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Betsey Brown | Introduction

Ntozake Shange is best known as the playwright who combined dance, poetry, and music in 1975’s groundbreaking sensation for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. In a change of gears and attitude, Shange published a conventional semi-autobiographical novel called Betsey Brown in 1985. Betsey Brown tells the story of a sensitive and thoughtful African-American girl as she struggles to understand her place in the world. While many of Shange’s earlier works are both stylistically experimental and politically aggressive, Betsey Brown is accessible and understated. In it, Shange offers a richly descriptive coming-of-age story, taking place in 1959 St. Louis, whose universal themes of sexuality and morality are set against the backdrop of the school desegregation crisis. The novel also portrays the conflicts among family members, centering on the discontent of Betsey’s mother, Jane. Like Shange’s more radical works, Betsey Brown focuses on the difficulties of coming to terms with racial and feminine identity for black women. It is also often noted for being one of the few novels of its time to focus on black middle-class characters. In this novel Shange portrays the small and large struggles of a thirteen-year-old girl while lovingly sketching the way of life in an all-black middleclass enclave at a time when the incipient Civil Rights Movement agitated for integration. Though many critics find Betsey Brown lacking in literary power, it remains a favorite on high school reading lists.

Betsey Brown Summary

Set in 1959, Betsey Brown tells the story of a black thirteen-year-old as she confronts racial identity and inequality, developing sexuality, and family life in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of St. Louis. The novel opens by introducing the family and describing the rambling Victorian house where they live. The Brown family— including parents Jane and Greer, grandmother Vida, four children, and cousin Charlie— get ready for a day of school and work. Betsey, Jane’s oldest and favorite daughter, practices a poem by the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar for an elocution contest at school. As the chaotic morning ends and the children go off to their all-black school, Vida airs her disapproval of the rising integration movement and cherishes the fact that her family lives in its “own world.”

Betsey arrives at school and overhears two girls talking about Eugene Boyd, an older boy Betsey has a crush on. Though she is flustered when she arrives at class, she rises to the occasion and wins her elocution contest. After school she and two of her schoolmates go the house of a poor white friend. When one of her schoolmates leaves because the white girl’s mother is racist, this triggers Betsey’s thoughts about the integration crisis taking place in Little Rock, Arkansas.

That day Jane comes home from work and is met by police escorting Charlie and her son, Allard, who had been caught on the grounds of a local Catholic school. Jane is worried about the boys and angry with Greer for not being home to help her with the conflict. This precipitates a fight about how much Greer works. Chaos reigns in the house. Just then, a bedraggled woman, Bernice, approaches the house asking for work. She reveals Betsey’s treetop hiding place in order to win Jane’s favor, instead provoking Betsey’s wrath. Betsey retaliates by getting all of the children to wreak havoc the next morning, and Jane fires the woman. At school Betsey is eager to tell her friends about her victory, but one of them, Veejay, reveals that her own mother works as a nanny for a white family and shames Betsey about her actions. Betsey returns home, eager to take the blame for the morning’s misdoings, but it is too late—Bernice is already gone. Betsey goes to her tree and falls asleep. She is awakened by Charlie and his schoolmate, Eugene Boyd, throwing a basketball up at the tree. Eugene starts to flirt with Betsey and she goes inside to change her clothes. They spend the afternoon... » Complete Betsey Brown Summary