Quote 1
"If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" [John Wesley] and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head. (3-4)
The grandmother doesn't want to go to Florida, and the children don't particularly want the grandmother to come on the trip. Right from the start, we know the kids are disrespectful. Does this make you sympathize with the grandmother? On the other hand, June Star seems to get something right: she recognizes the grandmother's sense of self-importance and desire to get what she wants. Then again, might the grandmother want to go with them in part because she genuinely wants to be with her family and not on her own. She does, after all, go to Florida with them eagerly, even though that means she won't get to see her relatives in Tennessee.
Quote 2
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state too." "You said it," June Star said (16-17)
June Star and John Wesley have a different sense of the South than their grandmother. They look down on the people around them, and don't respect their origins. In that respect, they seem like kids from a more "modern," middle-class southern family with less of a sense for their roots and the norms of old southern society.