EIGHT PLUS ONE by Robert Cormier

Author:Robert Cormier [Cormier, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83425-6
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2013-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Protestants Cry, Too

INTRODUCTION

I am assuming that the reader has read “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” before embarking on these remarks because there is such a distinct relationship between that story and “Protestants Cry, Too.” The stories are very much alike and yet distinctly different. Let me explain.

The setting of both stories is Frenchtown, the French Canadian section of a small New England city, the time is the 1930s Depression, and the cast of characters is almost identical. The narrator of both stories is a boy named Jerry; Armand, a high school student, is his older brother; Roger Lussier is Jerry’s best friend; Sister Angela presides in the classroom; the Globe Theater is their palace of celluloid dreams; Jerry’s father works in the comb shop. An important part of both stories is the fact that Armand is in love with a girl from the other, more affluent, side of town.

Thus, the similarities. The differences? Subtle, perhaps, but so unmistakable that it seems to me that “Protestants Cry, Too” hardly fits into the Depression era stories in this collection. It has a certain aura, a sense that it belongs to a time far removed from the Depression. The family, although American (the father is proud of his citizenship and is a partisan of Franklin Roosevelt), is more Canadian in spirit, more recently arrived from Canada, more alien to the American way of life. Would the father in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” be as upset by the Protestant girl friend of his son as is the father in “Protestants Cry, Too?” I don’t think so, or, at least, the tone of the story suggests he wouldn’t be.

Tone is probably the operative word here. I sought to give the story a more ethnic feeling than the other story, made Frenchtown a more self-enclosed area with invisible but powerful walls separating it from the rest of the city. But focus and emphasis also play their roles.

In “Protestants Cry, Too” the emphasis is on Armand’s love for a girl from the North Side. The love affair and the reaction of Armand’s father allowed me to explore prejudice and the possibility of love—or compassion—overcoming it.

In “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” Armand is again in love with a girl from the other side of town, but this time the focus is on Jerry, the narrator, who discovers something in himself he had not recognized before.

In one story, Jerry is simply the narrator, the device through which the story is told. In the other, Jerry, still the narrator, is the crucial character to whom things happen. But Armand’s involvement with a girl alien to Frenchtown is the wheel that turns both stories.

Thus, we have the same ingredients in both stories, the same basic situation and the same cast of characters, but the two stories are altogether different in tone and theme and plot.

Protestants Cry, Too

To begin with, my brother Armand fell in love eleven times between Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving Day of 1938, and so it was no

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