The Mighty Miss Malone Themes

According to their family motto, the Malones “are a family on a journey to a place called Wonderful.” At first, it isn’t hard for Deza to maintain hope in this bright future. She has a loving family, a devoted best friend (Clarice), and her teacher, Mrs. Needham, has just agreed to supplement her public-school education with private tutoring. But it turns out that there are a lot of detours along the way…

A lot of things come easily to 12-year-old Deza Malone—mostly schoolwork, but she also proves herself to be a competent boxer in a fistfight with the class bully Dolly Peaches. Deza and her brother Jimmie are gifted in different ways. While Deza is an academic superstar, 15-year-old Jimmie has an angelic voice and the emotional maturity and sensitivity of a much older person. Despite their respective talents, however, the siblings are both limited…

The Mighty Miss Malone explores the difficulties that Deza, her family, and their friends face as a working-class Black people during the Great Depression. Mrs. Ashton, a White librarian, clearly thinks of the world in racialized terms when she tells Deza and Clarice that they (and boxer Joe Louis) are a credit to their race. Mrs. Carsdale’s letter recommending Mrs. Malone as a potential employee drips with racial stereotyping and condescension…

The events in The Mighty Miss Malone take place in 1937 and 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the decade-long economic downturn that followed the U.S. stock market crash of 1929. The Depression makes life difficult for almost everybody in the book to one degree or another, even the family of Mrs. Carsdale, whose husband (a bank president) must take a 25% pay cut. Of course, the privileged Carsdales weather the period…