I

In the work of contemporary writers who explore the racial and social geography of growing up in the American South, fleeting encounters between white and black girls abound but enduring friendships prove to be more problematic to represent.¹ In Ellen Foster (1987), Ellen and Starletta's association stretches across the novel whereas, most frequently in fictions, the points at which black and white women converge and relate tend to be brief and transient, as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) where a heavily pregnant and fugitive Sethe is aided by poor white Amy; or in Thulani Davis's 1959 (1992) where the brief kindness of a white woman is remembered as a significant, if fleeting gesture. I wish to raise questions about the ways in which cross-racial childhood relationships are represented formally and aesthetically. There is often an understandable but troubling literary–critical impasse whereby black girls are contained within the first-person narrations of white protagonists which, whilst explicating the connection between the girls, risk engulfing or subsuming the black “best friend.” I shall examine the ways in which this may be the inevitable result of the Bildungsroman form and consider how the representation of the cross-racial friendship at the heart of Ellen Foster is modified in direct correspondence to the novel's structuring.

Landscapes of childhood are received rather than chosen, and contemporary writers often explore the ways in which the young black and white girls gravitate towards friendships with each other but become victims of the structuring of the Southern societies the novels seek to reflect. Their roles are important as markers of the boundaries Southern society sought to maintain and to stabilize via childhood identity formation under racial segregation. Ruth Frankenberg's recent study sees the “social geographies of race” as the organizing principle of the childhoods of the white American women she interviews for whom unofficial demarcations according to race still persisted, wherever and whenever they grew up. This is an examination of racial geography which refers to the “racial and ethnic mapping of a landscape in physical terms, and enables also a beginning sense of the conceptual mapping of self and other with respect to race operating in white women's lives.”²

This facet of Southern culture in particular fascinates writers; there are a number of autobiographies and memoirs in which writers explore childhood friendships within the crucible of race and segregation. Lynn Bloom has described race as that “touchy subject … that permeates twentieth-century southern childhood autobiographies and distinguishes them, as a group, from other American childhood autobiographies.”³ The “touchy subject” is also inescapable in fictions that seek to testify to and explore the searing effect racial division could have on young girls in the South. There is a marked propensity in fiction and film to fix representations of cross-racial relationships of all types in earlier decades when social roles were fixed and black characters had little space to manoeuvre outside an established paradigmatic formulation (white child/black nurse; white mistress/black domestic; white employer/black chauffeur).⁴

The meeting between a white girl and a black girl in contemporary fiction is frequently represented as a profound and meaningful encounter, an epiphany. It is this propensity that seems to underpin most fictional delineations of cross-racial childhood associations. Dorothy Allison, in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Nanci Kincaid, in Crossing Blood (1994), each delineate Southern landscapes of childhood and pursue the idea of cross-racial relationships as transgressive.⁵ For their young white girl protagonists, meeting with a young black girl constitutes an epiphanic moment, a moment that carries much in terms of the text's meanings as it illuminates the white girl's progress towards adult understanding. Meaningful as the affiliation may be, however, such a relationship cannot and does not endure in either novel. In Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons relies upon such binary oppositions in order to explore in a more developed way the relationship between Ellen and Starletta. Starletta is Ellen Foster's only friend, but she is firmly fixed as auxiliary to Ellen since Ellen is driven by an intensely personal quest to re-establish family and order in her life. The reader is appalled by the situation Ellen finds herself in, compelled to follow her quest to find a new and safe home for herself, and admires the pragmatic determination with which she intends to achieve her ends. This is the basis of the reader's engagement with Ellen's personal narrative. In her monologue, she recognizes how the adult world will judge her association with her black friend and she begins, consciously and systematically, to differentiate herself from Starletta at every turn. Disorder has ruled Ellen's life; her family falls apart, her home becomes unsafe as her drunken father lurches around it, so Ellen concerns herself with order and cleanliness and fixes Starletta as her opposite in order to judge what those characteristics might be. Starletta is inextricably linked into the dialectic of order and cleanliness versus disorder and dirt that preoccupies Ellen. Her first comment on seeing Starletta in the church at her mother's funeral focuses in on this most precisely: “I see Starletta and she looks clean” is immediately followed by the statement “Starletta and her mama both eat dirt.”⁶ Her observations bespeak a social conditioning, according to Southern design, whereby poor white people learned to differentiate themselves at any and every level from poor black people.

