Maud Martha, Once Again

My thoughts: Ok, I started to read Song of Solomon, then I got the urge to reread Maud Martha. October has been a crazy month for me, and I needed a nice, soothing read. Upon rereading Maud Martha, I was reminded of why I liked it so much in the first place. The language is so beautiful and the main character is freakin’ awesome. Even though it’s a novel, Maud Martha is about the inner workings of a real life. You feel as if she is a real person, who endured real things. She has real triumphs and real heartbreaks. Maud Martha is the kind of person who finds humanity in things that others may not. In one chapter, she refrains from killing a mouse because she imagines that life would be harder for the mouse’s family if it died. She empathizes with the rodent, because she knows a little something about struggle herself. After she lets the mouse go, she feels proud of herself: “A life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed.” Thinking about this moment makes me smile.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes about intraracial discrimination among blacks based on skin shade in this novel—something Dorothy West wrote about in The Living Is Easy. Maud Martha notices it as a child, when people (even her own family members) treat her light-skinned sister Helen more favorably. And this follows her into adulthood. And, as I mentioned in my previous post about the book, she also experiences racial discrimination. Brooks writes, “There were scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.” At one point, she quits working as a maid because she knew that the white people she worked for thought of her as stupid and childlike, and she did not want to absorb their low opinion of her. This is a quiet moment of defiance that gives her a little bit of a voice to address that “baffled hate.” In spite of everything, Maud Martha loves and respects herself, loves life, and embraces its ups and downs. I needed to read something that was life-affirming, and this is the perfect read for such occasions. One last thing: I wonder how much of Gwendolyn Brooks is in the character of Maud Martha…She (Gwendolyn Brooks) was a great poet, but she wrote a hell of a novel!

Great passage (when Maud Martha’s husband takes her to a dance and spends most of the time dancing with a light-skinned lady—when Maud Martha herself is pregnant, no less): “I could,” considered Maud Martha, “go over there and scratch her upsweep down. I could spit on her back. I could scream. ‘Listen,’ I could scream, ‘I’m making a baby for this man and I mean to do it in peace.’”

But if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?

Up next: I think I’ll read The Lilies of the Field