Sam says that onions can cure everything.
Sam is known as “the onion man.” He claims that his donkey Mary Lou is fifty years old, and her old age and good health are a result of eating onions.
"She eats nothing but raw onions," Sam would say, holding up a white onion between his dark fingers. "It's nature's magic vegetable. If a person ate nothing but raw onions, he could live to be two hundred years old." (Ch. 25)
Basically, to Sam, onions are the cure-all. They will heal whatever ails you. Soon, the people of the village go to Sam instead of the doctor when they are sick. He has made all kinds of medicines and lotions out of onions and swears by their use.
He said that onions were good for the digestion, the liver, the stomach, the lungs, the heart, and the brain. "If you don't believe me, just look at old Mary Lou here. She's never been sick a day in her life." (Ch. 25)
So Sam says that onions can cure old age, arthritis, baldness, and just about anything else. A lot of people just get medicine from the doctor and onions from Sam, to hedge their bets. They do not want to take any chances by skipping the onion cure.
Sam gets into a little trouble for kissing the schoolteacher, Katherine Barlow, because he is black and she is white. This causes a stir in the village. They set fire to the schoolhouse and Sam is shot. Kissing Kate never recovered psychologically.
There may be something to the onions. When Stanley runs away, he finds some of the old onions and eats them. It turns out that the onions have another use. They protect you from the dangerous yellow-spotted lizards, who don’t like “onion blood.” The onions come full circle.
No comments:
Post a Comment