In contemporary fiction, white girls are frequently fascinated with their black counterparts and pursue connections with them even under the strictures of segregation and even when rebuffed. But the constraints placed upon cross-racial childhood friendships are perhaps best exemplified in the much earlier autobiographical writings of Lillian Smith (1897–1966) who interrogated the ideological apparatus that tried to ensure that friendships that crossed “the color line” would be dissolved when the girls reached the threshold of adulthood and introduction into their appropriately different places in Southern societies. In 1943, before the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, Lillian Smith spoke out against racial segregation and exposed the detrimental impact of post-Reconstruction controls upon black and white children. She spoke of her own childhood in the 1900s specifically, but also of systems still in effect at the time of her speech:

No colored child in our country, however protected within the family, is being given today what his personality needs in order to mature fully and richly. No white child, under the segregation pattern, North or South, can be free of arrogance, hardness of heart, blindness to human needs. The bitter and inescapable fact is that our children in America, white and colored, are growing distorted, twisted personalities within the frame of this segregation which our fears and frustrations have imposed upon them.⁷

Smith spoke out forcefully against the “frame of segregation” in her speeches, and much of her autobiographical Killers of the Dream (1949) is dedicated to explicating and exposing the false sanctity of white skin that was inculcated into children in the Georgia of her youth.⁸ One incident in particular that Smith “forgot” for more than thirty years is wrenched into comprehension. It concerns a little white girl who is discovered living in “Colored Town” and is removed by the white townsfolk, with the aid of the town marshal, from a black family who are deemed “ignorant and dirty and sick-looking colored folks,” and who must have kidnapped her. She goes to live with young Lillian's family and the two become firm friends until it is realized that, despite her white skin, Janie is “colored” and must be returned. She will not be allowed over to play, and the dictate that “white and colored people do not live together” is played out to emotional effect in both girls' lives; Lillian feels guilty at having broken a clear social taboo by sharing her bed and her friendship with a girl who she discovers is black. She shuns her:

And like a slow poison, it began to seep through me: I was white. She was colored. We must not be together. It was bad to be together. Though you ate with your nurse when you were little, it was bad to eat with any colored person after that.⁹

Young Lillian and Janie share an intimacy that is subsequently shattered and distorted and even obliterated from Lillian's memory in the need to adhere to the racial geography of her day.¹⁰

The girls have engaged in a border crossing which, if it is allowed to continue, will destabilize and disrupt the map of social relations for which they are to be prepared. The episode Smith recounts is especially powerful in its playing out of the “rules” and the “frame” of segregation. After the social structure was legally dismantled, it remained the case that it was deemed reasonable, even natural, that black and white children should play together pre-school. It was the onset of adolescence which marked the point after which their intimacy should be dissolved.¹¹ This “sorting,” entrusted to the institutional jurisprudence of schools, proved insidious but effective and largely unassailable. The girls are manoeuvred out of particular friendships as a result of the inflexibility of racial and social biases.

It is, indeed, striking that white writers who have deemed cross-racial childhood connections significant, in that they have chosen to represent them in their fictions, have simultaneously often left the black girl unvoiced and inactive in the encounter. One writer who does explore a relationship in which both parties strive to be vocal and actively equal participants is Susan Richards Shreve in A Country of Strangers (1990). A short consideration of this novel may help to quantify exactly how it is that the friendship in Ellen Foster remains stifled and trapped within its structure. It may also serve to illuminate the fact that, whether couched in a monologic or dialogic framework, interracial childhood friendships typically do not endure beyond childhood in contemporary fictions, whatever their form. The two novels are structured very differently, but the problems that arise in maintaining a cross-racial friendship beyond childhood association are present in each. Shreve locates a childhood friendship as one interracial connection amidst many, but she features it centrally; in fact, it is the closest the novel comes to positing a successful cross-racial alliance.

Kate and Prudential meet in Northern Virginia in 1942, and their encounters are mediated through a third-person omniscient narrator who assesses each character's motives and feelings, whereas, in Gibbons' novel, Ellen may only assess her own. The girls' relationship begins in unequivocal aggression and antagonism and Shreve retains a startlingly clear image of their differences, whilst manoeuvring Kate and Prudential towards recognition of the elements that connect their lives. Kate immediately detects Prudential's hatred of her as representative of “white girls.” The hatred is translated into a succinct and memorable incident in which Prudential, feeling a profound urge to spit at Kate, decides to urinate on her instead. She pees from way up in an elm tree, “a long thin stream, straight as a pencil through the branches. Bulls eyes on top of her silky hair.”¹² It is, in the scuffle that follows, Kate who spits in Prudential's face. Prudential describes this fight as a “conversation” and it is represented as the most honest exchange that the girls can muster in the first instance. Prudential is thirteen, pregnant by her father and angry. Only when Kate is abused at school by a boy who forces her head towards his erection, and she spontaneously confides the incident to Prudential, is their friendship “sealed.” Prudential does not reciprocate with her own experience of abuse, but her shocked “I had no idea that kind of misfortune could happen to a white girl” (p. 111) belies her conditioning, historical and cultural. The white girl may have similar problems.

