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And then it’s cold . . . the skin . . . grows red and hard and itchy from the flap flap of the boots and the fine hairs on my legs grow coarse there and ugly.

The pared-down style of this passage is typical of Chapter 29, which is narrated in a simpler, less lyrical fashion than are many of the other chapters. The unadorned prose reflects the difficulty of Naomi’s life on the beet farm. There is no time for waxing rhapsodic about nature, or making pat observations about animals. She and her family members are doing backbreaking work. They are exhausted and hungry. When Naomi isn’t frozen solid in the winter, she is warding off fainting attacks in the summer. In the paragraph immediately before this one, she describes the way the intense heat made her tear ducts dry out. Now, in this paragraph, she describes the sudden onset of winter, which brings its own set of discomforts. The straightforward prose style here also reflects Naomi’s dull anger at Aunt Emily, whom she addresses periodically throughout the chapter. There is a sense that with each new appalling detail, Naomi is asking her aunt, “You want to hear what it was like? This is what it was like.”

Naomi addresses her physical appearance in this passage, something she almost never does. She tells us early on in the novel that she is small and slight, but beyond that, she makes almost no remarks about her own body. What little information we do get about the way she looks is confined to descriptions of her clothing and shoes. The scarcity of physical details elsewhere in the novel makes this description of her raw skin and hairy legs almost shocking. The sentence “I mind growing ugly” is moving because of its remarkable frankness and simplicity, and because it marks one of the only moments during which Naomi analyzes her own body, and her natural girlish vanity, with unswerving honesty. The sentence is set apart on its own line, as if Naomi is forcing out this honest declaration word by word, with difficulty.

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