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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the name of the mortician in Chicasetta?

2. What is the name of Ailey’s second high school?

3. In what month does Samuel typically sell enslaved persons?

4. What nickname does Root have for Ailey?

5. In what year does Root start college?

Short Essay Questions

1. How is Ailey supposedly rebuked for not accepting punishment alongside Boukie and Baybay?

2. Why does Ailey dislike spending summers in the City?

3. For what reason does Belle recommend eating greens?

4. For what reason do the women of Belle’s hometown not blame men for adultery?

5. What is the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem?

6. How does Micco come to own the land he holds?

7. What causes the death of Root’s mother?

8. Throughout the book, a number of women use botanical contraceptives. What are those discussed earliest in the novel?

9. Why does Ailey argue that the strategy to increase male enrollment at Routledge is a failure?

10. Why does Ailey regard the teachers at her second high school as “serious pushovers” (96)?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Explicate the significance of the name of any one character in the text.

Essay Topic 2

How reliable is the primary narrator of the novel? What in the text indicates that reliability, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Jeffers’s seem most similar? What makes the writers similar? What differentiates them? Overall, which do you regard as doing better at the craft of writing, and why?

(see the answer keys)

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