The girls are edged into contiguous and unforeseen symmetry: “Their bodies touched along the arms and thighs, their bony knees aligned as if such order in presentation were intentional” (p. 110). Shreve patterns their commonality into each evocation of their daily lives in an interracial household in which they are the only members to overlook difference in favour of cohesion: they lunch together, sit closely side by side, and exchange secrets, except for the one alluding to the father of Prudential's baby. Their circumstances are not the same, but their desire to be friends is mutual, for much of the novel. It has been said of Shreve's work in general that, “When her characters are not making grand gestures or being quietly introspective, they are usually talking with each other, most often interpreting and evaluating each other's lives.”¹³ This general tendency is significantly abridged in the case of Kate and Prudential's reciprocity in that actions figure more than words; just as their first fight was a “conversation,” so they go on to demonstrate their mutual support in deeds and actions. Kate buys Prudential a dress as a mark of appreciation and Prudential fights Kate's battle with the schoolboy oppressor on her behalf, exacting revenge in a secondhand retaliation for her own as well as her friend's sexual distress. On only one occasion, and very untypically, does Prudential underline their equitable camaraderie in words: “It's like we were born together, halved out of the same eggshell” (p. 129); the image serves to conjure up the fragility and precariousness of an association such as theirs in rural Virginia in the 1940s. Their friendship gradually slips over into a memory, and the depths they plumbed over Kate's problems are never repeated and so a wall of silence is quietly but significantly erected between them by the close of the novel.

Kate and Prudential exemplify a spirited endeavour to elicit honesty and comfort from a cross-racial childhood friendship, but theirs barely persists beyond the age of thirteen. However, a writer may choose to structure her novel—as Bildungsroman or melodrama, through a dominant central character and voice, or in short narrative passages or scenes that coalesce as an exploration of relationships—the outcome tends to be the same when one focuses directly on the cross-racial childhood relationship. Very few withstand social or indeed personal pressures or remain as close, if they persist at all beyond adolescence, as they clearly had the potential to be in childhood. In Meridian (1976), set in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and which engages with lost hopes and failed coalitions, Alice Walker has Meridian's grandmother declare that in all her life she has “never known a white woman she liked after the age of twelve.”¹⁴ In fact, writers do not tend to push much beyond the onset of adolescence, fixing the girls within a framework that reinscribes the repeated breakdown of cross-racial friendships or never allows them to become truly dialogic encounters in the first place.

II

In Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons inscribes the girls' social experiences as racially different, their futures as ultimately separate, and their friendships as almost impossible to maintain. The structuring of the text separates the girls and keeps them separate, despite their friendship. Black girls are often framed and constrained within the white protagonists' first-person narratives in Bildungsromans or biographical novels; and this form of narration, typically featuring a single narrating voice, fixes the black girl as auxiliary, as an emblem to signify a stage (or stages) in the white protagonist's personal development and rites of passage. The first-person narrated Bildungsroman, described by Richard Gray as one of the South's “familiar regional narrative types and structures,” is also a monologic form that silences other voices that might otherwise disrupt the monologue or deviate from its flow.¹⁵ The Bildungsroman has, of course, also been judged one of the most bourgeois of novelistic forms; classically realist, it privileges the individual, eponymous in this case, her psychology, and her character to the extent that Catherine Belsey has stated that “character, unified and coherent, is the source of action.”¹⁶ Kaye Gibbons unfixes some of the conventions of the form in her depiction of a poor white girl whose class and language clearly set her outside of a bourgeois formulation.

Nevertheless, the Bildungsroman structure envelops the speaking protagonist in a kind of impermeable membrane and functions to divert the reader's attention away from characters who are positioned on the outside. This means that the black friend is not recognized with a space for speech as she could be in a heteroglossic text in which more than one social discourse is represented. It is not the emphasis on Ellen's development that is disturbing, but the inclusion of Starletta as an apparently major spur, whilst rendering her mute and muted in the novel in all circumstances. She never becomes a speaking subject. This results in the aporia, or internal contradiction, in the text, that I read as the gap between the friendship, clearly present in the novel, and the organization of the novel as a monologue which severely limits the representation of that friendship.

The disjunction between white and black characters in a text that can be read as based on an axis of friendship constitutes what I shall call a “fault line” in the text. This fault line splinters the friendship, since the friendship is ultimately only the casing or framework according to which the content of the text may be said to operate. Potential difficulties arise in fiction about women, as well as in feminist praxis, as a result of epistemological standpoints intrinsic in different “feminist” positions. Cross-racial co-operation, apparently of representative importance in contemporary feminist thought, and to the novel under discussion here, risks being undermined by set literary structures and paradigms deployed in the construction of black characters and in representations of black voices that inevitably function to segregate or “other” them, even to silence them completely. Gibbons creates a white girl whose epistemology derives from segregated situations but for whom even a radical ideological breakthrough of the kind she undergoes in the novel is contained within a narrative structure that, whilst it necessarily privileges her, denies agency to the “other” character on the friendship axis, Starletta. No matter what Ellen may think or feel about her friend at the end of the novel, the monologue form cannot disclose the voice or “I” of Starletta since Ellen is the only developed subject of the text and it is her evolving consciousness that prevails.

