“’Someday somebody’s going to come along and knock this old fence down,’ Annie said. And I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Someday.” This excerpt is from the narrative The Other Side, the fictional account of Clover, an African American youth, and her encounters with her neighbor Annie, a white, young girl. The author, Jacqueline Woodson, uses clever symbolism within her writings to not only convey the racial partition between Clover and Annie, but the foretelling the division between them would soon fall. Furthermore, she also utilizes a naïve, informal tone to generate an audience of kids. These literary elements contribute majorly to the story, as without them there would be no meaning to the story at all.
Woodson uses symbolism throughout the