"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Neal A. Lester

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   ... just as the babies are getting big enough to fly he will have to light
   paper torches and burn the paper houses down, singeing the wings of the
   young wasps before they get a chance to fly or to sting him.... (37)

Whereas this father can easily destroy the baby wasps before they are able to sting him, he is not so lucky with his maturing daughter who has denied him authority in her life. She has instead authored her own life in the face of threatening outrage. That she is able to write signifies her ability to think. To think independently and to act accordingly is the "sting" the father gets from the fact of her letter and the act of her letter-writing. And while he may hold, possess, even destroy the letter by destroying the actual paper on which the letter is written, he cannot possess the creator of the words or diminish the "sting" of their words. Indeed, the source of her empowerment is formal education, learning to read and write. As the story opens, the daughter is returning from school and getting off of the school bus. As she nears her father sitting on the porch, he is attracted to her physical person, which Walker conjoins imagistically with the power of education for this daughter: "the school books against her hips" (37). Except for slave narratives given orally and recorded by an interviewer, slave narratives generally, especially Douglass's and Jacobs's, are triumphs based on a slave's literacy.(8) Again, both Douglass's and Jacobs's rifles emphasize the connections among literacy, self-identity, and self-liberation when they clarify that they--not someone else-had "written" their own narratives. Douglass reminds the reader how literacy and the ability to write were particularly threatening to slaveowners because slaves could write their own passes to freedom (Douglass 672). Mr. Auld's command to his wife to stop teaching Frederick Douglass to read and write signals, for him, one of the slave's greatest weapons against enslavement:

   Mr. Auld... forbade Ms. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among
   other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to
   read.... "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger
   should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do.
   Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now ... if you teach
   that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping
   him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave." (Douglass 667)

It is what Douglass terms the "incompatibility of education and slavery" (Douglass 670) that proves the ultimate destruction of this father who can physically, but not intellectually and spiritually, destroy his daughter. Even when she is no longer a presence in the story--at the beginning when she is at school and at the end after the breast-cutting when she is no longer mentioned--her presence is real and documented in the letter that remains a testimony of her defiance. Her letter triggers his thoughts to his past with his' sister and with his wife as well. Daughter's letter conveys the ultimate power of literacy and creation of the word, especially for females. Perhaps this fact explains why Jacobs represents a tradition of black writers generally, and black women writers specifically, who feign a humility in taking up pen to write at all. The very act of writing, particularly in a public space, assumes an authorial position for those neither expected nor meant to be literate.(9) Not only are the daughter's thinking and writing affronts to her powerless father, but the very act of publishing--here symbolized in her intent to send the letter to another person, her white lover--is the ultimate symbol of his defeat and her triumph: "He hates the very paper of the letter and crumples it in his fist" (42). Still, the words are indelibly imprinted on his mind: "Words of the [crumpled and rainsoaked] letter are running [and will continue to run] on a track in his mind" (42). Hers is yet another act of female defiance left to remind him of his own illusory power.

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"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Neal A. Lester

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