It is generally the case that Kaye Gibbons writes novels in the form of first-person monologues since her intention is to create Southern women characters who will appear to tell their own stories. She has indicated that she begins

her conceptualization of a work with character and voice, not with plot and abstract ideas … In her writing, interior experience is more important than surface experience, and language is the important interpretative mechanism for bringing that to the reader, even concerning memories of surface experience.¹⁷

For “surface experience” I understand social actions and interactions, and the “abstract ideas” mentioned here I read as political as well as philosophical and existential considerations. In this her first novel, it is particularly the case that details of region and society receive attention only so far as Ellen chooses to articulate her child's understanding of wider issues. Ultimately, whatever does or does not transpire in the novel is circumscribed by Ellen, as Gibbons has her rationalize herself as an autonomous and coherent self. This is clear from the sheer number of times that Ellen repeats the phrase “my own self” so central to her idiom and idiolect. Her monologue is the self-analysis that her child psychologist tries unsuccessfully every Tuesday at school to extract from her. In this way, Gibbons leaves little room for the interactions, dramatic confrontations, and emotional and violent exchanges that may be enacted in a more melodramatic text.

Ellen Foster is a self-celebratory monologue in the voice of a child who has not yet fully discovered that human experience is necessarily dialogic and collaboratory. Ellen's monologue has, to employ Bakhtinian terms, a “centripetal” and a “monologic” imperative and force in which Starletta's silence is as necessary as it is disquieting. It is hard for Ellen to consider anyone else in any depth whilst she is in the process of self-formation, as is indicated when she takes the name Foster, a new name (the reader is never made aware of her family name). Ellen mistakes the term “foster family” for the family name of her “new mama” and appropriates it as a signal of her wish to cut the ties with her old life and with a “worn-out” name in order to make herself anew. The link she preserves with Starletta is really the sole connection she actively seeks to maintain with her old lifestyle; Starletta is her chosen and designated “other.”

Ellen begins to reconcile herself to her own illogicalities in the way that Elizabeth Abel has discussed in another context when she notes that to (re)construct a friend is to (re)view the self so that the friend acts as an alter ego that “refines and clarifies the narrator's self-image.”¹⁸ In the final pages of the novel, Gibbons dramatizes the complex negotiations of racial social geography in which Ellen is involved, but solely in terms of Ellen's character. Starletta is sidelined even in the final pages and her silence remains unsatisfactory. Gibbons has implied that she was unaware of this factor until she got to the end of the book and “realized she hadn't talked.” Significantly, though, rather than interrogate the motivation behind this feature of the text, and its effects, as Ellen Douglas does openly in Can't Quit You Baby (1988), Gibbons provides a get-out that legitimates as it disclaims:

I said, “Kaye, you've got to say why this girl has not said a word and I said, well she stutters and doesn't like to talk.” I took care of that real quickly.¹⁹

Shirley M. Jordan, interviewing Gibbons, does not pursue the issue, but effectively disabling Starletta, disempowering an already disempowered character, does not “take care” of the discomfort and disappointment this reader feels in having Starletta simply act as a silent witness and accomplice to Ellen's most forceful engagement with life. In Ellen, Gibbons creates a character whose strength, vitality, and creative good sense go some considerable way towards undermining a tenacious image of a “poor white” girl as hopeless, but her creation of Ellen's black counterpart is all the more disappointing as a result. Starletta remains a plot function in spite of Gibbons's general engagement with issues of race and representation in her work.²⁰

A more theoretical focus on the constitution of the subject is described by Tzvetan Todorov in his elaboration of Bakhtin's aesthetic of otherness. For Bakhtin, self-consciousness as consciousness of self can only be realized “through another and with another's help,” for:

every internal experience occurs on the border, it comes across another, and this essence resides in this intense encounter … Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other.²¹

These ideas include the condition of self-existence as reliant on the other, so that existence becomes dialogical in principle. Bakhtin is interested in the writer or artist's relation to the characters he or she creates, but here I foreground the interrelationship between characters in an application of Bakhtin's ideas, in order to clarify how a novel that ostensibly values the mutuality and interdependency of friendship can nevertheless remain monologic in form by denying dialogue. In Bakhtinian terms:

Ultimately monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I … The monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response; it does not await it and does not grant it any decisive force. Monologue makes do without the other; that is why to some extent it objectivizes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the last word.²²

Extrapolating from Bakhtin, I would argue that a monologic outlook dominates Ellen Foster; not simply as a result of Gibbons's own acknowledgement that Starletta's voice was of no particular concern, but as evidenced in the formal structuring of the novel itself. Starletta is finally little more than a device circumscribed by a monologic textual exploration of the protagonist. In his application of Bakhtinian ideas to popular cultural products that apparently seek to promote white and black racial harmony in America, Robert Stam points out the dangers of “pseudo-polyphonic” discourses whereby certain voices are disempowered because they are marginalized, so that the “dialogue” that takes place is really between a voiced individual and a “puppet-like entity that has already been forced to make crucial compromises.”²³

In many ways, Starletta is the puppet in the text, whose reality is objectivized. Starletta figures only as a component in a series of elements in Ellen's life that she is trying to fix in some order. The picaresque quality of their encounters as nodal points in a linear model bears this out. The construction of Starletta's character and of her silence comes perilously close to the construction of African-American characters as foils in an “American” literary tradition as noted by Toni Morrison, and by Ralph Ellison before her. If Starletta's silence is read as accommodation, she becomes an accommodating black presence in the novel. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison describes black characters operating as a “control group” in a white American literary experiment and in the formation of white American national culture. Her idea can be extended in an analysis of the black characters in Gibbons's novel as they operate in Ellen's reformulation of her personal identity. For Morrison:

