Little is involved in a discussion about religious symbolism, Jesus’ crucifixion, and martyrs in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Sadi and other students comment on how the conscience of people in South-Central is different, where “‘some people will kill you and go out and eat a sandwich’” (169). After the lesson is over, Little continues to brood about the meeting in the principal’s office and feels that she herself has been crucified.

The students are worried because the applications to all University of California campuses are due soon. They don’t know how to write the autobiography the applications require, but Little reminds them that they already wrote similar autobiographies for her class.

Most of the students’ families originally came from the rural South and moved to Los Angeles during World War II to work in defense plants. After Franklin Roosevelt desegregated the defense plants, about 200,000 African Americans moved to Los Angeles, mainly to South-Central, which had been a vibrant black neighborhood since the 1920s. The black population continued to swell after the war when many servicemen who had been stationed in California decided to stay in the city. Though life was better in some ways than it had been in the South, blacks in LA continued to struggle financially, and the unemployment rate in South-Central was double that of the rest of the city.