Sandra K. Friday
Ellen is profoundly her only advice and counsel, and in large part her only comfort. She is profoundly alone trying to counsel herself, to figure things out, and sometimes just to pass the time. Ellen weaves many threads into the fabric that is her story. I have chosen to focus on four of these that represent her character by virtue of her clear indomitable voice and that lend themselves to a close reading to reveal her character. One of these threads that makes up the fabric is her ability to effortlessly juxtapose her present life, with her new mama, in dramatic contrasts with her past life, where she was mired in neglect and abuse. Another thread crucial to the fabric of her story and character is her initial escape from that abusive life the night she declares, "I run . . . Run . . . I run," when her drunken father tries to assault her sexually. The thread that sometimes seems about to break is Ellen's search for a home in which she portrays herself as a victim of both do-gooders and the legal system, until, out of desperation, she spots the woman whom she will pursue to be her "new mama." The fourth thread, also crucial to her character development, is the narration of her friendship with Starletta who is "colored." At first, Starletta's race draws out all of Ellen's stereotypical prejudices, only to have them gradually and subtly dispelled.
The juxtaposition of Ellen's families: past and present
After startling the reader by declaring in her first sentence that she thought up ways to kill her daddy when she was little, and then declaring on that first page that killing him was not necessary, seeing as how he drank himself to death, Ellen confides to us at the beginning of page two that she now lives in a clean brick house where there is plenty to eat. Throughout her narrative she segues from her past life, in which she often had to sneak away from, and sneak back into, her house depending on whether her daddy was home, to her present life, in which she states that she is proud for the school bus to pick up her stylish well-groomed self standing in the front yard with the green grass every morning.
There is no warning when Ellen may switch from her present to her past, but side by side, her accounts of the two shed a lot of light on the character of Ellen and what she has suffered, such as when she describes her new mama washing her hair.
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Does that feel good?
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Oh yes that feels very good.
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I lay on my bed where the sun has come in the window and made it bright and
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warm. My hair hangs off the side so I do not leave a damp place (Gibbons 36).
Ellen's description of her new mama washing her hair takes about a page to describe in the novel, and reaches far beyond the actual physical act of washing someone's hair. These final four lines are laced with words that express Ellen's serenity from the attention and human contact that is so foreign to her former life: feel good, feels very good, lay on my bed, sun, bright, warm. I want students to consider if Ellen were used to this kind of attention whether she would describe it in her new life in such detail. My students will first mark and discuss this passage, and then the one that follows immediately in the text.
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My daddy showed up at my house less and less. He did show up on New Year's
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Eve. Of course I went and hid when I heard him and a pack of colored men come
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in the door. They came in my house and went through my refrigerator . . . They
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got my bread and jelly and made sandwiches. I hope they choke. I hope they
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choke and die (Gibbons 36).
Ellen goes on to say that she will set the house on fire and burn them all up, even her own daddy. The rage she feels at her father and the men pillaging her refrigerator is in sharp relief against the serenity she has established in the final four lines describing her new mama washing her hair. These two passages side by side in the novel represent the power of juxtaposing her two lives. My students will learn to be on the lookout for these striking and sometimes more subtle contrasts that occur without warning, and they will choose some of these pairs of passages for marking and discussing.
What do you take when you leave a place you never will come back to?
The death of Ellen's mama in the autumn sets the stage for her sudden and shocking departure on New Year's Eve. Ellen describes life at home, on the very night that she and her daddy returned there after her mama's funeral. She confides that her daddy left and did not return home until the next night. It may be easy for students to speculate on what motivated her to go to school the day after her mama's funeral and why, as she says rather matter-of-factly, she wore some of her mama's clothes to school every day, thereafter.
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I wore some of mama's clothes to school. Nobody would know. Just some things
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up under my dress. She was not that much bigger than me. . . . I enjoyed
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wearing my mama's clothes. Just so I am not in a wreck is all I thought. I went
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through her things that night. . . . I decided to wear a little something every day
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(Gibbons 24).
Students will do a close reading of this passage using the Mark and Discuss template. There will be no words they don't understand, but there should be any number of words or phrases they might find meaningful to our discussion of Ellen as she is revealing her character. What can be inferred that Ellen wanted to wear some of her mama's clothes, and wear them "up under her dress?" What is the significance of Ellen wearing something next to her body that was worn by her deceased mama? An important connection and then question is, "How many people do you think do that, or something like it?" "How many of you have worn something to remember a deceased person who is dear to you, maybe not an article of clothing, but perhaps a bracelet, or pin with his or her picture on it, or a tattoo?" We will explore why Ellen says, "Nobody would know." Does she want to hide the fact that she is wearing her dead mama's clothes? Why? People who wear pins or bracelets or tattoos usually want others to know they are mourning the loss of a friend or family member. I want my students to consider what they think motivates Ellen to keep the clothes hidden.
When she says, "I enjoyed wearing my mama's clothes," what does she imply about her feelings for her mama and the comfort this brings her now that her mama is dead? Some students will question why she says she hopes to not be in a wreck. What has being in a wreck to do with wearing her mama's clothes under her own clothes? Ellen's sentence, "I went through her things that night" [the night of the funeral when she was home alone] simply states what she did, but I want my students to read the emotions that are motivating this activity.
