Summary
That fall, there is a great deal of racial tension, and it is on the news every night. Joseph is on the list to be transferred from the junior high to another one further away; Twyla thinks this is a good thing—until she is told that it is not. The kids are getting jumpy by August as the school year looms.
One day, Twyla is driving out near the school that is supposed to be integrated and she sees Roberta holding a big sign that says “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!” Twyla pulls over and honks her horn; Roberta waves and comes over.
They begin to argue when Roberta states that she is picketing because this is about their kids. They both say that they thought the other one was different. Twyla scoffs at the other women and their signs “swarming all over the place” as if they owned it. Roberta looks, then turns back and says they’re just mothers. The two women are visibly frustrated.
The other women begin to walk over, and Twyla is struck by how mean their faces look. They begin to gently rock her car; Twyla reaches her hand out to Roberta by instinct, but Roberta does not reach back.
Finally, a few policemen saunter over and shut it down. The women walk away. Roberta watches as Twyla fumbles to start her car.
Roberta tells Twyla that she is no different: Twyla is still the same state kid who kicked a poor black lady when she was on the ground, and now she has the nerve to call Roberta a bigot.
Surprised, Twyla says that Maggie wasn’t black. Roberta replies that of course she was, and they both kicked her—a black lady who couldn’t scream. Twyla bursts out that she is a liar.
The next morning, Twyla makes her own sign that says “—AND SO DO CHILDREN” to directly respond to Roberta. She and other like-minded people conduct their own picketing on the other side of the street.
On the first day, things are orderly and everyone ignores each other, but on the second day, there are jeers and rude gestures. Twyla cannot tell if Roberta sees her and her signs. She begins to make new signs that respond directly to Roberta’s. Her signs get crazier every day and the others being to think she is crazy.
Finally, Twyla writes “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?” on her sign. Roberta does not return the next day or any other day, and Twyla stops going as well.
Those are six terrible weeks, and the schools are closed. The children are restless and bored, but finally, school opens.
Years later, Twyla looks for Roberta when Joseph graduates but does not see her. She cannot forget what Roberta said about Maggie. She really does not remember her being black, and she definitely does not think that she kicked her. They didn’t join the gar girls, though they did watch. Maggie was her dancing mother, she thinks: “deaf…and dumb.” Nobody was inside. She danced and swayed while she walked; the girls kicked her, and she could not scream.
***
Twyla and James are trying to economize at Christmas because Joseph is off at college, but even though they weren’t going to have a tree, Twyla decides that she must, so she goes out one snowy night to get one.
The downtown streets are wide and empty except for some glamorous people coming out of a hotel. They make Twyla feel tired. She decides to stop in at a small diner for a cup of coffee and a few minutes of peace before going home and getting things ready.
She hears her name, and she sees Roberta dresses up elegantly with two other people, looking a little drunk and trying to buy cigarettes from the machine.
Roberta tells the others to wait for her in the car and turns to Twyla. She says that she has to tell Twyla something that she has been wanting to tell her for a long time. Twyla sighs that it’s not important, but Roberta urgently explains that she really did think that Maggie was black—now, though, she isn’t sure. Maggie was brought up in an institution like Roberta’s mother, and Roberta didn’t want to be left to that same fate. Roberta and Twyla didn’t kick Maggie; only the gar girls did. But, she adds, she wanted to, and she wanted them to hurt her. She concludes that she doesn’t want Twyla to have to carry that burden around anymore.
Twyla notices Roberta’s eyes watering. She replies that they were kids, and Roberta knows this. They agree they were sad and lonely.
Twyla says thank you, and Roberta acknowledges it. Twyla adds that her mother never did stop dancing, and Roberta sighs that hers never got well.
After a moment, Roberta covers her face with her hands, and when she takes them away, Twyla can see that she is crying. Roberta bursts out, “Oh shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?”
