The Angel Esmeralda Summary and Analysis

The Angel Esmeralda Summary

"The Angel Esmeralda" begins when an old nun named Sister Edgar, who still wears the conventional habit and is obsessed with cleanliness, rises one morning at the convent and is driven by Sister Grace, a young nun in secular dress, to a ruined inner city neighborhood nicknamed the Bird. On a free-standing brick wall near an abandoned tenement building the nuns see rows of spray-painted angels, each a memorial to a local child who has died. Sister Grace thinks the paintings and words that describe these often- violent deaths are in terrible taste, but Sister Edgar appreciates them, just as she does the boys who risk rappelling down the wall to produce the graffiti. The nuns work here, in the South Bronx, with a few friars, one of whom tells them to look...