Summary
Ellen goes over Starletta's house, which Ellen describes
as somewhat of a shack—a dirty place with no toilet and no television.
However, Ellen hints that Starletta and her family live better than
the colored families nearby, who, so she hears, live fifteen people
to a house and eat their meals off of music records instead of plates.
Whenever Ellen visits Starletta, she waits until she returns home
to go to the bathroom. When Ellen arrives, Starletta's mother is
cooking dinner at the stove. Ellen thinks to herself that she could
never drink after Starletta because she is colored and tries to
see the invisible germs that she leaves on the lip of her cup.
Starletta's parents cannot read. Both work as field hands
on a cotton plantation, and Starletta's mother sews quilts to make
an additional income. Starletta's father, Ellen says, is the only
colored man who does not buy alcohol from her father.
Ellen plays with the toys that Starletta has received
as Christmas gifts, though she feels she is too old for them. When
Starletta's parents invite Ellen to eat with them, Ellen politely
refuses, though she wishes to stay and wait until they finish, which
she does. After they eat, Starletta's parents give Ellen their Christmas
gift, a beautiful sweater that Ellen thinks "does not look colored
at all." Ellen is overwhelmed by emotion at their gift and thinks
she may cry. In return, she gives them the spoon rest she has bought
for them, which Starletta's mother lovingly places atop the stove.
Afterwards, Ellen insists that she must get home. Starletta's father
tells her to come back to their house if her father is home. But when
Ellen does return home, her father is still gone. She wonders if he
is lying in a ditch somewhere, frozen and dead. Whenever her father
is not home, Ellen relaxes and watches television. When he is home,
she retreats to her room where she stays until he is gone again,
or she escapes out the window and goes elsewhere.
Ellen's father is rarely at the house, though she does
not know where he stays. On New Year's Eve, however, he throws a
party with a "whole pack of colored men," who eat Ellen's food and
rifle through her belongings. She hopes they choke and die, even
her own father. Her bedroom window is frozen shut, and there is
no escaping her father or his friends. One man lewdly comments that
Ellen is at the perfect age to marry, saying "you gots to git em
when they is still soff when you mashum." Ellen retreats to the
closet and hides there until the men either leave or pass out. When
she dares to come out, she knows that she must leave quickly before
the men rise and try to rape her. Her own father is the one to sexually
assault her, calling her by another woman's name, presumably her
mother's, though it is not clear exactly what he does to her. Ellen
tries to wriggle free of him, and, when he releases her, she runs
to Starletta's house in the darkness, wondering all the while "what
the world has come to."
Ellen no longer has any clothes to dress herself in because
her mama's mama has sent one of her daughters to collect all of
Ellen's mother's clothing, claiming that she would "rather some
real niggers" have the clothes than those who "drink and carry on
like trash." This confuses and frustrates Ellen, as she does not
drink and will "not even eat at a colored house." Ellen has also
run out of books to read and longs for the end of the Christmas
holiday when the bookmobile will again run its regular route through
her neighborhood.
