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Devil / Planter/ Old Man
Gros Jean, Mi-Jean, and Ti-Jean’s impoverished single mother. The boys’ mother is deeply faithful, believing that God will provide her starving family with food and stressing the importance to each of her boys to respect all of God’s creatures before they go off to meet the Devil. The mother’s piousness suggests her resilient spirit: she has lost her husband and lives in abject poverty, but she still has steadfast faith in God. Ti-Jean is the only one of her sons to have absorbed this lesson, and it is through his own faith in God, as well as his humility, that he eventually defeats the Devil.
Mother Quotes in Ti-Jean and His Brothers
The Ti-Jean and His Brothers quotes below are all either spoken by Mother or refer to Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Prologue Quotes
MOTHER: Wait, and God will send us something.
GROS JEAN: God forget where he put us.
MI JEAN: God too irresponsible.
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Act 3 Quotes
“You are hardly a man, a stalk, bending in the wind with no will of its own, never proven your self, in battle or wisdom […]”
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“You have told me yourself our lives are not ours, that no one’s life is theirs husband or wife, father or son, that our life is God’s own.”
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Mother Character Timeline in Ti-Jean and His Brothers
The timeline below shows where the character Mother appears in Ti-Jean and His Brothers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue
...a place on the moon because Ti-Jean beat the Devil. In life, Ti-Jean had a mother and two older brothers: Gros Jean, whose arm “was hard as iron,” but who wasn’t...
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Ti-Jean’s mother, whose husband passed away, was very poor, too old and weak to protect her home...
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...have the brains. Unable to find any food for themselves, Ti-Jean’s family starves while, in Mother’s words, “the planter is eating from plates painted golden, forks with silver tongues, the brown...
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The boys’ mother doesn’t seem all too worried that they don’t have anything to eat. “Wait, and God...
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...Bolom appears outside the family’s door. They hear the sound of a child’s cry, and Mother fears it is one of the Devil’s “angels.” Distraught, she tells her son that she...
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Bolom asks the boys’ mother to send her oldest son outside, for the boys “must die in that order.” And...
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Act 1
Early morning the next day, Gros Jean rises early and packs up a bundle. His mother is sorry to see him go, but he feels it is time for him to...
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Act 3
The next day, Ti-Jean is comforting his mother, who tries to ask her youngest son not to leave. She tells him he is...
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...Ti-Jean that it’s the only home he has. In response, Ti-Jean tells him that his mother had three sons, and didn’t get vexed. Taking off the Planter’s mask, the Devil says,...
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...Devil shows no signs of listening, and raises his fork to kill Ti-Jean. Then, Ti-Jean’s mother appears, asking the devil to have mercy on his son. Ti-Jean admits he’s “scared as...
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