My True South

Which inference about the narrator is best supported by the following passage?

“When I crossed the Louisiana-Texas state line, I exhaled. And I exhaled again when I crossed the Mississippi state line over the swampy expanse of Pearl River. When I turned right on Kiln DeLisle Road, driving past my grandmother’s house, my grandaunt’s house, my uncles’ houses and my sister’s house, where my uncles were fixing the roof on the pump shed and my aunt waved from her porch, another exhalation.”

• She is confused about her emotions regarding returning home.

• She has a medical condition related to her breathing.

• She gets progressively more comfortable as she approaches her childhood home.

• She specifically despises the state of Texas.

What is most closely the meaning of the word slight as it appears in the passage below?

"This can be that place. The aggression is sometimes slight and interpersonal, as simple as me walking through a department store with my children, an obvious shopper, when an older white woman with perfectly coiffed hair and small hands walks up to ask me if a shirt or a pair of shoes is on sale."

• adjective | small in degree, inconsiderable

• adjective | not sturdy or strongly built

• verb | to insult someone

• noun | a pointed and contemptuous discourtesy

The attitude of teachers toward their black students in free preschool programs could best be described as

• supportive

• empathetic

• vicious

• negligent

Which sentence best summarizes the following passage?

"There are moments that would break me if they could, moments when I am all too aware of how we have been robbed of opportunities to create intergenerational wealth, when our schools fail us, when we are shuttled into the service sector, when we scrabble for demeaning job after demeaning job. Days when I see one of my cousins, struggling with addiction and untreated mental illness, walking the streets shirtless and shoeless, drowning in his life, and my heart breaks. It is on days like this when a white person will interview me and ask me how to make black people want more for themselves, and I’ve had enough."

• The narrator feels deeply frustrated by the historical injustices that continue to oppress black Americans.

• The narrator considers the problems of black Americans to be unfixable.

• White interviewers frequently fail to understand the narrator.

• Lack of intergenerational wealth, bad schools, and demeaning jobs are the main problems affecting black Americans.

Which of these statements best describes the historic racial power structure of Mississippi?

• The Civil War ended white control over Mississippi.

• Whites and blacks both had times of being in power.

• Whites built their wealth by oppressing other groups of people.

• Race did not play a large role in the state’s history.

Which lines from the text most closely support the correct answer to Question 5?

• “It is difficult for them to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public’s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so.”

• “There are many images of tortured and lynched people taken during that era in the South: white crowds milling under mangled bodies, men, women and children alight, smiling.”

• “Mississippi is the memory America invokes whenever it wants to convince itself that racial violence and subjugation are mostly lodged in the past, that they have no space in our present moment, save in this backwoods, backward place.”

• “Black pain, Native pain, women’s pain: if this was necessary in order to reap their lot, to build their wealth, to earn their leisure, so be it.”

The narrator’s views on the future of Mississippi can best be characterized as

• frustrated

• dispassionate

• exuberant

• optimistic

Which line from the text best supports the correct answer to Question 7?

• “We stand at the edge of a gulf, looking out on a surging, endless expanse of time and violence, constant and immense, and like water, it wishes to swallow us.”

• “We dream of a day when we will not feel the need to throw our children into its maw to shock them into learning how to swim.”

• “Even as the South remains troubled by its past, there are people here who are fighting so it can find its way to a healthier future, never forgetting the lessons of its long, brutal history, ever present, ever instructive.”

• “We are trying to understand that one person’s fate predicates another’s, that this illness of racial violence and oppression affects all of us—not just in Mississippi, but throughout the South, America and abroad.”