Violet Trace Character Analysis

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”

The memory of the light, however, that had skipped through [Violet’s] veins came back now and then, and once in a while, on an overcast day, when certain corners in the room resisted lamplight; when the red beans in the pot seemed to be taking forever to soften, she imagined a brightness that could be carried in her arms. Distributed, if need be, into places as dark as the bottom of a well.

Part of why they loved it was the specter they left behind. The slumped spines of the veterans of the 27th Battalion betrayed by the commander for whom they had fought like lunatics. The eyes of thousands, stupefied with disgust at having been imported by Mr. Armour, Mr. Swift, Mr. Montgomery Ward to break strikes then dismissed for having done so. The broken shoes of two thousand Galveston longshoremen that Mr. Mallory would never pay fifty cents an hour like the white ones. The praying palms, the raspy breathing, the quiet children of the ones who had escaped from Springfield Ohio, Springfield Indiana, Greensburg Indiana, Wilmington Delaware, New Orleans Louisiana, after raving whites had foamed all over the lanes and yards at home.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him my parrot all these years. “My parrot.” “Love you.” “Love you.” Did the dogs get him? Did some night-walking man snatch him up and take him to a house that did not feature mirrors or keep a supply of ginger cookies for him? Or did he get the message—that she said, “my parrot” and he said, “love you,” and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him—and manage somehow to fly away.

What did she see, young girl like that, barely out of high school, with unbraided hair, lip rouge for the first time and high-heeled shoes? And also what did he? A young me with high-yellow skin instead of black? A young me with long wave hair instead of short? Or a not me at all. A me he was loving in Virginia because that girl Dorcas wasn’t around there anywhere. Was that it? […] Is that what happened? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.

The important thing, the biggest thing Violet got out of that was to never never have children. Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?

Who lay there asleep in that coffin? Who posed there awake in the photograph? The scheming bitch who had not considered Violet’s feelings one tiniest bit, who came into her life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or Mama’s dumpling girl? Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? Washed away on a tide of soap, salt and castor oil. Terrified, perhaps, of so violent a home. Unaware that, had it failed, had she braved mammy-made poisons and mammy’s urgent fists, she could have had the best dressed hair in the city.

“Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”

“Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.

Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn't do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over about the talking? They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice Manfred said, “Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute.”

True Belle was the one [Vera] wanted and the one she took. I don’t know how hard it was for a slave woman to leave a husband that work and distance kept her from seeing much of anyhow, and to leave two daughters behind with an old aunt to take care of them. Rose Dear and May were eight and ten years old then. […]

More important, Miss Vera Louise might help her buy them all out with paper money, because she sure had a lot of it handed to her. Then again, maybe not. Maybe she frowned as she sat in the baggage car, rocking along with the boxes and trunks, unable to see the land she was traveling through. Maybe she felt bad. Anyway, choiceless, she went.

What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not notice the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.

Had she run away, escaped? Or had she been overtaken by smoke, fire, panic, helplessness? […] Immediately Joe fell to his hands and knees, whispering: “Is it you? Just say it. Say anything.” Someone near him was breathing. Turning around he examined the place he had just exited. Every movement and leaf shift seemed to be her. “Give me a sign, then you don’t have to say nothing. Let me see your hand. Just stick it out someplace and I’ll go; I promise. A sign.” He begged, pleaded for her hand until the light grew even smaller. “You my mother?” Yes. No. Both. Either. But not this nothing.

The way she said it. Not like the ‘me’ was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn’t have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. Somebody who wouldn’t have to steal a ring to get back at white people and then lie and say it was a present from them. I wanted the ring back not just because my mother asks me have I found it yet. It’s beautiful. But although it belongs to me, it’s not mine. I love it, but there’s a trick in it and I have to agree to the trick to say it’s mine. Reminds me of the tricky blonde kid living inside Mrs. Trace’s head. A present taken from white folks, given to me when I was too young to say No thank you.

Somebody in the house across the alley put a record on and the music floated into us through the open window. Mr. Trace moved his head to the rhythm and his wife snapped her fingers in time. She did a little step in front of him and he smiled. By and by they were dancing. Funny, like old people do, and I laughed for real. Not because of how funny they looked. Something in it made me feel I shouldn’t be there. Shouldn't be looking at them doing that.

[…] When they finished and I asked for my sweater, Mrs. Trace said, ‘Come back anytime. I want to do your hair for you anyway. Free. Your ends need clipping.’

Mr. Trace sat down and stretched. ‘This place needs birds.’

So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view, was the only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling, well finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious.

