How High School Literature Can Uncover Hidden Sibling Resentment: One Family’s Story
The argument started over a half-eaten box of sour cream and onion Cheez-Its on my bedroom floor, sophomore year of high school. My little sister Mia slouched against my doorframe, her tattered paperback of A Raisin in the Sun peeking out of her canvas backpack, and said, “I get it now. You’re Walter Lee.”
We grew up two Black girls on the south side of Milwaukee, raised by a single mom who worked 12-hour shifts as a nursing home aide. A Raisin in the Sun wasn’t just a play to us; it was the story of families that looked like ours, that scraped by for a shot at something better. I was 16, the older sister, already talking about going to college out of state to study literature. Mia was 12, quiet, always drawing in the margins of her notebooks, talking about going to art school someday when she got the money.
When she got assigned the book for her 8th grade language arts class, she read the whole thing in one night, and that’s when it clicked. The parallel was impossible to miss. Mom had poured every extra dollar she had into a college fund for me, starting when I was in kindergarten. She never talked about how much was left, or what she had saved for Mia. She just said we’d cross that bridge when we got to it. To Mia, that looked exactly like what happened to Beneatha: Walter Lee took the money earmarked for her future and spent it on his own dream. That’s what she said to me that day. “You got your stupid degree dream, and now there’s nothing left for mine. You never even asked if I got to have one.”
I yelled back. I told her I got a 90% scholarship, I was already working weekends at the local diner to cover books, that Mom’s money barely covered the gap. I said she was being ridiculous, turning a 50-year-old play into some big fight against me. She stormed out, slammed the door, and didn’t speak to me for two weeks. She sat at the opposite end of the dinner table, rolled her eyes when I asked about her art projects, even refused to come with me to the used bookstore I used to take her to every Saturday. I thought it was just a preteen mood swing, that it would blow over after a month. It didn’t. It hung between us for almost three years, until I was getting ready to leave for college and Mom sat us both down.
She pulled out her old metal lockbox from under her bed, pulled out the savings passbook she’d never shown either of us. She wrote down two numbers on a paper napkin: one for my college fund, one for Mia’s. She hadn’t stopped saving when she started putting money toward me. She’d picked up extra overtime shifts every holiday to put away for Mia. She just never talked about it, because she didn’t want us to stress about money when we were just kids. “Y’all been waiting for the other shoe to drop this whole time,” she said. “This play just pulled it out into the open, that’s all.” She didn’t take sides. She didn’t tell Mia she was being ungrateful, didn’t tell me I was being selfish. She just showed us the numbers, and let us talk.
Now I’m a high school English teacher, and I assign A Raisin in the Sun every year to my 11th grade classes. I used to just follow the curriculum, talk about the American Dream, segregation, 1950s gender roles. After what happened with Mia, I changed how I teach it. The first day before anyone opens the book, I tell them: “Any of you might read a line in this play that hits close to home. That’s normal. You don’t have to share what that is with anyone, but I want you to write it down on the first page of your reading journal. If you ever want to talk about it after class, my door is open.” It takes two minutes, doesn’t mess up my lesson plan, and it gives kids space to feel whatever the book brings up instead of pushing it down.
For parents, I’ve learned a simple concrete rule that works every time. If your kid comes home angry or upset after reading something for class, don’t jump in to defend yourself or shut it down as “just a book.” Don’t try to fix the fight right away. Just ask them to read you the line that got to them. That’s it. No lecture, no fixing, just listening. That one question gives them permission to talk about whatever the book pulled out of them, instead of letting it fester like it did between Mia and me for three years.
I see this dynamic play out every year. Last semester, a quiet sophomore who sits in the back of the class stayed after school, and she told me she’d never realized until she read this play that her mom had given up going back to get her nursing degree to pay for her club volleyball fees. She’d always thought her mom just didn’t want to go back to school. Another boy told me he called his older brother after reading the play, because he realized his brother had given up a full ride to play college football to stay home and work when their dad got cancer, and he’d never said thank you. Sometimes reading a classic book doesn’t just teach you literary analysis. It gives you words for the feelings you’ve been carrying around but couldn’t name.
Mia and I are fine now. She’s a graphic designer for a small children’s book publisher, got her art degree, Mom’s savings covered half her tuition, the rest was scholarships and the money she saved working at the local coffee shop all through high school. We still get into silly fights sometimes, about who left the dishes in the sink, or who got more birthday presents growing up, and every once in a while one of us will joke, “Yeah, well you’re Walter Lee.” It’s still there, that little shadow, but it’s not the big scary thing it was when she read that book for the first time.
Not everything gets fixed perfectly, right? But that’s the point. Books aren’t just supposed to teach you how to write a five paragraph essay. They’re supposed to make you see things you couldn’t see before. Sometimes that means a fight between sisters. Sometimes that means healing a tension that was hiding for years. All parents and teachers can do is make space for that, instead of shutting it down.
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