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Chapter 32
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 house at 541 Jackson Street is beautiful and perfect, even though it doesn’t yet have any furniture in it. Deza and Mrs. Malone spend their first night there sleeping on the floor. After the past year, they don’t mind too much. Deza feels excited, but Mrs. Malone knows that they still face difficulties and uncertainty. She’ll have to find work, and they don’t know what has happened to their friends in the months since they left.
Deza’s hope and Mrs. Malone’s realism balance each other out. It’s important to have both. Hope can sustain a person through the darkest times and most dreadful difficulties, but it’s also important to be realistic about what the future might hold and what obstacles one might face. Still, together, Deza and Mrs. Malone have taken on a lot—and can do so again.
Themes
The next day, while Mrs. Malone looks for work, Deza discovers just how much has changed. Mrs. Needham is gone. Clarice’s family is gone, too, and Deza doesn’t know where they went. Still, things aren’t all bad: Mrs. Ashton lets Deza check out books at the library, even though Deza doesn’t have a card under her new address yet.
In Flint, Mrs. Malone gave Deza a blue gingham jumper. It suggested that her future was still bright, but that it had been unalterably changed by the things that had happened to the family recently. And sure enough, the vision of the future represented by Mrs. Needham and the dress is gone. This causes Deza grief, but it doesn’t stop her from hoping, and it doesn’t stop her from striving to achieve her full potential.
Themes
When Deza gets home from the library, Mrs. Malone is waiting in a taxicab out front. She tells Deza that she has reason to believe that Mr. Malone might be in a poor house in Lansing. They’re going to check. Deza asks, what about the letters? How can Mr. Malone be in a Michigan poor house when he’s been sending them letters—and money—for months? Mrs. Malone says that if Deza really considers the letters, she’ll have to admit that they’re suspicious. They don’t sound like Roscoe Malone wrote them, and their story doesn’t add up. If he’s too injured to hold a pen, how can he be working as a carpenter, for instance?
There’s one final surprise waiting for Deza. Mr. Malone is the one piece of the puzzle that’s still missing. Deza is confident that the story in the letters is true, but now Mrs. Malone reveals that it was all a lie cooked up by Jimmie.
Themes
Long before they left Gary, when Mr. Malone didn’t write, Mrs. Malone suspected that something had gone horribly wrong. She started writing letters to every police station, poor house, hospital, and morgue in the area. Eventually, she got a description of a man who sounded something like her husband, although the people who are taking care of him call him Jonah Blackbeard.
In Flint, Deza worried that her mother had given up hope in her father. In fact, Mrs. Malone never gave up hope of finding him, even as the chances of doing so became less and less likely. While Deza kept her hope alive (aided by Jimmie) with the letters, Mrs. Malone refused to let hers die, either, which is why she sent so many letters in search of her husband.
Themes
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The poor house is a dreadful place, full of despair and horrible smells. The inmates there barely seem to be human. Sure enough, Mrs. Malone and Deza find Mr. Malone in their midst. It seems that he suffered some kind of accident or asthma attack on his way to Flint. He woke up, delirious, in a hospital in Lansing, and from there was taken to the poor house. He tried writing to Mrs. Malone, but in his confusion, he sent the letters to the wrong address, and they were returned.
As bad as things got for Mrs. Malone, Jimmie, and Deza, they never got as bad as the conditions in the poor house. Not only does this remind readers yet again of the poverty and suffering brought about by the Great Depression, but it confirms the book’s idea that a person cannot be truly poor or lost if they have a loving family around them. Mrs. Malone, Deza, and Jimmie saved each other from the worst consequences of their circumstances, consequences suffered by Mr. Malone after his ill-advised decision to leave them behind.
Themes
Deza’s reunion with Mr. Malone doesn’t go the way she’s been imagining it, but in the end she doesn’t care. She’s just happy to have her father back, even though Mrs. Malone warns her that they still have a long way to go to recover as a family—if that’s even possible. Mrs. Malone sends Deza to wait in the cab while she helps Mr. Malone get cleaned up for the trip back to Gary—he is dirty, and his hair and beard are matted and ratty after months of neglect. While she waits, Deza slowly realizes that her mother was right about the letters. And if they didn’t come from her father, they must have come from Jimmie. Once again, he’s proven to be the best big brother in the whole world. Deza weeps in gratitude.
Things have changed for and within the Malone family just as surely as things have changed in Gary in their absence. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost—just because the path has changed doesn’t mean that the destination still can’t be that place called Wonderful. In this moment, Deza reconsiders the letters, and readers might remember that her very first impression when she saw the first envelope was that it must be from Jimmie, since he wasn’t one of the addressees. It seems that deep down she always knew something was off. But to keep her hope alive required her to look past the obvious, at least for a little while.
Themes
Mr. Malone mostly dozes on the cab ride back to Gary, but he starts to perk up as they get closer to the city. He, Mrs. Malone, and Deza amuse themselves by reading the silly Burma Shave billboards aloud. Then, as they pass a field of cows, Mr. Malone asks if his family can see the last and best set of billboards. Deza and her mother worry that he’s losing his mind—but he’s not. Pretending to read it along the side of the road, he makes up a poem on the spot about hope and the lessons the past difficult year has taught him.
When Deza, Jimmie, and Mrs. Malone left Gary with Marvin Ware, Mrs. Malone registered her distress over every one of her circumstances by ignoring the Burma Shave recitation. Now, she joins in. The Malone family is back together—albeit changed by their experiences over the past year—and back on the road to Wonderful.
Themes