Analysis
When Twyla and Roberta meet again, it is against the backdrop of the racial tensions over busing and integration (see the “Other” section of this ClassicNote). The issues between the two women that were kept at bay or only simmered now break out into outright animosity. They come with distinct feelings on racial busing (though Twyla’s are less developed than Roberta’s), but they use this conflict mostly to poke at each other. They see the other as a member of another race, and the simple and tenuous ways they connected in childhood no longer suffice. Their friendship is, as Susan Morris notes, “mitigated and mediated by oppressive power relations that are highly visible and important even when race is radically destabilized (at least for the reader).” Twyla and Roberta struggle for autonomy but do so within a “matrix of domination” that means that even as they elevate their social class, they still face difficulties with societal dynamics regarding race and gender.
Our main focus in this section is Maggie: a character that neither speaks nor interacts with Twyla or Roberta. Maggie's past and future are unknown, but nevertheless, she is a key part of the story for numerous reasons. Roberta tells Twyla that Maggie was black and that she pushed Maggie down along with the gar girls, and even though Maggie’s racial identity is still inconclusive and Twyla and Roberta didn’t actually push Maggie—that Roberta was lying to be mean—everything is still painful, messy, and problematic. Maggie’s race is up for speculation, and the girls admit that they wanted to push Maggie.
Maggie is not part of the binary understanding of race that the girls bring to the table. They cannot agree upon whether she was black or white, and in the “colorblind” 1980s, critic Leslie Larkin writes, “blackness and whiteness remain mutually constitutive and legible only in relation to each other.” Maggie is confusing to the women, and this confusion “redoubles the racial slipperiness of all its characters and exposes the measures, psychological and social, necessary for disciplining racial ambiguity.”
Besides her “silly” hat and racial ambiguity, what the women remember most about Maggie is her “legs like parentheses.” This image conjures up, Larkin suggests, “the blank space she and Roberta try, unsuccessfully, to fill up with racial content.” Maggie’s legs are the physical marker of her disability, yet another aspect of non-normative identity that separates her from the rest of society and makes her easy to mock and ignore.
Twyla and Roberta decide that the main reason Maggie bothered them, on account of which they wanted to see her hurt, was that Maggie reminded them of their own “deaf," “dumb,” impotent mothers who were incapable of taking care of their daughters. Twyla muses, “Maggie is my dancing mother…Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use.” Sandra Kumamoto Stanley explains how Twyla conflates the memory of Maggie’s fall and her mother’s visit: “both sites of shame and suffering that Twyla associates with a shelter –St. Bonny’s or the orchard –that paradoxically couldn’t protect her. Thus, Maggie with her disabilities comes to reprise Twyla’s own disabling moments; Twyla both identifies with Maggie and yet wishes to exclude and even erase her.”
Critic Helena Adams Androne adds that “language, myth, and imagery are united in the archetypal figures of Maggie” and that Twyla and Roberta constantly revise their memories of her “in order to transfer their anxieties and anger toward their mother onto her.” Mary and Roberta’s mother are powerless; Maggie is powerless; through wanting to push Maggie, Twyla finds a modicum of revenge, justice, and catharsis.
Maggie is also a problem because she represents the girls’ past, which they are trying to move beyond. They prefer to keep their memories of St. Bonny’s superficial—e.g., Easter baskets, Big Bozo—and Maggie complicates that.
Juda Bennett sees Maggie as a striking metaphor, as “a human text that is read by the girls” and a “form of punctuation that includes what may have been left out.” When the girls could pass their turmoil onto Maggie, their lives were bearable, but now that they are choosing, albeit reluctantly, to face that pain, they have a new compassion for Maggie and a new understanding of just how they created their own identities by circumscribing and negating that of another person.
At the end of the story, Roberta utters a new sense of shame, of concern for Maggie, of acknowledging the difficulties that are present in her friendship with Twyla and in her understanding of herself. Morris explains that the story withholds answers but “its ending suggests there is efficacy in asking the question at all.”
