Character EssayDraft 1

Jon Davis

“True friends stab you in the front.” – Oscar Wilde

Everybody wants a friend, but sometimes it's hard to be a good friend and you end up stabbing your friends in the front. To avoid this, it is important to have good qualities. Johnny is the main character in With Every Drop of Blood. Johnny has many qualities that make him a good friend, but some of them work in a negative way. Johnny is nice, sneaky, and religious which made him a good friend to Cush.

Johnny's religiousness helped him be a better person. Religiousness is having faith in something that cannot be seen or scientifically proven. Johnny sticks to his understanding of his religion when he is arguing about the morality of owning a person.“How could any Christian believe in slavery when Jesus said flat-out all people was to be brothers unto each other?”“Oh!” I said. “Well what about Genesis, where it says, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’ It’s clear enough- God made the colored black so’s they could be told apart from whites.” “Where in the Bible does it say a fella ought to be whipped until his back is raw just because he took a piece of pork from a pig he’d done the work of raisin’?”This shows Johnny’s religiousness because he truly believes what he says even though Cush is fighting back with his own faith based belief. Not only did Johnny’s religiousness make him a better a friend, his kind nature did as well.

Johnny’s nice nature made him a caring person. Niceness is caring for another person while you are dying. Johnny is nice to Jeb when Jeb is dying, and promises to bury him properly.“Now I know these here Yanks’ll just bury me by the road in five minutes like they done with the other fella. Do me a favor, youngster. Put a couple of big rocks on top of me so’s the dogs won’t dig me up.” “Maybe you won’t-“He reached out, clutched my arm, and squeezed it hard- a lot harder than I reckoned he’d be able to. “Big rocks,” he said. “Big as you can drag over.””All right,” I said.I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it, for the Federals wouldn’t be much interested in whether the dogs got him or not. But I reckoned I’d try.This shows Johnny’s nice side because he is willing to care for Jeb even though he is in a dangerous situation. Not only is Johnny caring and nice natured, but he is also sneaky.

Johnny’s sneakiness made him have better relationships with friends. Sneakiness is an important factor in friendships because it works like the way you strengthen your muscles. It ruins part of the friendship, and then you have work to build up that relationship and it ends up being a stronger friendship than before. Johnny uses his natural sneakiness when he attempts to escape his captors.“It took some mighty fast talking, but in the end I convinced them I wasn’t trying to escape.”“I tried digging right here by the road, like I said I would, but it’s all rocks there. I figured the ground’d be softer where they plowed it.”This shows Johnny using his sneakiness by talking his way out of a sticky situation when his captors catch him escaping. Johnny’s sneakiness is one of the greater qualities about him.

Johnny is nice, sneaky, and religious which helps him socially. While some of these build and some destroy, he uses them in ways to eventually help him. These characteristics helped his bitterness with Cush develop into a great friendship.