Previous
Chapter 21
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mighty Miss Malone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hope
Talent and Hard Work
Family
The Black Experience in America
The Great Depression
Summary
Analysis
The camp, run by a woman named Donna Stewart (whom everyone calls Stew) certainly isn’t wonderful, but it is at least okay. Stew shows Mrs. Malone, Deza, and Jimmie around. Deza picks a recently vacated hut with a cheerful blue gingham curtain (like Mrs. Needham’s dress) for her family. Stew explains the camp rules—no belongings can be left outside, respect others’ property, take trash to the dump and only pee in the latrines—then bids the exhausted Malones goodnight.
Although this is a very dark moment for the family, they’re all doing their best to cling to their hope of finding Mr. Malone and a brighter future. For Jimmie, this meant invoking the family motto at the end of the previous chapter. For Deza, it’s represented by picking the hut with the curtain that reminds her of better times and the promise the future held for her a few short weeks ago.
Themes
When Deza wakes up in the morning, Mrs. Malone has already gone to town and Jimmie has befriended the girls who live in the next-door tent, Loretta and Kathleen Small. They both have obvious crushes on him, much to Deza’s consternation. After a while, Stew passes by and invites Deza to accompany her on her rounds of the camp. Stew keeps things running smoothly in the large community, but it requires hard work and continual vigilance. She’s a caring person, and she offers to share her collection of Reader’s Digest magazines with Deza when she learns that the girl is an avid reader.
While Deza is fond of Jimmie, she tends to see him just as her brother and as an undersized teenager. The fact that other girls—Clarice, Loretta, Kathleen—all develop instant crushes on him suggests that there’s more to Jimmie than Deza realizes. In her life, Deza has had no shortage of examples of the value of hard work. Her mother models it and Mrs. Needham demanded it. Stew exemplifies this virtue, too, and helping her out gives Deza something productive to do with her time.
Themes
Mrs. Malone returns without news of Mr. Malone or his mother. And Mrs. Carsdale’s friend no longer needs a housekeeper. But she does manage to secure work as a housekeeper in the Hotel Durant. Jimmie starts working odd jobs, and the family even starts saving a few pennies here and there. But they haven’t been able to move into a more stable living situation before Deza goes back to school in the fall.
Most of Mrs. Malone’s news is bad—it doesn’t seem like the family’s luck has shifted since they left Gary—but at least she’s found work. So does Jimmie, and together their efforts start to gain traction. Notably, they’re stronger together than they would be on their own, reminding readers of the value of familial relationships.
Themes
Whittier is an integrated school, even though there are only about eight Black students there. And although Mrs. Needham is hundreds of miles away, Deza works hard to learn to toughen up, just like Mrs. Needham wanted her to do. At this new school, the teachers don’t praise Deza for her hard work—instead, they treat her with suspicion. When her English teacher gives her a C+ on her first essay, Deza doesn’t cry or complain, even after Loretta explains that a C+ for a Black student is like an A+ for a White one—the racist teachers at Whittier always automatically give the Black students lower marks.
In Gary, Deza found school easy. Mrs. Needham wanted to challenge her academically, but in Flint, the challenges are social (and racial) in nature. It seems that, even though she’s no longer in Gary, she still has an opportunity to learn the lessons Mrs. Needham thinks she will need to succeed. And one of those is that working hard is its own reward. Deza knows that she’s not doing C+ work and her confidence in her own efforts helps to soften the blow of her teacher’s cruelty.
Themes
Get the entire The Mighty Miss Malone LitChart as a printable PDF.
As the Malones get more comfortable living in the camp, Stew tasks Deza with welcoming newly arrived children. That’s how she befriends the sad-eyed boy who walks in from Flint one day with his friend. She brings the sad-eyed boy with her to the creek to wash dishes, where she realizes that he’s shy around girls. But he’s lonely, too. As they listen to someone in the camp playing “Shenandoah” on the harmonica, he asks for a kiss. She gives him one on his forehead, then holds his hand while they listen to someone singing nearby in the darkness. No matter how hard her life is, Deza reflects, she’s still luckier than most because she still has (most of) her family with her, unlike the sad-eyed boy.
The sad-eyed boy never gets a name in this book, but he’s the title character from Christopher Paul Curtis’s earlier novel, Bud, Not Buddy. In many ways, he’s in a harder situation than Deza. Both are disadvantaged by their race in a time of rampant racism and prejudice. Both are impacted by the Great Depression. But Bud doesn’t even have a family to fall back on. Meeting him helps Deza to reflect on her blessings even in times of great difficulty.
Themes
