slave heritage, and of Yoruba, their royal African great-great-grandmother, stating that “we got a past to be proud of.” The novel’s pivotal part 2, in which Francie gains a balance of self and community, is called “Yoruba’s Children.”

Louise Meriwether’s story works on two distinct levels, the social and the psychological. Its social themes revolve around what it is like to grow up black in New York during the Depression, and the story relates that condition in a broad array of details. Meriwether reveals the socioeconomic conditions—the couch in the living room where Francie sleeps, infested by bed bugs; the educational—Francie’s school, P.S. 136, “the baddest girls’ school in the world”; and the cultural—the numbers racket, music, food, and so on. Depression-era Harlem life is shown in all its difficulties and violence, with few pleasures. It is a complex and accurate portrait: The Ebony Dukes jump the Jewish boys who attend the synagogue around the corner, but Francie’s dining room furniture is a gift from the Jewish plumber downstairs. Meriwether’s is no simplistic portrait of urban life and strife.

More significant than the social meaning of the story is the psychological, and this is far more subtle, for the eleven-year-old narrator does not always understand the significance of her own life. Like her slightly older fictional cousin, Huck Finn—likewise a first-person narrator of his own adventures—Francie relates incidents that readers must interpret. She wonders what makes her friend Sukie so mean, for example—but Meriwether gives readers all the evidence they need to make the analysis of Sukie’s behavior themselves. Francie cannot articulate the pressures of her own life, let alone recognize them in her friends. She is suspended in that limbo between childhood and adulthood that is not yet adolescence. She still reads fairy tales from the library on her fire escape, and her dreams, such as the fish dream that gives her the winning numbers, aid the family. On the other hand, she witnesses the violence of Depression Harlem, as shown in a reference to mugging any white man caught alone there after sunset, and its poverty, highlighted by her mother searching half an hour for a dime she thought she had lost but that Francie had stolen. She loves her father, who is trying to get her to grow up to be a lady, and still trusts him, wondering why her mother could not. She has not yet learned all the lessons life has taught her mother.

The story provides clues that Francie will successfully navigate her way out of childhood to adulthood, in spite of the numerous dangers in her world. She is, in fact, halfway there. She is already resourceful and responsible for her family, and at the end of the story, after beating up Sukie, turns her face away from home and wanders aimlessly down Fifth Avenue. Her future will be away from this world. When a mob crowds around her and Sukie, she says, “I was suffocating. I pushed against the black, shoving mass until I was free of them. There was something evil in their sweating black faces, and that something was in me also.” She must flee this world in order to attain her own healthy identity, even if it means wandering aimlessly at first. Readers can only hope for Francie’s future.

The story was written in the Watts Writers Workshop, which screenwriter and novelist Budd Shulberg started after the Los Angeles riots of 1965. Three years later, Louise Meriwether published a novel based on the story. Although the novel brings in many more significant details, sexual and violent, it does not change the basic thrust of the original short story. In both, readers witness a young girl coming of age against the myriad difficulties of urban Depression life.