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfilment of destiny.²⁴

Morrison discusses nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts as the language of her analogies indicates; ideas of individualism and freedom were inextricable from those of oppression and slavery, but Ellen Foster has frequently been compared with Huckleberry Finn, and its philosophy is distinctly Emersonian. Ellen's idiosyncratic first-person narrative commentary is replete with Southern speech patterns reminiscent of Huck's, and the motif of self-reliance so strong in Twain's novel is clearly present in Gibbons's, from the epigraph from “Self-Reliance” to the end of the novel. Both Huck and Ellen escape alcoholic and abusive fathers and are orphaned but, whereas Huck “suffered” the informal maternalism of the Widow Douglas and Aunt Sally, Ellen is immediately tied into the decisions of Court Welfare hearings and regular monitoring by an educational psychologist. Despite the obvious differences in context, the course Ellen is set upon in the novel involves her primarily in a progressive articulation of her own identity, and Starletta is, like Jim for Huck, the only other character present throughout the text who services this end. Gibbons is clearly aware of the American literary tradition, most clearly explicated by Leslie Fiedler, in which African Americans and Native Americans have functioned as subordinate and peripheral “sidekicks” to white individualistic protagonists. In Ellen Foster, she retains the basis of this binary intact as she negotiates such a relationship for her protagonist.

III

In Ellen Foster, the speaking protagonist records the period of her childhood in which she begins to identify herself as separate from her parents and as an active force in shaping both her environment and her future in the contemporary South. Starletta, her black friend, is the only character featured throughout the text who remains a constant presence despite the changes in Ellen's life. Ellen's mother's suicide precipitates Ellen's advance into the wider world, and Starletta is present at Ellen's mother's funeral at the beginning of the book; she is the first and the only person from Ellen's former life to visit once Ellen has established herself in a new foster home. But Ellen's efforts to lift herself out of what she understands to have been an ill-starred start in life quickly become indivisible from what she deems the clearest means of demonstrating herself to be a young lady of clean habits and reasonable, moderate behaviour: she sets herself directly against what she deems to be the “standards” of the black members of the Southern community in which she resides. Not only does Ellen seek to restore what order and routine she experienced whilst her mother was alive, she also embarks upon a related quest to ascertain her individual needs. Simultaneously, she discovers that she and Starletta are united by more than what divides them, and she wishes to maintain their connection in the new life she is in the process of mapping for herself: “I feel like she grew behind my back and when I think about her now I want to press my hands to her to stop her from growing into a time she will not want to play” (p. 97). This realization is slow in coming, but it forms the trajectory of what is clearly a friendship plot. Prior to this discovery, the novel is punctuated by scenes in which Ellen expresses her wish to fit herself into quite conventional images of girlhood. With the intention to become a Girl Scout, Ellen signals her desire for a new and widely acceptable image. Her full school uniform is a source of pride and satisfaction as it marks her out as a “good” student.

Much of the time Ellen is groping towards a new identity, even though she couches her intentions in highly conformist terms, and her narration is cluttered with concerns about the impression she makes on others. Ellen invests time and effort in herself, as made manifest in her attention to clothes and the outward presentation of self, but her determination to reassert herself in this way does not leave much time to devote to her own psychological recovery from the traumas that beset her, or to consider the meaning of her friendship with Starletta. This would involve considerable self-scrutiny and Ellen's unceasing and, at times, breathless monologue belies a concerted effort to be outwardly self-confident rather than inwardly self-searching. Her bid to create a coherent sense of self, the express goal of the Bildungsroman form, excludes a more open and problematic engagement with the facets of her character that are not immediately assimilable into this particular discourse of the self.

Ellen's prejudices and judgements about black people are disclosed along with her other feelings: Starletta is her friend but she will not eat in Starletta's home nor will she drink from the family's utensils, despite having decided that they live “regular”—her shorthand for “like white folks.” Her joy at the Christmas present she receives from them is redoubled with “Oh my God it is a sweater. I like it so much. I do not tell a story when I say it does not look colored at all” (p. 38). These and other indicators clarify the chasm that separates her own place in society from Starletta's, despite the way this directly contradicts her personal experiences. Ellen feels that her most safe and comfortable retreat is the black family's home. She escapes there on the occasion when her drunken father mistakes her for her dead mother in the dark and she sleeps there in security, the like of which she has never experienced at home or when forced to stay with her own grandmother.

Initially, I felt that Gibbons might be working to create a different effect—or misprision—in her codification of race relations from that created in much previous American literature where the white protagonist is mirrored or shadowed by a black companion. The reader is encouraged in the belief that Ellen's sharp and pragmatic self-reliance is her most valuable asset. For the most part, she demonstrates an uncanny ability to slice through hypocrisy and etiquette and to catch people in a few words, as can be seen in her debunking of psychoanalysis and the court system. She disdains the child psychologist's tentative explanations that she may be suffering from “identity problems” following the traumas of her early life: “I hate to tell him he's wrong because you can tell it took him a long time to make up his ideas. And the worst part is I can see he believes them” (p. 103). Similarly, the studied homilies of the judge who presides over the case for Ellen's guardianship are recognized for what they are; Ellen astutely reconciles the illogicality of his decisions in such a way as to preserve herself from the full force of their impact on her life:

What do you do when the judge talks about the family society's cornerstone but you know yours was never a Roman pillar but is and always has been crumbly old brick? I was in my seat frustrated like when my teacher makes a mistake on the chalkboard and it will not do any good to tell her because so quick she can erase it all and on to the next problem.

