If You Come Softly: A Literary Analysis

Imagine you were at the beach with your friends on a Tuesday afternoon, and about to go into the water, but you notice a sign that says, people with brown eyes are not permitted to go into the water on weekdays. Your friends have blue eyes so they happily go into the water splashing away, but you have brown eyes so you cannot go into the water, In life, people experience social injustice and unfair treatment for no valid reason. In the realistic fiction book If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson, the young adult novel Sold by Patricia McCormick, and the true story Parallel Journeys by Eleanor Ayer, the authors prove that social injustice can occur when people get judged based on characteristics that they are unable to change about themselves.

Once Lakshmi becomes a woman she can play a bigger role in pleasing her stepfather because she is capable of more. Lakshmi’s mother continues to tell Lakshmi what she is supposed to do now that she is older, “Now, she says, you must carry yourself with modesty, bow your head in the presence of men, and cover yourself with your shawl. Never look a man in the eye. Never allow yourself to be alone with a man who is not family” (McCormick 15 ). In Lakshmi’s household and throughout the village men are superior to women in every way possible. Women are forced to do all of the hard work for men including getting money for them to spend on whatever they would like and providing food for the men so they could eat how much they would like. Moving on, Lakshmi eventually gets sent away to the city to do work as a maid in the hopes of bringing home money for her family. On the way to the city Lakshmi sees a very young girl on the road with her husband and his friends, “At the center of the group, a girl my age crouches in the dirt. Her scalp has been freshly shaved [...] One of the men in the crowd throws his cigarette butt at her feet. Another one spits in her direction. Then another - a fat old man with a boil on his neck - picks up a handful of gravel and flings it at her. She winces, then began to cry” (McCormick 85). This girl is getting abused for no reason in

Problems in Germany were coming about and people did not know who to blame or what to do, but when Hitler steps in he says that Jewish people are causing all of the problems in Germany. People did not know what to do, but since Hitler had a plan and lots of money the Germans looked up to him. Alfon is a young boy who lives in Germany and is not Jewish and does not really know who to trust or what to believe. One day in school, “When he [Alfon’s teacher] told us that Jewish kids would no longer be going to school, he said, ‘They have no business being among us true Germans.’ And then looking straight at me he added, ‘No German boy can ever be true friends with a Jewish boy. No matter how nice he seems, he’ll grow up to be your enemy.’ I didn’t see how this could be true, but I figured it must be, since Herr Becker knew everything” (Ayer 8). Alfon is a young boy and does not know why things are, but at the same time trusts his teacher because he thinks that the adults are always right. Alfons teacher, Herr Becker, is promoting exclusion and inequality for no real reason. It is very unfair to categorise a group of people based on anything about them, and in this case for their religious beliefs. Moving forward, as WWII continues things get worse for Jewish people as Hitler plans to put “the final solution” in action. As no end is put to the