Abraham Lincoln once said “I am bound to live up to what light I have” and that is true of the characters in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Sonny’s Blues. The girls in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves were told to abandon their wolf nature and they embarked on the difficult task of changing everything they knew about the world. Sonny in Sonny’s Blues was a Harlem raised kid with a dim future who turned to heroin and had trouble deserting it, as most heroin addicts do. These challenges stemmed from their childhood environments. The characters in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Sonny’s Blues could not escape the control of their childhood influences. The children in Sonny’s Blues were terrified to grow up. In their neighborhoods, “[y]ou can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes.” (Baldwin 26) Their futures grew morbid as they matured and faced their reality. Sonny had once been one of the schoolboys with his head bumping “abruptly against the low ceiling of [his] actual possibilities.” (18) There was nowhere Sonny or any of the other kids could have gone
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Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves were raised in an environment that dictated their futures. To them, “things felt less foreign in the dark.” (Russell 237) However, at St. Lucy’s, they were trying to stifle their desire to revert back to their wolf behavior. Claudette kept repeating to herself “[m]outh shut, shoes on feet” because she wanted to conform to the nuns’ teachings (240). During Stage 2 of their teachings, when Mirabella was not deserting her wolfish ways and was still travelling on all fours, the girls “could barely believe it… the shame of it, that [they] used to locomote like that.” (241) However, the wolf girls could not understand the purebred human girls they met. Claudette wondered what it would be like to be “always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you’ve never seen.”
Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves were raised in an environment that dictated their futures. To them, “things felt less foreign in the dark.” (Russell 237) However, at St. Lucy’s, they were trying to stifle their desire to revert back to their wolf behavior. Claudette kept repeating to herself “[m]outh shut, shoes on feet” because she wanted to conform to the nuns’ teachings (240). During Stage 2 of their teachings, when Mirabella was not deserting her wolfish ways and was still travelling on all fours, the girls “could barely believe it… the shame of it, that [they] used to locomote like that.” (241) However, the wolf girls could not understand the purebred human girls they met. Claudette wondered what it would be like to be “always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you’ve never seen.”