When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn’t know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.
• • •
Meanwhile, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette’s mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady’s three small children so that Claudette's mother could leave, Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette’s pastor, the Reverend H. H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.
—Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,
Phillip Hoose
Read the excerpt. Based on the excerpt and the rest of the text you read earlier, write two to three sentences explaining why it was important for the author to include first-person point of view when telling Claudette’s story.