“Taking in the World:” Out of the Family Cocoon

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VIII

“Speak up, Ike, an ‘Spress Yo’se‘f”

Sentimental Romance Revisited in Ntozake Shange’s

Betsey Brown

“Taking in the World:” Out of the Family Cocoon

If novels can heal past wounds, then Betsey Brown’s fresh, optimistic tone redeems the black female image by placing her in a familial context imbued with love. Moreover, one of the strongest points of Shange’s writing is her ability to redefine black existence, by making us aware of the dangers of a conventional life. The writer does not shatter this familial happiness (as in the case of Harper and Fauset), but remodels it through crucial interactions between the private and the public spheres.⁷

By analyzing Betsey’s image in connection with Harper’s and Fauset’s protagonists, it can be noticed that Iola and Angela initially feel no need to move away from their family’s influence, and it is the tragic death of parental figures that marks the beginning of an existential crisis. In comparison, Betsey’s inner struggle is present from the beginning in her escapist thoughts, in her desire to fly away from her family’s smug cocoon—this ambivalent receptacle—that both chokes and protects her. To quote Michael Cooke, Betsey’s passage is one from “self-veiling” (“an assertive, undemanding adaptation to the environment”) to “intimacy” (“freedom from compulsion and a lucid, prompt communication with [the] spirit and world” (1984, 8)).

From the first paragraphs in the novel, the schematic blissfulness of the Jane-and-Greer family is both highlighted and questioned. Betsey’s desire to break free from her family’s encircling mentality is set in contrast with her siblings’ settled life. While the house is asleep, Betsey’s awakening at dawn is not simply a physical act, but mostly a mental ritual of watching the horizon that offers her an insight into her own existence through “innumerable perspectives of the sun” (13).

The setting marked by symbols of ascension—the terrace, the porch, the stairs, and the tree—suggestively places Betsey’s inner growth in isolation from the others. The young girl’s Thoreauvian ideal of self-reliance appears in antithesis with the “lives of quiet desperation”⁸ experienced by the black inhabitants of St. Louis: “There was a preciousness to St. Louis at dawn or dusk that was settling to the child in the midst of a city that rankled with poverty, meanness, and shootings Betsey was only vaguely aware of” (14). Ironically, the above lines will be further subverted, since Betsey will later leave her ivory tower and discover on her own the social and racial degradation. By running away from home, she will have access to other social strata, much different from her parents’ middle-class way of life.

Set in contrast with the daily fracas of her big family routine, Betsey’s solitude as a watcher-of-the-horizon allows her to deliberately create a private, imaginative sphere by “taking in the world all on her own” (16). “The littlest porch on the third floor” becomes a liberating topos, similar to the garret described by Harriet Jacobs in her nineteenth century autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. If for Jacobs physical freedom was at stake, for Betsey spiritual development is essential, as disclosed by her rhetorical question: “How could she become a great anything with all this foolishness going on around her?” (17).⁹

Betsey’s question initiates a search for identity, pendulating from self-deception to self-knowledge in a decisive attempt to fulfill her potentiality. Seen through Gabriel Liiceanu’s lens, Betsey strives to move way from “this terrible universe of things and beings-as-things,” in order to remember the self “as a subject of one’s liberty and existence” (1975, 165). The oak tree, as a secret place of meditation, allows the young girl to ponder both romantic and political ideas:¹⁰

Nestled in her private cranny made by two wide boughs of the ancient tree at the corner of the house, Betsey laid her roses in a circle round her head, a halo of flowers befitting a princess, she thought. The huge oak sprawled over her front lawn, letting the shadows make lacework on the grass and the porch below. The uppermost branches stretched past her very own window, so Betsey knew it was her tree, where she could think all kinds of thoughts and feel all kinds of feelings (42).

The young girl’s polytropic character and symbolical ascension is also suggested by her choice to recite Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, a crucial reminder of the importance of self-expression in black people’s existence:

Who dat knockin’ at de do’?

Why, Ike Johnson, yes, fu’ sho!

Come in, Ike. I’s mighty glad

You come down. I t’ought you’s

mad

At me ‘bout de othah night,

An was stayin’ ‘way fu’ spite.

Say, now, was you mad fu’ true

W’en I kin’ o’ laughed at you?

Speak up, Ike, an ‘spress yo’se’f (22).

Selected by Betsey for the Elocution Contest, Dunbar’s poem dramatizes the act of self-assertion on a literary, racial, and personal level.

On the literary level, Betsey’s choice of an African American poet inaugurates a change in the literary canon of her school formerly dominated by white authors such as Whittier, Dickinson, Robinson, and Kipling. Shange suggests that this redefinition of literary taste has occurred because students have started to understand literary and social matters differently. If in the past the chosen authors were Shakespeare and Byron, now “Dunbar, Hughes, and Fawcett were the champions of her new changes” (37).

On the racial level, the poem discloses the importance of liberating black identity, of reclaiming the possibility of open speech denied to black people by white ideology. In the poem, the interlocutor is eliciting a response from Ike/the Other, while striving to make him speak, and therefore break a historical silence. The recurrent question also draws attention to the African American’s choked feelings of anger and frustration at the imprisoning racial system.

Furthermore, on the personal level, Betsey’s reciting individualizes the poem by endowing it with an erotic message that playfully deconstructs the artificially puritan language of romance: “‘Who dat knocking at de do’?’ took on a more coquettish tease than Betsey’d ever revealed” (38). The message of the poem is thus related with Betsey’s incipient romance, with her first thoughts of love knocking at the adolescence’s door.

The author reconfigures here the conventional representation of the “good girl” by contrasting Betsey’s image with both a debauched and a pure version of femininity: Betsey is neither a Jezebel nor a Madonna. Definitely, she does not subscribe to the modern, cosmeticized model of her age, exemplified by her two colleagues, Mavis and Liliana, whose luring sexuality exposed as a “sign of grown-up-ness” prevents them from studying (38). At the same time, Betsey’s portrait differs from the nineteenth century, fair-skinned renderings of femininity—those characters whose virginal minds were never clouded by sexual impulses. In this way, Betsey moves away from stereotypical versions of femininity, inasmuch as she wants to be herself—to be an Ikette who speaks up.

NOTES

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