He had us all mixed up with a different group of folks.

(p. 66)

Despite such perspicacity, Gibbons shows that the social etiquette of race relations is much more difficult for Ellen to penetrate. She has Ellen revise her assumptions and come to understand that the criteria she employed to judge a black family as inferior was mistaken. But, finally, I do not think that the codification of the primary relationship differs significantly from paradigmatic depictions in earlier novels. In fact, Ellen refers to Starletta as “the baby” for much of this novel and describes her as “hers,” almost as a doll might be hers to keep and to love. Starletta is a kind of talisman for Ellen, certainly a touchstone in the sense of a comfortable place that she can return to at points on her journey of self-discovery and in her monologue. Each time the two meet there are examples of Ellen's tendency to feel that she may “own” her black “buddy”: at the cinema, “Starletta was the only colored girl at the movies and she was mine” (p. 60); on the bus, “I need to tell the driver first thing that I'll be having a extra passenger on board this afternoon. She'll be getting off at my house. She's colored but don't act like you notice. And she'll be sitting right up front with me. And she'll be getting off at my house” (p. 142).

There are other black characters who are minimally drawn and who form part of Ellen's environment. Initially, they seem simply auxiliary figures playing “bit parts” but they come to serve most importantly as an alternative locus for Ellen's desires for home and security. Starletta's parents are only an extension of Starletta, unnamed and described solely in terms of what they do for Ellen. They are a collective presence, but when Ellen goes to live with her grandmother and is set to work in her cotton fields, she meets Mavis, one of the cotton pickers, and she spies on black homes and communal homelife from the bottom of “colored lane” with a half-acknowledged loneliness and envy. Her homelessness is the key to Ellen's mire of conflicting emotions, her psychological and existential predicament, the predicament she refuses to confront beyond her pragmatic assessment of her own needs. She comes to know Mavis who protects her from the heavier work and who confides that Ellen's mother was her childhood friend and that she knew her “good as I know my own self” (p. 76). Although the pairing of the young white girl and older black woman lasts only a short while, it would seem to have a specific bearing on Ellen's reassessment of her own position with regard to Starletta, and Ellen's dawning apprehension that a “home” is of limited value if unsupported by wider social affiliations that can help to make it a shared space rather than a lonely sanctuary.

By the end of the novel, Ellen feels the need to “straighten out” things between herself and Starletta so they can become “even friends” within the space of her new home, but this “evening out” does not include the need for dialogue with her friend since Starletta's speech is never represented. Ellen does begin to seek physical intimacy with her friend rather than disdain it, “I wonder if Starletta would let me take a bath with her” (p. 141) and she sings her name inside her head all morning looking forward to Starletta's weekend sleep-over. The language certainly registers love and desire, but Starletta is clearly the object of Ellen's affections. Ellen, Gibbons makes clear, is awakening to the wonderment and significance of a friendship from which she has derived comfort whilst denying its full import in her world, and in so doing she begins to desegregate her mind and her understanding but fails to dismantle the strategies of containment via which she has embodied Starletta. Consequently, there would seem to be a tension between the form of Bildungsroman and the idea of representing a cross-racial friendship within it, particularly when, for her author, Ellen is “a child who thinks first and then feels.”²⁵

Ellen makes what she affirms is a revolutionary gesture and statement about her friend; she has Starletta to stay in her home as a special guest when “every rule in the book says I should not have her in my house, much less laid still and sleeping by me” (p. 146). The novel ends on a clear note of social reconciliation, but it is primarily Ellen's reconciliation with her “own self” via Starletta, in a confession that facilitates an advance in Ellen's independent assessment of her life and her future but that does not permit response or debate:

Starletta I always thought I was special because I was white and when I thought about you being colored I said to myself it sure is a shame Starletta's colored. I sure would hate to be that way. … now I remember that they changed that rule. So it does not make any sense for me to feel like I'm breaking the law … if they could fight a war over how I'm supposed to think about her then I'm obligated to do it. It seems like the decent thing to do.

(p. 146)

The attitudinal shift has come about as a result of the accumulated experiences of living in a biracial community that Ellen undergoes in this picaresque tale; staying the night in Starletta's home and picking cotton in her grandmother's fields, for example. The reader is also reminded, during Ellen's “confession,” of Huck's “crisis of conscience” over slavery and over whether he should inform Miss Watson of the whereabouts of “her runaway nigger,” Jim. Where Huck confounds his sin with not upholding the codes of slavocracy, Ellen harbours no such paradoxical contradistinctions but, lightly ironic, Gibbons has Ellen luxuriate in the magnanimity and munificence that “integration” with Starletta brings to her sense of self by having her draw on the Civil War and on Civil Rights history to create an “ending” in the manner of the “old stories” (and Huckleberry Finn may be one of them) that Ellen loves to read. This is dryly done, but it nevertheless conforms to the convention of narrative “closure” that one expects in a classic realist format where the protagonist's maturation and self-discovery is “the end” and this “ending” forecloses on any further or deeper interaction with others.

