54 pages • 1 hour read
Kelly MustianThe Girls in the Stilt House
Kelly MustianFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Children in the Park
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of racism and gender discrimination.
In the final chapter of the novel, the segregated park and the children playing there constitute a motif that points to The Complexities of Friendship Across Social Divides and the arbitrary nature of those divides. When Ada is inside the dressmaker’s shop inquiring about a job, Matilda goes to the park, and she watches as the children—both Black and white—play. She sees them, “colored children playing on one end and white children on the other. A decrepit set of swings and slides for one group, shiny new models for the other. Two little girls stood facing each other at the border of their separate worlds, chatting across the invisible divide” (362).
Throughout the novel, Matilda maintains an emotional distance between herself and Ada, the result of her understanding that Ada is unlikely to see her as an equal. For a long time, Ada allows herself to be helpless, relying on Matilda for survival; it’s another way of embodying a power dynamic that has roots in the history of slavery and racism: the Black woman waiting on the white woman, helping with her children, taking care of the home, and so on. However, Matilda only knows how to do all these things because she hasn’t had the luxury of helplessness.
Ada continues to hope that she and Matilda will be like sisters, but Matilda understands the implications of their different races in a way that Ada doesn’t. Matilda notices that the area in which the Black children play is vastly inferior to the area in which the white children play. The girls from opposite sides who talk to one another are aware of the boundary between them, even though it’s “invisible.” There’s no written rule against their becoming friends, but they maintain the distance nonetheless because, even as very young children, they understand that they are not supposed to be friends. Still, the two girls are drawn to one another, and if they maintain a relationship as they age, it will likely be as fraught with complex and contradictory feelings as Matilda and Ada’s.
Cleveland
When Lorraine’s family moves from Natchez Trace to Cleveland, Ohio, Matilda begins to dream of the better life she, too, might have if she moved North. The city becomes more than just a literal location; it takes on the figurative meanings of freedom and equality—or at least more than Matilda has in Mississippi. Of her home, Matilda thinks, “a person, at least a person in her own circumstances, couldn’t have a respectable dream in a place like this” (114). Matilda witnesses so much injustice in her home—Buddy Jones’s assault and murder, Frank Bowers’s corruption, Dalton’s exploitation—and she feels powerless to change her community so that Black people can enjoy the same opportunities as white people. As a young Black woman, she has no real social power, and she is not content to carve out a life of small happinesses, like Teensy.
Instead, when Matilda thinks of Cleveland, she has hope for the future: “Up North, [employers] were looking for Negroes to hire. […] Rainy’s mother had an uncle in Cleveland who ran a Negro newspaper—now there was a dream worth having—and he had written […] about an anti-lynching law some people were trying to get passed in Washington” (116). Not only is there a newspaper designed for a Black readership, but it is actually run by a Black man, one who values her writing and perspective. People in the North care about the issues that affect Black Southerners, and this gives Matilda hope that social change is possible. In her mind, Cleveland represents financial independence, social freedom, personal agency, and the possibility of future change.
Sewing and Writing
For Ada and Matilda respectively, the acts of sewing and writing take on figurative significance and highlight The Resilience of Women. Ada has always associated sewing with fun and love. Ada and Sylvie would sew “while Virgil was away so he would not see how much happiness they took from it” (263). It meant time together, in the absence of Ada’s abusive father, with her mother, the only person to ever really love her. When Virgil eventually destroys the sewing machine, Ada finds “the little inside parts scattered in the ditch like jewels” (267). This simile comparing its parts to “jewels” highlights how valuable the machine was to her, not financially but emotionally. Flora Rankin helps Ada to understand that the ability to sew is a skill—and a marketable one at that. Something Ada used to do for fun actually becomes a path forward, giving her confidence in herself and faith in her ability to make a life for herself and Annis: “Ada felt like an artist as she sewed” (283). It represents her capability and aptitude, and it demonstrates how resilient she can be.
For Matilda, writing takes on a similar meaning. When Mr. Moser first commends her for it, “Matilda felt as if she had been invisible all this time on the swamp and someone had finally seen her, acknowledged that she was still here in the world, still living, not just being” (271-72). Writing gives her a sense of purpose, some way to manage the trauma of being a young Black woman living in the American South in the early 1920s. It becomes a release, but it also gives her something in which to take pride, aligning her with other people who are fighting to right the country’s wrongs. She enjoys “the feeling that she was part of a noble conspiracy, she and the newspaperman and the others taking risks, that gave her a heady sense of stealth and undetectability, a safety net of camaraderie. Whatever it was, she felt changed” (279). As a result of her new sense of identity, Matilda is better able to emotionally manage staying in Mississippi a while longer. While there, she can report from the inside, so to speak, sending along personal stories that might otherwise never be heard. Thus, writing becomes synonymous with her hope, agency, and identity.
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