Ellen, who passes much of the time by herself, even before her mother died and was often in the hospital and is alone even more now that she is dead, cooking and eating by herself, tells us that one of her games is "playing catalog" which means that she picks out pictures of a make-believe family in a catalog, furniture for their house, clothes they might like to wear, camping gear, and even clothes for the next season. She even makes up the father and mother's jobs. Students will mark and discuss Ellen's creation of her fabricated family that seems to be and have everything she would like in a real family. To learn more about Ellen, students will compare the choices she makes for her catalog dream family juxtaposed to the hand she is dealt in her actual dysfunctional family.
On Christmas Eve, with no visible sign of her daddy, she goes with her only friend Starletta to the "colored" store and buys a few things for herself. Ellen plays the roles of a whole family: buying, wrapping, hiding, and finding her presents.
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When I got home I wrapped the presents . . . I wrapped them at the kitchen table
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and hid them. When I found them the next day I was surprised in the spirit of
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Christmas (Gibbons 28).
Marking and discussing this brief but poignant passage, will add to the profile that students are creating of Ellen: her perspective, tenacity, creativity and imagination, vulnerability, and profound solitude at the age of ten.
A trauma on New Year's Eve is the catalyst that permanently drives Ellen from her home, and hurls her nearly invisible self into the world with a box of her earthly possessions and a mission, to find a home where she can feel safe and where someone cares about her. Her drunken father mistakes her for her dead mother, and tries to rape her.
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I am Ellen.
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I am Ellen. (Gibbons 38)
In some ways this declaration, shouting out to her drunken father, could be the title of this novel. Ellen seems continuously trying to identify herself to the world, to fashion a place for herself, against so many odds, here against a sexual assault by her drunken father.
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He pulls the evil back into his self and Lord I run. Run down the road to Starletta.
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Now to the smoke coming out of the chimney against the night sky I run. Down the
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path in the darkness I gather my head and all that is spinning and flying out from
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me and wonder oh you just have to wonder what the world has come to (Gibbons
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38).
Students will mark and discuss both of these passages, even though the first one is only the repetition of three words. They can infer from the repetition of these words the emotions that are driving them. There is also the repetition in the second highly charged passage of the word run: ". . . I run," "Run . . . ," ". . . I run." Students will observe that she runs out into the night and last but by no means least, she exclaims, "and wonder oh you just have to wonder what the world has come to." This crisis is one of the more revelatory about Ellen's inside emotions from what she says and from her body language.
In marking and discussing this and the following passage, students will begin to identify the emotions that motivated Ellen to sneak back into the house and pack her few personal possessions in a box and take flight.
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I went on home and waited on the edge of the woods until I saw them leave . . .
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I went in the house and then loaded up everything I damn well please in a box. . .
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And what else do you take when you leave a place you never will come back to
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not even if you forget something very precious to you? Then there is where to go?
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(Gibbons 40)
Searching for home
Not having given any thought to where she will go prior to packing her box reveals the irrevocability of Ellen's decision. And so begins her journey, her search for a family where she will feel safe and wanted. The way is strewn with potholes and boulders, downed power lines and tree limbs, miscommunications and misjudgments, and obstacles that would discourage an adult with far more experience and survival skills at navigating the world alone. Ellen begins by abandoning what is left of her dysfunctional family after the death of her mother, and lives through home placements that are made on her behalf; an art teacher takes her in and then her mean-spirited, vindictive grandmother whom she refers to as "mama's mama" demands that the court turn Ellen over to her because she is legally her grandmother, and it turns out, because she wants to punish Ellen for the death of her mama. Finally after being bounced around among relatives, she spots the woman at church whom she will choose as her new family, hence her "new mama."
Ellen starts out on her journey with at least the hope that she has some control over her choice of a family. Her first abortive effort to stay with her Aunt Betsy appears to be a mutual fit until Sunday afternoon when Ellen discovers that Aunt Betsy means only to keep her for the week end.
She must return home where she locks herself in the closet when she hears her daddy coming. If she forgets to lock herself in, she might have to push him down and run. I want my students to mark and discuss Ellen's comment that follows when she says, "You live with something long enough and you get used to it" (Gibbons 44).
Ellen is so relieved when her art teacher takes her in because somebody has "decided what to do with me" (Gibbons 45). But, this placement is short-lived, and the law sends Ellen to live with her mama's mama, who sends Ellen to work in her cotton fields as if she were hired "colored" help, and not her ten-year-old granddaughter. Ellen finds a perfect family in, of all places, the "colored" family of Mavis who teaches Ellen how to pick cotton. In the following passage that students will mark and discuss, she refers to this perfect family as a commodity that one procures, "I thought I would bust open if I did not get one of them soon" (Gibbons 67). What might this exclamation reveal about the way Ellen thinks about her search for a family?
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While I was eavesdropping at the colored house I started a list of all that a family
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should have. . . . While I watched Mavis and her family I thought I would bust
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open if I did not get one of them for my own self soon (Gibbons 67).