It is disappointing, therefore, that despite the threshold of ideological understanding the character may be said to reach by the end of this Bildungsroman, and her belated acknowledgement that this is largely as a result of her friend, she still cannot see the importance of listening to Starletta, finding out what she thinks and might wish to say. In this I would disagree with Jay Clayton who reads Ellen Foster as a narrative of racial reconciliation and who asserts that “the plot culminates in Ellen's successful efforts to make amends for former slights to her best friend” (my emphasis).²⁶ Clayton implies that the novel plays out its utopian possibilities, whereas I would argue that they are left unfulfilled and that the ending remains far too ambiguous to be a culmination of all the ideas raised by the plot.

Arguably, Starletta remains silent because the “text” to be read is Ellen herself and the textual lacunae in the representation of Starletta are the inevitable result of structuring the novel according to the principles of the Bildungsroman which serves, on the one hand, to emphasize and, on the other, to retreat from what I have termed the “friendship plot” or the “friendship axis” in Ellen Foster. The friendship is plotted along an axis, the line about which the figure of Ellen may be understood to revolve. The novel is plotted around the friendship that helps to co-ordinate the trajectory of Ellen's life and progress and this draws on the sense of alliance present in some definitions of the word “axis.” A friendship axis is clearly present and can be traced specifically via a series of nodal points in the girls' relationship that structure the writing as a developing friendship for Ellen: a Christmas spent together, shopping together, a visit to the cinema, and Starletta's visits to two of Ellen's foster homes. They go to the same school and, although in different classes, their connection is maintained, largely it seems because Ellen makes no particular friends in her own homeroom as Starletta does in hers. The childhood friendship operates strategically to point up the relationships between institutions like school and the Girl Scouts, small-town life and family life, that are such socially powerful forces against which the crises of friendship contend. This is especially the case for an interracial friendship when, for example, there is no integrated, or segregated, Girl Scout group for Starletta to attend.

Gibbons leaves Ellen Foster on the threshold of a new phase of development, but the subordination of Starletta in the text does not offer much in the way of hope for sisterly connection. If one wishes to detect hope for the association, nevertheless, it may be present in the way in which Ellen has come to realize that Starletta has an existence independent of her; she has her own friends and ideas and she may decide to drift away from their association, something Ellen intends to try to prevent by becoming an “even friend”:

something tells me inside that one of these days soon she will forget me. So I have to make a big very big good time with her that she will not forget … I know for a fact that I would not ever forget her but you can never be sure about how somebody else thinks about you except if they beat it into your head. At least that is how I am worried about Starletta who never has said much good or bad to me but before long I will have to know I am in her head like she is in mine. It is good to have a friend like her.

(p. 99)

This passage is unusual in a novel that focuses so exclusively on the protagonist; it shows Ellen as she begins to appreciate that Starletta acts independently outside and apart from herself, but it also remains typical in its self-involved emphasis on Ellen's own fears, observations, and needs. Ellen remains consistent in her utilization of Starletta as a standard against which she may measure her own progress; so even her invitation to Starletta to stay in her new home acts as a celebration of how far she has progressed or of how far her world may be differentiated from Starletta's, “she would think back on me and how she stayed in the white house all night with Ellen” (p. 99).

She says quite a lot towards the end of her monologue about her dawning understanding of the social order that kept her prejudices and assumptions in place and about the possibilities for a more open acknowledgement of differences across race. Certainly, Ellen has learned some important lessons about where she fits and where she may choose to place herself within a Southern scheme of social relations but, as the novel closes, she is resting comfortably in the image she has fashioned of her own magnanimity in reconciling her “new” carefully integrated self with Starletta. Finally, individualism overrides the friendship plot in Ellen Foster. The friendship plot informs the composition of the text but only so far as it helps to situate a “self-made” American individual on the threshold of a new phase in life.

The cross-racial childhood friendship in Southern literature about girls is a palimpsest wherein the complexities of race and gender may be collapsed into a single unitary relationship when the complexities begin to intersect with the young girls' lives. This is not to say that each representation is a social protest or reformist in some sense (Belva Plain's Crescent City (1984), for example, is clearly neither²⁷) but rather that the history of segregation restricts representations of a childhood friendship that seek to incorporate realism in their form or credibility in their content. Toni Morrison has said that there is always something “more interesting at stake than a clear resolution in a novel” and, unlike Jay Clayton who feels there is a sense of culmination at the end of Ellen Foster, I believe that important ambiguities remain.²⁸ It is left ambiguous as to whether Ellen's developing self should finally be understood as essentially self-reliant or whether her sense of identity owes much more to group experience and to a salient cross-racial friendship. Such ambiguities are the crux of Ellen's monologue and of her story.

