Everything that Rises Must Converge

I felt sympathy for both Julian and his mother in this story. I can see where Julian is coming from when he tries to spite his mother for her ignorant unenlightened mother who lived most of her life in a wealthy home with slaves, and is now poor with nothing but bad health. She still holds herself in high regard, and she is afraid to ride the bus alone since it's desegregation, and this gets to Julian a little bit. So he thinks of ways to befriend blacks etc just to get to his mother.

I feel just as much sympathy for Julian's mother though too. It's not that she was a devout racist, but she grew up in a time period where her elders owned blacks as slaves, and most likely professed of their inabilities and incompetencies as white southerners did back then. They instilled prejudice in their children, and prejudice is really hard to erase from someone's existence. It's how she was raised to think, and most of our grandmothers still have a little bit of that.