You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.

Dear God,

I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m already half dead, an all of these chilren.

First impression?

‘Dear God’ indeed. I don’t think a book’s opening has ever left me as appalled. I feel like I’m just a spark away from bursting into angry flames.

Second impression?

Awe. 

Awe that a writer can get under my guard, and press my buttons so completely in such a short passage. I read so many books. Some make me cry at the end. Has one ever made me want to cry at the beginning? Or this angry? Not until now.

Close Reading

Probably the first thing that strikes me is the language – especially as a contrast to the tightly controlled, highly ‘rules-based’ examples I’ve seen recently. It’s not ‘bad English’; it’s English which – through its vernacular, idiom, and syntax – gives me a very particular sense of time and place. A clearer one than, say, The Remains of the Day.

After that, it’s the voices.

First, that awful opening sentence. This isn’t a space to be snobby about the double negative ‘not never’ – here I see it adding vehemence and threat to ‘better’, and my mind is whirring, consulting the list of things so terrible they can only be told to God. I sense more threat in the second sentence, but also I think there’s an undercurrent of trying to shift the blame. Whatever might have happened, it’s the fact of it being known, not the thing itself, which is being foregrounded. Whoever that voice is, their presence looms over the rest of the passage.

Then we come to the second voice: a fourteen-year-old trying to make sense of something she doesn’t even seem to possess the language to name. It’s telling that Walker foregrounds this character’s tender age, establishing a power dynamic between the two voices which is reinforced by the fact that this character is doing as told and speaking to God.

So what is this we’re reading? A letter, a prayer, a confession? I’m trying (and mostly failing) to keep an open mind here: it’s possible that this ‘secret’ thing might be something the child has done? Either way, there’s something appalling, incredibly powerful, about the idea that a young person might scrub those words out, ‘I am’, and change tense, as if goodness is nothing more than a memory, ‘I have always been’ turns goodness into a claim about the past. Something serious has happened between those two grammatical constructions.

The remarkable thing is how quickly Walker makes me change my mind. By the time we hit 100 words, I don’t feel like the child might be a culprit any more.

Walker gives this childlike voice just enough to help me draw the worst possible conclusions about ‘Fonso’, and the domestic situation. The first voice, the threatening and sinister one, gets a name. Is he the protagonist’s father? I don’t think so. The use of ‘Fonso’ seems oddly familiar, but also oddly detached; there is no explicit familial label. We get this picture of a silent, wary child, watching, hearing, but not fully understanding the adult drama playing out in front of her. In her confusion, not knowing the extent to which she is to blame, she asks God for help. For a sign, trusting that God might somehow tell her what is happening.

I think there’s one final detail which adds a sense of horror to my revulsion.

It’s simple, subtle, but devastating.

When the narrator begins her account with ‘Last spring’, we realise that whatever has happened, whatever IS happening, this isn’t an isolated event, but something taking place over a period measured in seasons, not days, weeks, or even months. How desperate must this poor child be, to want help at this stage. And what – or who – has prevented her from seeking help before? The text doesn’t tell us. But by this point, I have a pretty strong suspicion.

As you read on. Look out for:

How isolated the narrator seems. Does she have no school-friends, no friendly adults, that she can only confide in God?

The balance between implication and explicit detail. How much of the work are we doing as readers, filling in blanks with things better left unsaid?

What ‘Fonso’ has to say for himself. It’s a powerful and shocking opening, and it has certainly encouraged a strong sympathetic bond between me and the narrator. But it’s worth remembering that this is her account, too – and therefore a subjective one.

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