Ellen endures physical and psychological abuse at the hands of mama's mama, but eventually the mean old lady dies. Once again, Ellen puts her things in her box, the metaphor for her transience. Shortly, however, she decides that she needs to take matters into her own hands to find a family, and as it turns out she spots a lady at church with all the girls lined up next to her, and decides that this will be her new mama. Students will mark and discuss juxtaposition of these two passages, one in which she is packing her box and asking Jesus to "please settle up with me," and the other in sharp contrast, in which she states, "I am somebody now . . ."
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And as I laid out my clothes and folded them to leave I reminded Jesus that this
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is not the way a girl needs to be. I told him again to please settle up with me
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so I could be a pure girl again and somebody good could love me (Gibbons 93).
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And that is what I did. That is why I think I am somebody now because I said by
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damn this is how it is going to be and before I knew it I had a new mama (Gibbons
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95).
And it is this new mama's clean brick house where she is safely settled in the present, on page two, of Ellen's narrative. It is her life in the present in this house with this woman who seems to care deeply about Ellen that is woven seamlessly into the tapestry of Ellen's narrative of her physical and emotional struggle for survival. The juxtaposition of these two interwoven lives, the telling of one serving as relief from the telling of the other that is almost too cruel to read about, much less to have lived. So much of Ellen's present life with her new mama is influenced and informed as a result of life as an invisible, abused child picking her way, with her box of possessions, through a minefield in search of a home.
Students will more passages for marking and discussing, and among them they can include Ellen's present life juxtaposed with her "invisible" past life.
Starletta's friendship dispels stereotypes
In Ellen's perilous journey to find a home where she feels safe and loved, she is engaged on another journey of which she gradually becomes aware, and fully realizes at the end of her narrative. It is her journey to peel away her prejudices against black people, a mindset that was her legacy as a child of the rural south in the 1970's. Gibbons crafts this second journey seamlessly alongside Ellen's more urgent and conscious campaign to find a home, but it is in many ways as much a revelation for the reader as her primary journey.
I see Ellen's unconscious journey to dispel prejudice as a profound learning experience for my students, an opportunity to study how Ellen's prejudice unwittingly informs her attitudes and behavior, and ultimately how her experiences gradually bring her to full awareness of them. Just as Ellen brings the innocence of a ten-year old to many of her insights, she brings this same innocence to her observations and illuminations about black people in the characters of Starletta, her only young friend, and Starletta's mother and father; and Mavis, the woman who teaches her how to pick cotton and whose family Ellen deems just about perfect.
It is Starletta's family down the road who takes Ellen in on various occasions when she has no place to go to escape her drunken father or her loneliness. It is Starletta's mother who invites her to stay the night on New Year's Eve when her father and his drinking buddies invade her house and her drunken father, mistaking her for her mother, tries to rape her. But this is the same family of which Ellen says:
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As fond as I am of all three of them I do not think I could drink after them. I try
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to see what Starletta leaves on the lip of a bottle but I have never seen anything
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with the naked eye. If something is that small it is bound to get into your system
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and do some damage (Gibbons 30).
This is the same family of whom Ellen says when they invite her to have Christmas dinner with them:
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She came at me with a biscuit in her hand and held it to my face. No matter
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how good it looks to you it is still a colored biscuit (Gibbons 32).
Yet, when Ellen opens her Christmas present from Starletta's family, she says:
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Oh my God it is a sweater. I like it so much. I do not tell a story when I say
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it does not look colored at all (Gibbons 32).
After Ellen has worked in the cotton field a while and has had many conversations with Mavis, the black woman who teaches her to pick cotton, she shares this thought with the reader:
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I thought while I chopped from one field to the next how I could pass for
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colored now. . . . But that was O.K. now I thought to myself of how it did
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not make much of a difference anymore (Gibbons 66).
Ellen recognizes her own gradual transformation out of her prejudice and her growing awareness a year or two later when she and Starletta are slightly more grown and she reflects on her past attitudes about drinking and eating "colored" food:
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I wonder to myself am I the same girl who would not drink after Starletta two
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years ago or eat a colored biscuit when I was starved? It is the same girl but I am
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old now and I know it is not the germs you cannot see that slide off her lips and on
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to a glass then to your white lips that will hurt you or turn you colored ( Gibbons
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85).
Ellen's final transformation from racial prejudice is set when she brings Starletta home to meet her new mama and spend the week end. It makes up the final five pages of her narrative, and I have chosen these final pages for my Lesson plan #3 because Ellen's recognition that her racial prejudice has vanished provides a powerful study of how a character can change. Also students will have engaged in close readings of Ellen's racial prejudice as early as page one when she refers to "two colored boys," and on several other occasions throughout the novel. Now in the final five pages, using the Mark and Discuss template, students will analyze how she expresses changes in her prejudice, and use their previous close readings in which she voices her prejudice to observe the extent of her change.
Up to this point, students will have engaged in close reading individual passages, and in close reading, and comparing and contrasting adjacent passages; but in this Lesson #3, students will be referring back to various passages throughout the novel that they marked and discussed on the topic of racial prejudice, and contrasting them with the passages that they mark and discuss in these final five pages.
