Abeng

Clare remembers her parents talking about her uncle Robert, a distant cousin on her father’s side, who is a light-skinned civil servant and her godfather. The family describes him as “funny” because he lives with his mother and prefers other men. One time, he brings home a dark-skinned man and introduces him as “my dearest friend” (125). The friend turns out to be an officer in the US navy, so the family rejects him based on his “wrong” skin color and nationality.

Clare starts avoiding Robert because she does not want to learn about his pursuit of other man or for him to become too emotional. Eventually, Robert drowns like Clinton did, removing the stain from the family.

Clare, like Robert, has a “dear friend” in Zoe, but does not connect her feelings for the other girl to the descriptors of “funny” or “off” associated with same-sex attraction (126). At that point in her life, she does not perceive a problem with gender, but with skin color. Clare understands that if she chooses a husband who is darker than she is, for Boy, it would be akin to Ivanhoe choosing Rebecca (from the novel Ivanhoe), and she would become an outcast. Clare recognizes that her feelings for Zoe might have something to do with her need for her mother.

Kitty, unlike, Boy, loves her Black fellow islanders with a passion, but does not share those feelings with anyone in her family. She sees her people as victims that need to protection and keeps the “darkness locked inside” (129). Back in school, Kitty was the one chosen to recite “The Maroon Girl” at school, and she has internalized the poem’s message. Before her marriage, she was ambitious, disdaining marriage in favor of pursuing her education, dreaming about building another school on Miss Mattie’s land. However, WWII disrupted her plans, and she was transferred to Washington, D.C. After coming back to Jamaica, she met Boy, married him, and gave up her dreams after giving birth to Clare. After her marriage, Kitty gradually became silent and emotionally withdrawn.

Clare and Zoe head back to Miss Mattie’s. Clare wants to protect Zoe and tells her to go home. In the meantime, the cane-cutter has told Miss Mattie about Clare killing the bull, and the old woman concludes that her granddaughter is mean-spirited and corrupted by the Savage blood.

Miss Mattie comes from a mixed white and Black family, which used to be very poor. At 10, her mother sent her to cut cane and the plantation overseer, a cousin of hers, often beat her. Later in life, she became very close to her Black father, Samuel. Eventually, her life centered on her devotion to her father and her religion.

Miss Mattie’s husband, who suffers from dementia, has never been reliable. She takes care of him and allows his other children to visit, but she does not talk to him and is simply waiting for his death. The family often recalls one occasion when he was supposed to bring back money and gifts after selling their cane, but instead, he returned drunk with no funds and gave his children Easter pastries that were mixed with horse manure. All her life, Miss Mattie has had to “fend for herself. Even in marriage” (142), but her children know nothing of these experiences and have difficulties understanding their mother. As a result, Miss Mattie’s relationship to her daughter, Kitty, is caring, but distant.

When Kitty was seven, she developed a severe case of tonsillitis. Miss Mattie charged a neighbor’s simple-minded daughter, Clary, to take Kitty to the hospital. Kitty has never forgotten the time she had to spend alone at the hospital and how Clary took care of her, so she named her firstborn daughter after her.

Boy and Kitty take Clare away. They are uninterested in the details of what happened but worry that Clare is behaving improperly. Boy asks a family friend, Miss Beatrice, to take Clare in.

Miss Beatrice Phillips is an 87-year-old racist or “narrow-minded” (151) white woman who was once friends with Isabel Savage. She has lost all of her family, including her 13 children, except for her sister, Mrs. Winifred Stevens. Miss Beatrice is utilitarian, not spending money on anything she deems unnecessary, such as electricity or pets. Instead of a small lap dog, for example, she has taken in a number of stray dogs and trained them to attack all Black people, except for an old woman who feeds them.

Clare has met Miss Beatrice only once before when the old woman brought a cake made based on Isabel Savage’s recipe. The first night the girl spends at her new home, the old woman teaches her how to remove ticks from the household dogs.

Life at Miss Beatrice’s is “deadly sameness” (156). Others do all of the chores, and there are no playmates for Clare. In the morning, breakfast arrives on trays to the room where the two of them sleep, and Clare reads the local newspaper from cover to cover out loud. Miss Beatrice does not go out much, but she wants to know everything that goes on around town. On one occasion, Clare reads the news about the visit of a coloratura soprano. Miss Beatrice mistakenly thinks that the word “coloratura” means colored and becomes very angry that a non-white woman is performing on stage. Clare’s attempts to correct the old woman are fruitless, and the girl learns to keep quiet and ignore all the little acts of intolerance she witnesses, such as Miss Beatrice casually hitting her old servant with her cane.One weekend, Miss Beatrice and Clare travel to the old woman’s childhood house where her sister, Mrs. Winifred Stevens, lives. The sister is “not right in the head” (159), and Clare isn’t to talk to her. One morning, Clare gets up very early and sees Miss Winifred feeding birds. She is “a tall white-haired lady in a ragged blue dress and bare feet. A slender woman with one distinguishing feature, the filth that framed her body” (160-161). Miss Winifred tells Clare that when she was young, she became pregnant by a Black man, so she went to a convent to give birth, and her father killed her lover. The nuns kept the baby, and Mrs. Stevens’s father forced her to marry a man he chose. Her experiences have made Mrs. Stevens repentant for her social transgression, and she believes that mixing with Black people brings only bitterness and sadness.

The night after her conversation with Mrs. Stevens, Clare dreams about hitting Zoe with a stone and then tending to the wound. When she wakes up, she feels pain in her vagina and goes to the stream to wash. Her first period starts, and the story ends with Clare sitting alone on the veranda with a book, contemplating the changes happening inside her body. She thinks back to her dream, but the narrator states that the girl is not ready to understand the meaning of the dream because Clare “had no idea that everyone we dream about we are” (166).