But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”

The memory of the light, however, that had skipped through [Violet’s] veins came back now and then, and once in a while, on an overcast day, when certain corners in the room resisted lamplight; when the red beans in the pot seemed to be taking forever to soften, she imagined a brightness that could be carried in her arms. Distributed, if need be, into places as dark as the bottom of a well.

Part of why they loved it was the specter they left behind. The slumped spines of the veterans of the 27th Battalion betrayed by the commander for whom they had fought like lunatics. The eyes of thousands, stupefied with disgust at having been imported by Mr. Armour, Mr. Swift, Mr. Montgomery Ward to break strikes then dismissed for having done so. The broken shoes of two thousand Galveston longshoremen that Mr. Mallory would never pay fifty cents an hour like the white ones. The praying palms, the raspy breathing, the quiet children of the ones who had escaped from Springfield Ohio, Springfield Indiana, Greensburg Indiana, Wilmington Delaware, New Orleans Louisiana, after raving whites had foamed all over the lanes and yards at home.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him my parrot all these years. “My parrot.” “Love you.” “Love you.” Did the dogs get him? Did some night-walking man snatch him up and take him to a house that did not feature mirrors or keep a supply of ginger cookies for him? Or did he get the message—that she said, “my parrot” and he said, “love you,” and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him—and manage somehow to fly away.

What did she see, young girl like that, barely out of high school, with unbraided hair, lip rouge for the first time and high-heeled shoes? And also what did he? A young me with high-yellow skin instead of black? A young me with long wave hair instead of short? Or a not me at all. A me he was loving in Virginia because that girl Dorcas wasn’t around there anywhere. Was that it? […] Is that what happened? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.

The important thing, the biggest thing Violet got out of that was to never never have children. Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?

Who lay there asleep in that coffin? Who posed there awake in the photograph? The scheming bitch who had not considered Violet’s feelings one tiniest bit, who came into her life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or Mama’s dumpling girl? Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? Washed away on a tide of soap, salt and castor oil. Terrified, perhaps, of so violent a home. Unaware that, had it failed, had she braved mammy-made poisons and mammy’s urgent fists, she could have had the best dressed hair in the city.

“Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”

“Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.

Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn't do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over about the talking? They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice Manfred said, “Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute.”

True Belle was the one [Vera] wanted and the one she took. I don’t know how hard it was for a slave woman to leave a husband that work and distance kept her from seeing much of anyhow, and to leave two daughters behind with an old aunt to take care of them. Rose Dear and May were eight and ten years old then. […]

More important, Miss Vera Louise might help her buy them all out with paper money, because she sure had a lot of it handed to her. Then again, maybe not. Maybe she frowned as she sat in the baggage car, rocking along with the boxes and trunks, unable to see the land she was traveling through. Maybe she felt bad. Anyway, choiceless, she went.

What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not notice the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.

Had she run away, escaped? Or had she been overtaken by smoke, fire, panic, helplessness? […] Immediately Joe fell to his hands and knees, whispering: “Is it you? Just say it. Say anything.” Someone near him was breathing. Turning around he examined the place he had just exited. Every movement and leaf shift seemed to be her. “Give me a sign, then you don’t have to say nothing. Let me see your hand. Just stick it out someplace and I’ll go; I promise. A sign.” He begged, pleaded for her hand until the light grew even smaller. “You my mother?” Yes. No. Both. Either. But not this nothing.

The way she said it. Not like the ‘me’ was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn’t have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. Somebody who wouldn’t have to steal a ring to get back at white people and then lie and say it was a present from them. I wanted the ring back not just because my mother asks me have I found it yet. It’s beautiful. But although it belongs to me, it’s not mine. I love it, but there’s a trick in it and I have to agree to the trick to say it’s mine. Reminds me of the tricky blonde kid living inside Mrs. Trace’s head. A present taken from white folks, given to me when I was too young to say No thank you.

Somebody in the house across the alley put a record on and the music floated into us through the open window. Mr. Trace moved his head to the rhythm and his wife snapped her fingers in time. She did a little step in front of him and he smiled. By and by they were dancing. Funny, like old people do, and I laughed for real. Not because of how funny they looked. Something in it made me feel I shouldn’t be there. Shouldn't be looking at them doing that.

[…] When they finished and I asked for my sweater, Mrs. Trace said, ‘Come back anytime. I want to do your hair for you anyway. Free. Your ends need clipping.’

Mr. Trace sat down and stretched. ‘This place needs birds.’

So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view, was the only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling, well finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious.

But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.