DEVRY UNIVERSITY

Westbury
Court
Prem Persaud 1/11/2014

Professsor Barbara Monaghan Engl.108--13800

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Westbury Court What decisive factors are used in choosing a home? The environment or neighborhood, decent schools for children, accessibility to public transportation or jobs, nearness to relatives (parents), and familiarity or identity to a particular area (maybe born there) are some of the conditions people would choose when purchasing a house; but the main criteria in procuring that property is affordability, safety and security. Children get their sense of security from their parents. If the parents are not complaining, then it is satisfactory to be where they are. Children are too innocent to comprehend the evils of this world and will not see the anything wrong once mom and dad are there to protect them. Should anything go wrong, it is not their concern; the adults will solve it. As children, we all lived in those clouds until something tragic happens, which will bring us down, back to earth. Edwidge Danticat was transform from a cheerful child with no concern, to the status of an apprehensive child/adult when her entire secured world collapsed in a matter of minutes, after a devastating incident one afternoon made her sensitive and fearful of her surroundings. Edwidge Danticat is relating an event that befell her when she was a young fourteen years old Haitian-American girl living in Westbury Court, Brooklyn. She was given the responsibility of keeping her siblings (three brothers) safe from harms way, in the afternoons, after school. From the text, we can deduce that both of her parents were working at that time, and this may have been a middle class working family, living in a middle class community. Danticat felt safe and secured there. Though the elevator of the building where she lived was not always working, or the walls were saturated with graffiti, she never entertained the thoughts of leaving. I remembered living in a shabby apartment building as a child, but to me it was a palace, because my parents were there. This was in the nineteen sixties in Guyana, South America. Many of the

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houses were in dire need of repairs; but there were also fabulous houses intertwined with the dilapidated ones. Many of the perfect houses were of the colonial era when the British ruled that part of the world; but were taken over by wealthy businessmen, after independence. The gentleman who lived across the street was a white Englishman, who would pay me to help him in his vast garden. My parents moved only when the new owners wanted to tear down the old building to erect a new one. Danticat, as any young girl of that time was enthralled by the soap opera, General Hospital. She never had views of leaving Westbury Court; but from her writing, we can infer that she yearns for a better life, when she wrote about the children of General Hospital, coming home to welcoming arms of mommies and nannies, whose job were to take care of their every need. She was so absorbed in the show one afternoon that she neither heard the screams of the children nor smelled the smoke when fire consumed the apartment across the hallway from her. She only became aware of the catastrophe when two firemen knocked on their door and rescued her and her brothers. She later saw the firemen carrying the lifeless bodies of two children to an ambulance, while their mother was screaming their names. As usual, after any misfortune or disaster, question will be asked, advice of what precaution should have been taken, discourse of divine intervention for those who survived and comfort to the bereaved. Concerned parents will go in to over drive to bolster security for their children until the fear diminished. This was true for the writer and her brothers when their mother had them staying with another family for a few months. Danticat was engulfed in guilt when she was asked to explain why she did not know of the fire. Her reaction and personality change after the fire showed that she had become a different person, not a child anymore.

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She pondered whether her parents would have been prosecuted for negligence and child abandonment like the mother of the deceased children, if it was she and her brothers who were killed. When any piece of wood fell in the burnt- out apartment she would imagine it making the sound of the children crying for help, a sound that she did not hear. She became aware of the people around her in the building and would infrequently sneak out to watch the workmen repair the apartment. After the apartment was renovated, Danticat in her new persona and behavior was on watch for the new tenants. She wanted to be the first to know, should anything ever go wrong again. Danticats essay explains the path a teenage girl at that time, traversed from an innocent child - whose only concern in her youthful life was getting home early to see her favorite television show on time to the inconceivable state of early adulthood by the untimely death of two young boys in a fire. When her eyes were opened to the world that she was living in not the one she was accustomed to - a world that had set boundaries and protected by her parents but a different world, a world she finally saw, how cruel and violent it was. This was the real world, which her mother refused to let her children be aware of by not conceding, that people could be killed indiscriminately and thoughtlessly. This was the real world that the writer was having difficulty to come a grip with, as an adult. She was struggling to erase the memory of the fire and death of the two boys with the dread that it could have easily occurred to her family. Like Danticat the child, we discover or will be exposed to a world crammed of pain, fear, lies, unexpected and disturbing occurrences and death. We have to contend with it. We cannot ignore or hide from it. The questions we have to ask ourselves is; how do we respond? What will we do? What will we become? When our delusion of security is shattered; how do we react?

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Do we have the mental fortitude and stamina to address this new found aspect of the life? Only time would tell. ,

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