Critical Evaluation

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Ntozake Shange first won recognition for her dazzling choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which debuted on Broadway in 1974. A choreopoem is an innovative combination of poetry, drama, music, and dance. Her subsequent writings continue to impress critics and readers with their unique imagery, use of language, and tough-but-tender explorations of what it means to be a black woman in the United States.

Shange is best known for her poetry and plays. Of her published novels, Betsey Brown is probably least known to the reading public, yet it is a little gem of a novel. In it, Shange combines her extraordinary gifts for dialogue and image to build a story that sensitively treats family life, growing up, and the impact of the very early days of the Civil Rights movement on an African American family.

A typical young teenager, Betsey Brown is filled with longings. She wants to experience life in all its “thickness” and “heat,” to understand the world, and to find her place in it, claiming the fame and romance she deserves. Betsey is a good girl, and her upbringing has been a protected one in many ways, so her transgressions are minor. Still, her mother deplores her taste in music and dance, her new teacher does not recognize her heroes, and everyone looks askance at her interest in boys. Along with all this she must struggle to keep a secret place for herself amid the ongoing circus of family life. No wonder Betsey feels like she does not fit in.

Betsey’s mother, Jane, also feels besieged. In many ways she and husband Greer balance each other well, as spouses in successful marriages often do. Greer’s unabashed embrace of African American culture—down to the loud conga drums he plays every morning—clashes with her more ladylike sensibilities, even though there is no doubt the two have a strong and sensual bond. Jane feels the frustrations of any multitasking mother, and the lack of any time for herself. The tension-relieving remedies she does use—like solitaire games and nail polish—do not quite help. Ultimately, after her “time-out” from the family, she returns because, in spite of it all, she realizes she really does belong with them.

Betsey’s and Jane’s dilemmas are widely shared by American women of almost every ethnic background, but society’s institutionalized segregation and racism adds another dimension to their life experiences. For black girls and women, the stakes are higher. This is signaled in a telling incident, when two white police officers catch cousin Charlie and Betsey’s brother Allard recklessly careening around an all-white Catholic girls’ school campus on their bicycles. The police bring the boys home to Jane, but only “on accounta you special,” and they do not know local customs. It is clear that any repeat offense will be punished severely. The officers’ disrespectful attitude enrages and terrifies Jane. She knows that boisterous behavior by white boys would be treated much more leniently.

Likewise, the lures of “low-class” black music and ardent young males send danger signals to Betsey’s mother and grandmother. The fates of Regina Johnson, whom Betsey last meets pregnant and deserted at Mrs. Maureen’s salon, and of Carrie, whose loss of impulse control with a friend is about to send her to jail, highlight that Betsey has little leeway to make mistakes; and what will her innocent flirtation with Eugene Boyd, or even her spats with school friends, lead to?

The Browns enjoy a certain degree of safety and status within the African American community. They live in a sedate neighborhood where women cultivate roses...

(This entire section contains 890 words.)

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and hire maids. To most whites in the years just before the Civil Rights movement, however, all this hardly matters; all “Negroes” are just “those people.” In view of what he risks, Greer’s willingness to confront the white establishment on its own territory seems little short of heroic.

Altogether, the novel is notable for the way it illuminates the impact of racism on middle-class African Americans, and for showing, as few contemporary novels do, that black women, too, can be innocent and fragile.

Shange’s work has been criticized for presenting an unduly negative image of black men. This is perhaps inevitable, considering her overall literary focus on women, but is not the case in Betsey Brown. Greer is a good man and an admirable father and role model. The other significant adult male character, Mr. Jeff, the family’s gardener, is a quiet and reliable presence, whose inexplicable attraction to the eccentric Carrie only makes him more interesting.

Betsey Brown is not, primarily, an autobiographical novel. However, the author has drawn on her own childhood experiences for much background to Betsey’s story. Shange was the oldest daughter of Paul T. Williams and Eloise Williams, a surgeon and a psychiatric social worker, respectively. The family first lived in St. Louis, until Shange was thirteen years old. Also, as a child, she took part in court-ordered busing, which desegregated the city’s schools. Her parents knew such African American luminaries as musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and writer W. E. B. Du Bois, who appears in a family story in Betsey Brown. Altogether, the novel gives a unique and insightful portrayal of growing up black in America.

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