4: The Darkest Child 148-197

"I don't really know," Mama answered, and began to sob in her rehearsed refined manner. " I was playing wit my baby right here on the porch. You know how you do. I was swinging her out, trying to get her to laugh. I don't know what happened. I swung her out that one time and she musta kicked or something 'cause the next thing I knew she was falling. Wadn't nothing I could do"
"She was convincing. I thought for a moment that maybe I was mistaken in what I thought had happened. I thought she had thrown Judy from the porch but no mother could do that, not even mine. Could she?"

This passage is from after Tangy-Mae's mother throws Judy off the porch and tells the sheriff about how Judy died. She lies and Tangy-Mae notices her fake crying, "and began to sob in her rehearsed, refined manner". As I'm reading this book I'm starting to believe that this mother has a serious mental disorder. She seems to have no compassion for her own children and does not feel guilty about either killing her daughter or lying about it. Tangy-Mae notices this but she actually questions her own story instead of realizing how horrible her mother is, "I thought for a moment that maybe I was mistaken in what I thought had happened". Maybe Tangy-Mae sub-consciously knows what happened but would like to believe otherwise to ease her mind.

I chose this passage because Tangy-Mae's feeling of suddenly not being sure what the truth often happens to me. Sometimes in life everyone has a different story of what happened and suddenly you are not sure what the real story is even if you saw it happen. This happens to me a lot when I play tennis. If I have an argument with my opponent about score or a line call I often just give in. Sometimes even if previously I was sure of myself I start to question my story because their story can start to feel like my memory. This feeling of uncertainty is hard to explain but it is frequent in my life in and out of tennis.