Daimys – Response to "Ella"

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#593

This might just be my favorite out of the four, so far. Faery has a way of writing intimately and distanced simultaneously. As you read, you can feel the strong bond of family – especially with her and Will – and the secrets/troubles that have created tension.

I think what I liked most was her grappling with Ella being a ‘terrible person’ and wanting to give Ella a reason for leaving, showing compassion. For most of the piece, the reader – at least this reader – believes this is about Faery’s family history, and her trying to find plausible reasons for this one huge gap in her family narrative. But as the story unfolds, Faery makes this about an issue much larger – racism in the USA. She does an overall good job of depicting the racism that existed and still exists in todays society in being viewed as a person of color.

It’s also the first piece of read in a long time that acknowledges her privilege of whiteness while still working with the issues at hand. Which is why, I think, this part of the story is what I like the most:

“I grew up a blonde and blue-eyed girl, and I have enjoyed all my life the privileges of whiteness. I don’twant to deny that fact in wondering about the racial history of my family. It is the racial history of countless supposedly white Southern families, after all, whose ancestors hid or denied the forbidden passions that led them to cross the boundaries of race despite the warnings and the dangers. That white slave masters assumed a right of sexual access to the black women they or their friends owned, resulting in a profoundly racially mixed black population in this country, we all know, acknowledge, take for granted. That it sometimes was love and desire that led to racial mixing is a fact too often denied. But that mixing, forced or chosen, is our racial history, and as James Baldwin has written, ‘People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.'”

It speaks to the question we were asking last week in class “what’s at stake”. I think this piece exemplifies a piece of personal writing that goes beyond those first enjoyable steps of exploring, dissecting, finding, losing, and finds a larger, more critical message that (also) needs to be written.

[Anonymous]

#614

I think I also responded to Faery’s sense of social consciousness in regards to race, and even class. Stating, “Probably those ages weren’t all that unusual for marriage, especially among poor people, in those days” and acknowledging the men in the family moving around “always looking for better work” create a context for the family’s private failings in a way that connects them to society’s failings as a whole. In the lines prior to the telling ones you point out about the racial history of the south, she asks, “If she could pass, and did, who could blame her? What does being white, or being black, mean anyhow? This is the only version of her story I have imagined that can explain her decision to abandon her child. And her descent into the oldest profession, her finding refuge in the dowdy house.” I think she self-consciously suggests, and very much wants to believe, that society’s flaws were a contributing cause of Ella’s mistakes.

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