Why does taylor greer leave kentucky

Two former classmates of hers, Newt Hardbine and Jolene Shanks, are wheeled in amidst lots of shouting and noise. Jolene has been shot, but is still alive; Newt Hardbine, whom Missy has known since childhood, is dead. This event gives Missy her first close-up glimpse of domestic violence, and it almost makes her quit. Eventually, though, she decides that since "I'd probably seen the worst I was going to see," "there was no reason to quit now" 1. She may see some terrible things, but she presses on.

Missy keeps that job at Pittman County Hospital for five and a half years. After saving enough money to buy a beat-up old car of her own, she finally has what she needs to leave Pittman County for good. Early in the novel, Taylor tells us that her great-grandfather on her mother's side was Cherokee. To Taylor, this doesn't mean much of anything other than that she's technically one-eighth Cherokee.

Yes, that is how math works. When she was growing up, her Mama used to tell her that their Cherokee heritage could function as a sort of last-ditch effort. She'd had an old grandpa that was full-blooded Cherokee, one of the few that got left behind in Tennessee because he was too old or too ornery to get marched over to Oklahoma.

Mama would say, 'If we run out of luck we can always go live on the Cherokee Nation. According to Mama, if you're one-eighth or more they let you in. She called this our 'head rights. Not that they'd really be that much better off. Or, come to think of it, that Taylor's Cherokee heritage tells us much at all about her character. The fact is, she doesn't know much about that heritage herself.

But wait! The silver lining is that her lack of knowledge about her heritage does tell us something about her character—quite a bit, in fact. In order for this to make sense, we need to interrupt this programming to get a bit of historical and political context under our belts.

First off: when Taylor talks about the historical Cherokee people being "marched over to Oklahoma," what she's referring to is the devastating forced removal that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. As tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their traditional territories, an estimated 15, were killed by the harsh journey west. Given how casual Taylor's comments are, it's hard to tell exactly how much she knows about this history.

We're willing to bet that she's sketchy on the particulars, and here's why. When Taylor echoes her Mama's opinion that "if you're one-eighth or more they let you in," she repeats inaccurate information.

Neither Mama nor Taylor seem to know that federal laws and tribal laws approach these matters differently. Sturm writes:. Why does this matter, and what does it tell us about Taylor? For one thing, it helps us understand at least one crucial fact about her: when it comes to her Cherokee heritage, there's a lot she doesn't know. That fact makes another one seem pretty likely too: Taylor doesn't seem to know much about Native American history, culture, or present-day politics either.

Taylor and her Mama may think of their Cherokee heritage as their "ace in the hole," but both women have a lot to learn about that supposed kinship.

For Taylor especially, this lack of knowledge about Indigenous-colonial politics highlights the limitations of her rural—and, in some senses, impoverished—education. Which gets extra interesting when she picks up a Cherokee kiddo of her own….

Although Taylor starts putting some of these pieces together as the novel goes on, it isn't until Pigs in Heaven that her real learning begins. Just to remind you once more to pick up the sequel. Taylor spent a lot of her adolescence avoiding motherhood, but after she decides to keep the young child who enters her life on the Oklahoma plains, she's suddenly faced with a whole new role she's got to play. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a romance novel about a young woman named Taylor Greer and a Cherokee child placed in her care whom she names Turtle.

The unlikely pair find a home in Tucson, Arizona, where they meet people who are instrumental in helping them build a life there.

Throughout the novel, Kingsolver calls into question the morality of the government through characters. Motherhood in the Bean Trees The book The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a coming of age story about a young girl, Taylor, that is thrust into motherhood when a baby is left in her car. Taylor however, is not the only example of a mother in the story. There is Lou Ann and Esperanza, both literal mothers, but only one of them has their child to take care of.

There is Mattie, one of the first people that Taylor meet in Tucson, and who becomes almost a surrogate-mother for both her, and also. Taylor refuses to remain in her hometown forever, which only leads to teenage pregnancy and motherhood until death.

Just when she thinks she is home free, Taylor is left with an abandoned three-year-old American Indian girl. Ironically, Taylor ends up as an unplanned single mother. The two end up living in Tucson, Arizona along with another recently single mother and her son. Had Taylor stayed in Pittman her metamorphose process would have differed greatly from her life in Tucson, Arizona In …show more content… Her children would have had more open hearts to the world because unlike Turtle, they never would have had to experience what Turtle did at such a young age.

In Arizona, Taylor had to move at a much slower pace with Turtle because of the trepidation she was filled with from her previous home life. This reveals how much more effort it took Taylor to reach out to her daughter. In Arizona she had a much more abrupt maturing into a woman and mother than if she had stayed in her hometown. The accident left him deaf. Taylor explains that she and Newt Hardbine look like brother and sister. Like the Hardbines, Taylor and her mother are poor.

He impregnates a girl named Jolene Shanks and marries her. Many girls at the high school drop out to have babies, but Taylor makes up her mind to avoid pregnancy. She credits her handsome science teacher Mr. One day, when Taylor is working at the hospital, Jolene and Newt are brought into the emergency room. From clues and insinuations, we gather that years of abuse and neglect from his father led Newt to shoot Jolene and himself.

The horror of the scene makes Taylor vomit. Later that night she decides she will not quit her job, since she has survived the worst she will see. Her mother realizes that Taylor wants to leave and makes her daughter prove that she can change the car tires and tend to the car if it breaks down. As she drives off, Taylor who at this point still goes by the name Missy promises herself that she will change her name by driving until the gas runs out and naming herself after whatever town she happens to land in.