In Edwidge Danticat’s “A Wall of Rising Fire,” majority of the towns’ people were viewed as low class. Working full-time always having to provide for the family with wage below poverty line. “Lili, was squatting in the middle of their one-room home, spreading cornmeal mush on banana leaves for their supper” (Danticat 72). For instance, in the 1800s through the 1900s industrialization and immigration brought poverty new kind and on a new scale to Eastern European immigrants.
Danticat meets the same circumstances as Harrison Bergeron, being placed in a government control and determining to be free under a communist government “Near the sugar mill was a large television screen in a iron grill cage that the government installed so the shantytown dwellers could watch the state sponsored news at eight o’clock” (Danticat 76). This gives the reader the visual of how poverty was and showing the facts and outcomes if being “poor” or low class.
“A Wall of Rising Fire” the level of socialism and class for Lili and Little Guy is not what it could be. The wealth between the people and the sugar mill owner perspectives were put in different ways. The people had to struggle to get what they need instead of it being given to them. “Guy only got one’s day of work at the mill, it was almost six months since the last time Guy had gotten work from there” (Danticat 78).
The point that is being made is that the wealth of money can put you in a different place, without reminding you where you can from or what you were worth at one point of time. “The women had to walk miles to the public water fountains resting easily on their heads” (Danticat 80). The theme of the story mostly brings you in realization of the culture and gender formality. The women didn’t have to work only in the household, but the men had to work outside the home in the sugar mill struggling for their family.
If the men didn’t make money the women could not eat nor feed the children. Even though, the “poor” or known as the low class was in effect the government still provided education to the children and history as well. Little Guy got to be in a play known as a character named Boukman, born in a Jamaican Haitian slave but was known as a leader of the Haitian Revolution. Teaching other Jamaican slaves how to read then, later sold by his British master to a French owner who put him to work as a slave driver.
