Silent Dancing Hugh Rigby Devry University

Hugh Rigby English 108 Professor Monaghan Silent Dancing Judith Ortiz, in her essay, Silent Dancing, focuses on how her life changed from moving to Puerto Rico, to growing up in Paterson New Jersey. Judith Ortiz had to deal with her father leaving to join the navy at a very early age, due to economic pressures on the family and was stationed on a ship in Brooklyn. Soon after coming to New York he found a place and sent for his wife and kids. While living in Paterson they had to get used to quite a few new scenes. First of all there was the snow that covered everything outside the also had to start dressing differently. as were the streets, filled with slush the first few months of my life there. The coat my father had bought for me was similar in color and too big; it sat heavily on my thin frame. They werent used to the, beehive life, that is living so close together with people staying above your head and below your feet on one building. it was curious to know that strangers lived under our floor and above our heads, and that the heater pipe went through everyone's apartments. (My first spanking in Paterson came as a result of playing tunes on the pipes in my room to see if there would be an answer.) My mother was as new to this concept of beehive life as I was, but she had been given strict orders by my father to keep the doors locked, the noise down, ourselves to ourselves.. While searching for apartments in Paterson, her father faced a lot of resistance with the landlords, they didnt like the rate at which latinos were moving into the neighborhood. Ortiz talks about her mother, and how it was for her being at El Building. She never really got over Puerto Rico so staying at El Building made her feel a bit closer to home. She felt surrounded by her

language: The walls were thin, and voices speaking and arguing in Spanish could be heard all day. Salsas blasted out of radios, turned on early in the morning and left on for company. Women seemed to cook rice and beans perpetually -- the strong aroma of boiling red kidney beans permeated the hallways. N though her husband wanted her to wait till he got leave on the weekend to buy groceries they still went to La Bodega across the street from El Building because this had the items that she was familiar with from back home. Goya's and Libby's -- those were the trademarks trusted by her mama, so my mother bought many cans of Goya beans, soups, and condiments, as well as little cans of Libby's fruit juices for us. Ortiz mom did not want to forget her culture while living in the United States. In the essay, They All Just Went Away, by Joyce Carol Oates we see a young girl who becomes aware of her surroundings at a very early age. She was able to roam free and explore the neighborhood, especially the abandoned buildings, which she seemed to be very fascinated with. I was an articulate, verbal child. Yet I could not have explained what drew me to the abandoned houses, barns, silos, corncribs. Oates, in her essay also gives a perfect analogy for a house and a home. A house: a structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, these divided from one another by verticals and horizontals called walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will very likely survive it, reverting again simply to house when home (that is, life) departs. For only where there is life can there be home. She goes on to explain the story about the Weidels and clearly paints the uprising of their dysfunctional family and how they became such. It ends in her befriending Ruth Weidels in hopes to finding answers to questions she had. Westbury Court, by Edwidge Danticat tells the story of a young girl growing up in an apartment building off Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. Danticat describes her neighborhood in great detail, and talks about the fire which took the lives of her neighbors two children and changed her life, ruining

her image of the idyllic palace in which she lived, to the more mature view we all develop. We lived in a six-story brick building in a cul-de-sac off of Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn, called Westbury Court. Beneath the building ran a subway station through which rattled the D, M, and Q trains every fifteen minutes or so. Though there was graffiti on most of the walls of Westbury Court, and hills of trash piled up outside, and though the elevator wasn't always there when we opened the door to step inside and the heat and hot water weren't always on, I never dreamed of leaving Westbury Court until the year of the fire. Consequently, the events that took place all became an eye opener for and were building blocks for her new world view.