Short Story Manny's

When I first read through the story I could start to see little hints and signs of a man who is in a state of depression. Depression can be defined as a state of feeling sad. Also can be defined as a serious medical condition in which a person feels very sad, hopeless, and unimportant and often is unable to live in a normal way. These definitions pinpoints Manny's state throughout the story. You can notice the first since of him feeling sad, and hopeless when his wife died and he sold all of their furniture. Then he started to wear torn and dirty clothes everyday. Then he started to let his facial hair just grow out. He is starting to resemble a person who lives on the street. He was so used to his regimen life who being clean, shaven, and educated that when she passed he didn't know what to do
with his life but start up a junk yard since he know how to sell stuff. These type of actions that he is doing can’t be any other type of diagnostic or syndrome; because when you look at what someone goes through when they have depression it directs you back to Manny.

Later down the line in the story Manny received a statue at the junkyard which he thought was a naked just a naked black women.
At first he did not like it and wanted to get rid of it due to female customers not liking the nudity and males seeing it as pornography. Instead he decided to build a fence around the statue so that it couldn’t be seen so easily. As time moved along I think that Manny started to become more fond of the statue and shifted his bridge towards it. When I say bridge I mean that that's his pathway back to his old self and what he used to be before his wife passed. At first his bridge was the junkyard and selling things but it’s on the statue. It does not say it in the story but you can tell that he see’s his wife in the statute because he starts to change back little by little. First he saw how clean the statue was one night in the moon like and decided to go get cleaned up himself. He started by getting a haircut and as he was getting cut he was having flashbacks of his wife. This is when you knew that the statue was really start to get into his head a little. Then he finally changed out the old clothes and got some new ones that smell
good.

Things were starting to look up for Manny's after he done went though all of these transformation to get back to his old self just by looking at a statue and seeing his wife. Manny used mother Africa to bring him all the way to this point because he had no other bridge to bring him back there. I think that he uses mother Africa instead of his wife’s name because he doesn't want to see her as a statue but he still does anyway. But one day Manny had seen a scarf around the neck of the statue and decided to get a ladder and take it down. To his surprise he had found out that the statue was really a white women and not black. This outraged Manny that it broke the bridge that him and the statue had had. Which mean that he going to spiral back into his old state of being the junkyard man. No more shaving, no more clean clothes, and no more bathing. Everything that he thought he was doing right ended up being a big mistake to him when the statue wasn't what he thought it was. I feel that he really wanted to give this a shot to get back to his old self and was desperate and needed something to take him out of this depression state.

All in all Emanuel Turner aka Manny, is battling depression for a long time and needed some type of bridge to bring his old self back. Once he got the statue he had a love hate relationship with the statue for a little while until he started to like it even more. When this occurred in his life, mood, and style started to take a change for the better until an unexpected observation occurred that just destroyed everything he did up until now. Now he just wants to push it all away so he can just be in self pity like he was before the statue got there. He hated how it made him change, but he loved the results that came from the process.