Joel - Chapter 1

1) Identify and briefly define important words, terms, concepts, or characters.

So reading chapter one of Lady Sings the Blues the story opens finding out that mom and pop, parents of Elenora Fagan, were just kids 16, 17 and Elenora was 3 when they were married, but became pregnant and gave birth to Elenora before ever getting married. Sadie Fagan, mother of Elenora worked as a maid most of the time, but made a deal with the head nurse at the hospital to have Elenora there in exchange for scrubbing the floors. On April 7, 1915 in a Baltimore hospital Elenora was born.

By the time Sadie had paid the debt off to the hospital Elenora could sit up in the carriage when she was first seen by her grandparents. Her father peddled newspapers, ran errands.

Sadie takes jobs all over the country to pay the bills and make a nest egg for the family. Mean while her father things about playing the trumpet but gets gassed in WW I and learns to play the piano instead. While the war was on, Sadie worked in a war factory. Elenora lives with her cousin Ida, her two children Henry and Elsie, and her great-grandmother.

Everyone was crowded in a small house. Ida always abused Elenora. Elenora spread a blanket on the floor for her grandmother and fell asleep with her, only to wake to the death grip of a deceased grand-parent and became traumatized.

Elenora loved listening to the blues at the whore-house. She was almost raped by Mr. Dick and his wife. Elenora was sent away to a Catholic institution, run by Catholic sisters.

2) Summarize the main idea, theme, action, or event of the reading. Be sure to include quotation that best captures the overall feeling or mood of the reading.

Elenora grew up most of her child-hood with her cousin and grandparents. This remoteness from her mother, this enabled Elenora to see, experience, be forced into things that most children her age would never experience, if they did it would mostly be in their late teens or early twenties. Elenora started to listen to the blues played on an early record player in the front room of a whore-house. This started to give Elenora a bad reputation. Eventually Elenora's mother came back from living in New York, and Boston, to find out what her daughter had been doing and strongly disapproved. One day Mr. Dick was waiting for Elenora and told her, that she was to go with him and that her mother would pick her up from a friend’s house later. Well, it got very late and Elenora started to fall asleep, suddenly Mr. Dick was up upon her, trying to rape her. "A bitch can turn twenty-five hundred tricks a day and she still don't want nobody to rape her. (Elenora, pp15-16)

3) Formulate a question for discussion. The question should be relatively substantial, based upon a specified passage or scene from the text, and capable of sustaining a thoughtful discussion.

On page twelve Elenora speaks of disappointing her mother, and says that her mother was always afraid that Elenora would end up bad, and that her mother never hit her if she did something bad, rather she would just start to cry. Elenora speaks of one time “she would just cry, and I couldn’t stand it to see her cry. I didn’t want to hurt her, and I didn’t - until three years before she died, when I went on junk. “(Elenora, pp 12)

Did Elenora become a drug user, and if so was this the same thing that the boys were trying to get girls to do?