"Compare and Contrast"

I got a brilliant thought this morning as I stood outside watching my dogs take their morning potty breaks. I love it when ideas come to me like that (no, not necessarily as I'm watching my dogs shit, I mean, out of the blue, just a great idea pops in and says "hello, I'm here to make your life easier")

I finished reading a novel last night that was assigned in my College Writing II class. We have to write a paper about it, using different methods. I can't remember them all, but the one I am going to use is compare and contrast. She suggested that if we have read another book that has a common theme as the novel we read (the novel that we read was "Push" by an author named "Sapphire"... it's a book about a black girl growing up who is molested and beaten by both her parents, has 2 children as a result of her own father raping her, once at 12 and once at 16. She contracted HIV from her father, who later dies of AIDS. She gets help and gets away from them, gets her GED and (seemingly, the book ends there) BUT it leads one to believe that she has created a better life for herself and her children)

I stood outside smoking, wondering how I am going to make this story relevant to me. I have pretty much nothing in common with the main character.

Then it hits me... compare and contrast. I read a book when I was a kid, it was from my mom's library. It's called "Black Alice" and it's by Thom Demijohn. Excellent book... It was about a rich white girl who is kidnapped and changed. Her kidnappers are holding her for ransom, and they make her into a black girl, to hide her from the police. This book takes place in the 50s, and Push happens in the 1980's. Thing is, the part that links them is that both these girls are being hurt by their fathers. See, in Black Alice, the girl stands to inherit a bunch of money from her grandfather, her mom's dad. Her father arranges to have her kidnapped and have the grandfather pay the ransom. He also decides, after Alice figures out that her father is behind this, that he should just have her killed.

The black father hurts the daughter directly, the white wealthy man has black people do it for him. Yeah, Alice's captors are black, she's made to look like their child. They give her these pills that darken her skin (I don't know how believable it is, but hell, he wrote it, not me, so I don't have to defend his leap of common sense) and change her hair from red to black and kink it up to look like a little black girl's hair.

There are enough parallels and comparisons to fill the 3 page requirement, so this should be a breeze. I have read Black Alice since I was a child, in fact, about a year ago. I will have to skim through it again to find specific things, but that shouldn't be too tough.

I'm a happy girl today.