Mara Scribner
7/7/10
The Secret Life of Bees

The passage on page 178 is quite violent and suspenseful. A white man, the one with the shovel, has been disrespected by a group of black teenage boys. He tries to get the boys to say something again and during the silence, Jackson, one of the black teenage boys, throws his coca-cola bottle at the man. It had hit the man in the face. The man left and when he came back he had other white men with him. None of the boys would confess to throwing the bottle, so they all were hauled off to jail.
The fact that Zach didn’t rat out Jackson for throwing the bottle is very noble. They caused trouble as a group and got punished as a group. Zach chose to stay with his friends and stay true to them. It also seems symbolic to me that he was choosing to stay with his fellow black people and not giving in their oppressors by telling them who threw the bottle. It was wrong of Jackson to not come out and tell the truth. However, I’m sure he was very scared and felt that they would go easier on the group as a whole instead of one boy. I don’t really understand why the boy threw the cola bottle in the first place. All the white man said was, “What did you say boy?” He didn’t use a racial slur and he didn’t show any signs of violence first. Maybe it was the fact that he had a shovel. If the white man had decided to get violent, a shovel would have been an easy tool to use as a weapon against the black boys. If I was Jackson, I’m not sure if I would have thrown the cola bottle like he did, but if I did I wouldn’t have wanted to go down alone either.