,
ugly girl,
jesus thank,
original sin,
human development,
thank thank thank,
students understand,
|
Acceptance Essays
