Brief Summary Of The Novel 'Cry' By Ellen Foster

Earlier in the novel, Ellen asked herself a very important question. She wondered if she was the same girl who would not drink after Starletta or eat a colored biscuit when she was starved. She said:
It is the same girl but I am old now I know it is not the germs you cannot see that slide off her lips on to a glass then to your white lips that will hurt you or turn you colored. What you had better worry about though is the people you know and trusted they would be like you because you were all made in the same batch. You need to look over your shoulder at the one who is in charge of holding you up and see if that is a knife he has in his hand. And it might not be a colored hand. But it is a knife (Gibbons 85).
Ellen Foster knows now that she might be the same girl who thought those
things two years ago, but she knows that she is old enough to know that it is not those unseen germs that will “hurt you or turn you colored.” She used to think that these germs would kill your system but now she does not think so.
She now knows that these are not the things that people should be worrying about. She knows that this is how most of her people think and she wants them to be aware that that should not be their number one concern. She says that one should worry about the people you trust and see what they are doing because you “were all made in the same batch.” She no longer fears these unseen germs, she now fears the fact that the people you love and trust need to look in fear because you share DNA. She believes that those are the ones who will kill one’s system. She thinks that one needs to look over their shoulder to see if the one that is in charge of you and see if there are holding a knife because “it might not be a colored hand but it is still a knife. She thinks that catching these unseen germs are less important than that. Knowing that perhaps the one that is holding you up might be the one to
stab you in the back. She makes this clear by saying that it might not be a colored hand but it is still a knife because Starletta is colored but never did anything to her. Starletta’s house was the place where she went to have fun and feel secure but she still thought horrible things but now she knows that this is not the way to think. She now knows that Starletta’s unseen germs never got to her and hurt her or damaged her system but her white family did hurt her. Her mother died leaving her with her alcoholic father who tried to grope her and she got thrown around to different people in her family who scarred her until she permanently stayed with her new mom. She never was once stabbed in the back by a colored.