Hi, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel. Let's take a look at "New York Day Women," by Edwidge Danticot.
This is a short story that features a daughter who sees her mother out in the city one day,
and is very surprised because this is not where she
pictures her mother. It says, "Today, walking down the street, I see my mother." And we're
immediately in present tense, which is a choice the author
makes in order to give us more immediacy, in order to let the reader accompany the daughter
as the daughter watches this whole afternoon unfolding. So as the daughter is curious and
wondering what's going on with the mother (why is she
here?) we too are wondering, well, yeah, what is going on? Where is the mother going? What
is she doing in the city? And just as the daughter is
finding out these things, the reader is finding out right along with her, as if it's happening
right now. So it's important that it be in present tense to give that sense of immediacy.
She goes on to say that the mother appears to be happy,
and is strolling along, looking in shop windows, expensive shops where she wouldn't normally
actually go in and buy something. There's a contrast
between the mother's usual bargain-hunter self, and now here she is in a more sophisticated
part of the city where things are expensive, so she's looking in the shop windows of [shop
name] and so on. So that's one contrast that the
daughter's aware of. And then, um, another contrast is that the daughter says, well,
I left my mother at home with rollers in her hair to curl her
hair, and they're actually little bits of newspaper that she's using as rollers, in
a bathrobe too. She pictures her mother there, in that outfit, in that place, and now what
a shock to see the mother here in the city, where she is.
The daughter, we find out, does work in the city, so this is two worlds colliding for
her. Her home world, the mother world, collides with the work
world, the more Americanized world, and this is a shock for her, and that's why she's so
curious as she sees these two worlds collide. She wants to see what her mother's up to.
And not only that, but she's realizing her perspective on her
mother is changing as she watches her mother in a new context. Now then we get a bold sentence.
It's in bold text, font: "Would you get up and give an
old lady like me your subway seat?" This is a typical mother thing to say: would you be
polite, my daughter? Don't forget your manners. Didn't I teach you to do things like give
up your seat for a pregnant woman, or an older woman. At
first the daughter's saying, well, I don't always give up my seat. How pregnant is she?
The daughter, at first, feels that her mother's nagging her
a bit, wanting her to be polite, and she says, eh... We'll see a change in the daughter,
'cause by the end, she actually says, "Tonight on the subway I will get up and give up my
seat to a pregnant woman, or a lady about Ma's age."
So those two statements show the change that happens in this character from the beginning
to the end of the story. She not only gets to see what her
mother was doing, but she really develops an appreciation for her mother and her mother's
lessons. So out of a newfound respect for her mother, she will give up her seat for
someone who's older, who's her mother's age. She has a new respect
for all women of that age, including her mother. Let's see what else. The daughter says, "I
follow my mother, mesmerized by the many possibilities of her journey." She cannot imagine what her
mother's going to do. And she sees her mother doing a couple things: she buys a soda, she
eats a hotdog. And neither of these things are expected,
'cause her mother's supposed to follow some rules about her diet. She's not supposed to
eat sodium. Here her mother says that salt is heavier than a hundred bags of shame. So
that's about middle of the story, and by the end the mother has
said those same words in a different order. She says shame is heavier than a hundred bags
of salt. Now shame is at the heart of this story, because
that is what the daughter is feeling for the mother. She sees the mother doesn't get dental
implants. Instead she's going to have dentures. And the mother says, oh, dentures are fine,
it's okay. But the daughter is embarassed, like, mom,
don't you want to do something different for your teeth? Isn't it kind of wierd to have
three teeth missing? The daughter's embarassed, embarassed by
her mother. She also says her mother didn't ever go to a PTA meeting. She sees her mother
as not fashionable. She buys the African print dresses. The daughter is more concerned about
fitting in with the American norms, by dress, and by
what you're supposed to be doing, and how you're supposed to wear your clothing. She's
more interested in assimilating than the mother. So the daughter's
embarassed by the mother, who is not assimilated, and is out of step with the mainstream culture.
Where else do we see this? We see this in the discussion about the Goodwill. The daughter
says, well, yeah, when you don't want stuff anymore,
you give it to Goodwill. The mother says, wait, there's poor people in Haiti who need
this stuff. We're going to save it for relatives, or folks
we know, back home. The daughter says, here's what normal people do, mom, and the mom says,
wait, we have loyalty to our home country, and this is how I want to do it. There's some
tension there. Mother, daughter, one culture, and the other.
Now I would say the climax of the story is when the mother is seen with a child. The
mother is going to babysit this child for an hour while that
child's mother takes a jog around the park. Now we have the daughter in the story, the
speaker, seeing a child see her mother. And she gets a new perspective on the mother,
seeing her own mother through this child's eyes. This child
looks up at her mother as if she is the sky, it says, which is a lot of wonder and appreciation,
and that is what this daughter is starting to have
for her mother, especially since this child, so easily, does appreciate the mother. This
daughter thinks, yeah, I should be like that. Now, the mother spends a little time with
some other immigrant women, and the daughter notices
this too. She says they look like a third-world PTA, and there's some humor there. She even
more realizes that her mother has her own life, and goes
and does things that the daughter never suspected. And the daughter sees that her mother is more
than just the person taking the skin of the chicken in the kitchen, or more than the person
who's making little dolls at home that she names,
"Susette," which is the name of this daughter. More than just those domestic activities,
this woman has friends out there in the world. She has this
little babysitting gig. She eats a hotdog if she wants. She is busy, and the daughter
never really noticed that. And I think we all have that realization eventually, that
our parents do have lives beyond us, and beyond our role in our
lives, they actually exist as full people. But there's a deeper appreciation that happens
for this daughter, too, as she starts to see her mother as a
person worthy of respect. I've mostly talked about how the daughter undergoes a change,
but let me mention style for a minute. The author of course uses bold to indicate the
mother's voice, as I've mentioned, but also we have the repetition
of the phrase "my mother." Many of the paragraphs that are the daughter's perspective, or the
daughter's voice, say, "My mother, who does such and
such," like watches the lottery on TV, even though she never even bought a ticket, or
my mother, who makes jam with dried grapefruit peel. My mother. So every time she says, "my
mother," there's a sense of, can you believe it, we're talking
about my mother here, the mother who I picture doing this, the woman who I picture doing
that, doing cooking, doing some special recipe that's
from her homeland, doing something kind of quaint and cute like watching the lottery.
It's something she's not quite understanding. There's a certain condescension here. The
daughter looks down on her mother at the beginning here, but throughout,
she keeps saying, my mother, the woman who does this or that. And stylistically, that's
an effective phrase, because it reminds us over and
over of the shock and the bewilderment that the daughter's feeling as she sees the mother
in the new context, and she tries to figure out how to combine this woman she's watching
with the woman she knows at home, with the curlers in her
hair, the newspaper. Alright, I hope you enjoyed taking a look at this story with me, and I
hope you'll join me for another video sometime.