Junior Finally Belongs

Why does Junior cry on pages 216 and 217?

Junior Finally Belongs

Lucy 

For Spokane Indians, alcohol is the center of their lives. On happy occasions, they drink. When someone dies, they drink. All some of the people on the reservation do all day and night is drink. For Junior, drinking is the worst thing in the world. Almost all of the important people in his life have died because of alcohol. When Junior finds out that his sister has joined that group, he cries. Junior is not only crying for his sister, “I was crying for my tribe too… because I knew five or ten or fifteen Spokanes would die during the next year, and most of them would die because of alcohol. (p. 216)” Junior knows that the deaths he has already experienced will not be the last. 

Junior also cries because he is happy and proud of himself. He is proud because he was the only one to ever leave the reservation, and he cries because “I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world. (p. 217)” Junior knows that he is different, and he is in poverty, and has brain problems, and he is an Indian going to an all white school. Despite all this, Junior realizes that he belongs, and he is not “alone in his loneliness (p. 217)”