The piece of work I feel connects well to the memoir, They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch, is the song Time We Had by The Mother Hips. The tone is calm and hopeful matching Jennings’s inner emotions at the beginning and towards the end of the novel. The memoir itself although written in a child-like tone, also portrays a hopeful and struggling expression. Throughout the novel, Jennings runs away many times from the foster homes he is forced to stay at. Instead of going to where his family is although the location is always changing, he runs to the zoo, which becomes his new home. This matches the lyrics “on the way home” in the song. Another time Jennings is running away, he walks through a graveyard in the dead of night attempting to cross the Whitestone Bridge. As he walks through, a man, acting as a ghost frightens him out of the graveyard, going with the line “I heard a ghost laughing in the trees, moving inside the midnight breeze”.
“It was too dark to see my number, so I didn’t know who I was. One number is as good as another, I thought. I’ll find out tomorrow who I am”(252). After his mom falls down the stairs trying to fix the satellite, Jennings is taken to a precinct station house and from there, he is taken to a home in Yonkers by a woman from Child Welfare. Upon arrival, Jennings is led to his bed, but because he got there so late, and it was so dark, he could not see what his new number would be. This passage, although short, is very strong and deep. The tone is almost methodical and bored because Jennings has been in this situation so many times before. It no longer concerns him. In this passage, Jennings’s identity is being compared to a number. Spending so much time in foster homes, it seems to be the only thing that stays constant in his life. His life is so confusing, complicated and dark to see whom he is, so his number that he gets in every foster home becomes his identity. In