Notes

1. This article is a revision of the paper “Between Girls: Cross-racial Childhood Friendships in Contemporary Southern Narratives” delivered at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature 1996 Conference, 11–13 April 1996, Richmond, Virginia.

2. Ruth Frankenberg, “Growing up White: Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood,” Feminist Review, 45 (Autumn 1993), 54–55.

3. Lynn Z. Bloom, “Coming of Age in the Segregated South: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Black and White,” in J. Bill Berry, ed., Home Ground: Southern Autobiography (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 113.

4. Examples include Corinna, Corinna (dir. Jessie Nelson, 1994) set in the 1950s which examines cross-racial relationships predominantly through the white child/black nurse formulation; The Long Walk Home (dir. Richard Pearce, 1990) in which the white mistress/black domestic relationship features in Alabama in the 1950s, and Driving Miss Daisy (dir. Bruce Beresford, 1989) in which a “friendship” between an elderly Jewish lady and her elderly black chauffeur is played out in Atlanta over twenty-five years.

5. Nanci Kincaid, Crossing Blood (New York: Avon Books, 1994). Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (London: Flamingo, 1993).

6. Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 22. Subsequent references will be included in the text. Most reviewers have assumed the novel takes place in rural Nash County, North Carolina, the area in which Gibbons herself grew up, but particulars of place are not specified in the monologue.

7. Lillian Smith, “Children and Color” in Michelle Cliff, ed., The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lilian Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), 30.

8. Joel Kovel would appear to support Smith's ideas: “if we are to study the existence in culture of a fantasy creation such as racism, it is to the infantile roots of mental experience that we must first turn.” See White Racism: A Psychohistory (London: Free Association Books, 1988), 251. It is also important to note that Lillian Smith's name still features as the title of an annual Southern literary award that goes to the work that most powerfully and successfully interlaces black and white identity issues in the South.

9. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1949), 29. Smith's mining of her memories is echoed by Melton McLaurin, Separate Pasts: Growing up White in the Segregated South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), in his description of spitting after putting a football pump in his mouth that had been in the mouth of his black friend, Bobo. At this point in his narrative, McLaurin becomes aware of his acculturated belief that he and Bobo belonged to “two fundamentally different worlds and that society demanded that we each stay in the world designated for us” despite years of shared play, 27–41.

10. In The Temple of My Familiar (London: Penguin, 1990) Alice Walker also creates a situation where Fanny, a black woman who grew up in Georgia, repressed the memory of her white playmate Tanya. It is only through therapy that she regains this memory which she had suppressed after the shock of being hit by Tanya's grandmother for kissing her little white granddaughter.

11. This “sorting” is a significant feature of a system that is examined by the Nebraskan Tillie Olsen in the short story “O Yes” (1956) in Tell Me A Riddle (New York: Laurel, 1979), 48–71. It is also noted by the white interviewees who reconstruct their childhoods in Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women Race Matters (London: Routledge, 1993). Tangentially, they remember that black childhood friends were “‘tracked’ into vocational and remedial classes in high school” and they lost contact with them after this point (p. 79).

12. Susan Richards Shreve, A Country of Strangers (London: Sceptre, 1990), 66. Subsequent references will be included in the text.

13. Katherine C. Hodgin in Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, eds., Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 411.

14. Alice Walker, Meridian (London: The Women's Press, 1982), 105.

15. Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 234.

16. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 73. My italics.

17. Julian Mason, “Kaye Gibbons [1960–]” in Flora and Bain, 161.

18. Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6: 3 (1981), 423.

19. Kaye Gibbons in Shirley M. Jordan ed., Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 78.

20. In A Virtuous Woman (1989), for example, Gibbons explores marriage and bereavement, and also the role and stereotype of the black housekeeper and how her white employer's leisure is incumbent upon the black woman's skills as well as her economically inferior position.

21. Mikhail Bakhtin as quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 95–96.

22. Ibid., 107.

23. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 232.

24. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52. For a more detailed reading, see my “Writing for Revision,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 20 (Summer 1993), 173–180.

25. Kaye Gibbons in Jordan, p. 78.

26. Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 140. Clayton only considers Ellen Foster in passing but, in an otherwise illuminating and important study, he misreads the example on which he bases his argument. He has it that Ellen visits Mavis and her family and so begins to articulate what a family may be and what it should contain, whereas in the text Ellen is only spying on the black families who live on the edge of her grandmother's plantation, so her assessment of a family unit is much more a projection of her own desires than an empirical experience of a particular black household.

27. Belva Plain, Crescent City (London: HarperCollins, 1993) A popular writer of historical romances, Plain sees the dramatic potential of New Orleans in the period from the 1830s to the Civil War. She “goes South” in one of her many novels and reinscribes motifs that owe much to Gone With The Wind in a romantic and sentimental story. The black child, Fanny, is an adjunct to the white child, Miriam, and a foil for her, little else.

28. Toni Morrison in interview with Nellie McKay as quoted in Jan Furman, Toni Morrison's Fiction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 42.