Annie John

Now 15 years old, Annie is unhappier than she dreamed possible. She feels that everything she used to love has turned bad. Whenever her mother says that Annie’s way of doing something reminds her of herself, Annie purposely changes her methods and even tries to find a method that her mother doesn’t like. She believes, without evidence, that her mother intentionally praises things that are special to her just to compel her to give up or change her habits. Annie thinks of her mother and herself as having two faces now: one to show Annie’s father and the world and another to show one another. In company, they behave kindly toward each other, and Annie is often soothed by her mother’s attention. However, once alone, Annie feels that she has never loved and hated someone as she does her mother, and she struggles to reconcile these feelings. In the past, hating someone meant wishing them dead, but she doesn’t think she could live without her mother.

Annie recounts a new recurring dream in which she walks along a shaded road, thinking to herself, “My mother would kill me if she got the chance. I would kill my mother if I had the courage” (89). At first, she is happy, but then she realizes that she could never have the courage to kill her mother and that it is likely that her mother will kill her instead. Because her mother has taught her to take dreams seriously, Annie does. She begins to compare daily scenarios to the words from her dream.

Having been moved ahead in school, Annie feels no camaraderie with the older girls, only competition. Annie soon masters her new subjects, finding only one other girl to match her intellectually. Annie tries to befriend this girl, but she is dull and smells bad, so Annie intentionally forgets her name. Annie and Gwen still walk home together, but Annie isn’t thrilled to see her like she used to be. She feels that she has grown new skin with different nerve endings because nothing feels the way it did. She daydreams of living alone in Belgium, having read about it in Jane Eyre, and fantasizes that her mother would only be able to write letters addressing her as Miss Annie Victoria John. Gwen’s asserts that Annie should marry Gwen’s brother, Rowan, so that the two girls can always be together; this makes Annie feel even more alone, and she begins to avoid Gwen.

One day after school, Annie waits for Gwen to leave and then walks downtown by herself. She looks at her reflection in the store windows, thinking how strange she appears. Her head and eyes are too big. Her skin is black in a way she has never noticed, as though, she says, she is covered in soot. Her braids stick out in all directions, her neck is quite thin, and there are little white bumps on her face. She looks old and miserable, and she thinks of a picture she saw recently of a painting called The Young Lucifer. In this picture, a youthful Lucifer is alone and naked, standing amidst a charred landscape. His hair is made of snakes, and he smiles, but Annie can tell that the smile is a mask to cover up his loneliness and misery. Thinking of the painting now, she feels so sorry for herself that she begins to cry.

Then she sees a group of boys across the street. Although they say pretty words, their tone and laughter make Annie think they are mocking her. She knows only one of the boys, Mineu, with whom she used to play years ago. He is three years older than she is and always gave her the lesser roles in their games; she would be the servant or dragon, while he was the conqueror or knight. One day, they reenacted a local scandal that involved a trial and hanging: Mineu was to “hang” on the fence, and then Annie would weep over his body. However, the noose got caught somehow, tightening painfully while Mineu tried to escape, his body banging the gate. Annie became paralyzed and failed to help or even call their mothers. Mineu’s mother eventually came out, hearing the gate slamming, and she began screaming, prompting Annie to scream, too. Later, Annie could not explain herself or her inaction.

Seeing him now, Annie walks over and holds out her hand, greeting him politely. He remembers her, and the other boys step aside. When he rejoins his group a moment later, the boys all laugh. Annie supposes that they are laughing at her. She then recalls the last time she played with Mineu and remembers the new game he made up, in which she had to take off all her clothes and sit on the ground until he told her what to do next. He directed her to sit in a particular spot, and it didn’t take long for Annie to realize that she was sitting on a nest of fire ants. They began to sting her everywhere, and she cried in pain while Mineu laughed.

Arriving home, Annie senses that something is wrong. Her mother asks her why she is late. Annie claims that she stayed late at school, but her mother knows it’s a lie because she saw Annie talking to the boys. Angrily, she tells Annie that she spent years teaching Annie to behave properly and never expected to see her acting like a “slut.” Annie’s mother repeats the slur so much that Annie feels like she is drowning in it, and she finally fires back, saying, “like mother like daughter” (102). In this moment, her mother turns back to the stove, looking broken, which makes Annie both happy and sad.

When Annie peers at her mother’s back, she sees that her mother isn’t broken at all but is still quite beautiful. Suddenly, Annie wants to apologize but cannot, and she feels as though a deep chasm has opened between them. She goes to her room and considers the furniture, which was made by her carpenter father. Annie and her mother are the same height now, both taller than him. She reveals that her mother is named Annie, too, and this is why her parents call her “Little Miss.” Looking at her mother’s trunk, Annie thinks about the fight that her mother had with her own father before she left her home in Dominica; she wanted to live alone, and he refused to allow it. In this moment, Annie misses her mother more than ever, and she simultaneously wishes that her mother were dead. Later, Annie asks her father to make her a trunk of her own, and Annie glances at her mother, seeing the woman’s shadow on the wall. She thinks that for the rest of her life, she will never know for sure whether it is her mother or her mother’s shadow standing between her and the world.