Baby of the Family by Tina McElroy Ansa

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1950’s-1960’s

Locale: Mulberry, Georgia (a fictional town based on Macon, Georgia)

Principal Characters:

• Lena McPherson, a young girl struggling to balance the psychic and material gifts with which she has been endowed
• Nellie McPherson, Lena’s mother, who is a significant presence in the family business although her primary work is in the home
• Jonah McPherson, Lena’s father, a successful entrepreneur who is both feared and respected in the local community
• Grandmama (Lizzie McPherson), Lena’s paternal grandmother, who along with Nellie is the mainstay of Lena’s domestic life
• Nurse Bloom, the nurse/midwife who delivers Lena and attempts to educate Nellie on the management of Lena’s gift
• Rachel, the ghost of an enslaved woman whom Lena encounters on a trip to the beach

The Novel

Baby of the Family traces Lena McPherson’s development from birth to young womanhood as she copes with the supernatural experiences that are the result of her having been born with a caul (a fetal membrane) covering her head. In the African American folk tradition, the caul is associated with special powers of vision such as foresight and the ability to see spirits, and Lena’s powers are seen as a “gift.” Lena experiences some aspects of her special status as a burden rather than a gift, however, and throughout the novel she struggles to balance her position as the coddled youngest child and only daughter of a well-to-do African American family with her gift’s darker aspects, which allow her contact with the spirit world that she doesn’t always understand. Lena’s struggle is made more difficult by the fact that her mother, by embracing the “modern” and rejecting the folkways of the rural community, has deprived Lena of useful folk knowledge and protection.

Though Lena feels a distinct sense of alienation because of her extraordinary sensitivities, she nonetheless remains closely connected to the community from which she springs, and she has several significant friendships that help move her toward full self-awareness and self-acceptance. First among these significant friendships is her relationship with a neighborhood girl, Sarah. Sarah serves largely as a traditional literary foil; she is the opposite of Lena in almost every way. Though Sarah is poor, neglected, and prematurely burdened with care and responsibility, the two girls share a sense of adventure and a love of imaginative activity. Through her observations of and interactions with Sarah, Lena becomes more aware of her own economic privilege.

Lena also learns more about herself when she encounters the ghost Rachel during a family vacation at the beach. Lena’s encounter with Rachel gives her access to the subjective aspects of slavery that are not presented in the historical accounts that she has received in school. Through hearing Rachel’s analysis of how slavery cut people off from their creative capacity and therefore their humanity, Lena becomes aware of herself as a historical subject. She is presented with a historical context by which she can understand her own claims to freedom.

Lena’s journey to self-awareness and self-acceptance is not completed in these early childhood encounters. Her teenage years will present more tumultuous events for her to navigate: She is ostracized by her classmates after she gets one of them into trouble by revealing her as the source of a rumor about the nuns’ sexual activities; she proves susceptible to sleepwalking; and she must work through the death of her grandmother. All these events represent obstacles that Lena must overcome, and the first two traumatize her because they are associated with the inexplicable. When Lena tells the girls’ secret to the Sister, she speaks words that she does not intend to say in a voice that is not her own.

Lena is particularly frightened by her sleepwalking episodes, because they are actions of which she is unconscious. Sleepwalking therefore contributes to Lena’s confusion about her own ability to distinguish the real and unreal, leading her to doubt her sanity. Her grandmother’s death also contributes, initially, to her sense of self-doubt, because she feels that she should have been able to foresee it and prevent it. Ultimately, though, an encounter with the ghost of her grandmother helps reframe Lena’s abilities in more positive terms. Though Lena’s doubts are not fully dispelled, the novel ends positively in that Lena has been instructed to contact Nurse Bloom for information about her endowments. The novel’s final image is of Lena squarely assessing herself in a mirror.

The Characters

Lena is marked by feelings of ambivalence regarding her special status. On one hand, she accepts with easy grace her place at the center of her community and the affection and trust that are showered upon her by it. Lena is particularly easy in her relationships with adults, such as Frank Peterson, a handyman who helps maintain the McPherson home, and Gloria, a barmaid in her father’s juke joint. These characters could easily be dismissed as a drunk or a “loose woman” (and they sometimes are), but Lena is able to see past the superficial and gains their trust, their affection, and a great deal of information about human frailty and resilience as a result. On the other hand, the very root of Lena’s sympathetic relations with these marginalized people, the heightened perception that allows her to see on multiple planes, is an aspect of her identity that at times leads her to question her own sanity.

The generosity of spirit and confident assurance that Lena exhibits are further cultivated in her home life. The domestic space is shared equally by Lena’s mother Nellie and her grandmother, who together constitute a dualistic image of domesticity. Nellie’s association with the modern is symbolized primarily through her rejection of Nurse Bloom’s folk wisdom. Miss Lizzie’s association with tradition is primarily expressed through her storytelling (which focuses on ghosts) and her belief in folk cures. Within the novel, however, aspects of each woman’s character are valued. In fact, the way that Lena relates to them suggests that a synthesis of the two attitudes will be the most functional approach for Lena in her own development.

The characterization of Lena’s father Jonah is filtered through the “bad man” tradition of African American music and literature. His success is idealized, because it is achieved on his own terms rather than those that are deemed socially acceptable: He is a gambler, and his business is a combination juke joint and liquor store. As a consequence of his self-made status, he attains mythic proportions in the minds of Lena and other members of the community as someone not to be “messed with.” Jonah’s characterization exposes the central contradiction of the “bad man” figure in that he is revered by the community in spite of the fact that his primary commitment is to himself. In Jonah’s case, this contradiction is revealed through his womanizing, his tendency to violence in dealing with others, and his domineering attitude within his family.

Critical Contexts

Though Baby of the Family has been subject to a least one scathing review, critics generally have praised Ansa’s rich rendering of southern culture and her attention to women’s specific experience within that culture. While her novel, Ugly Ways, was the first of her works to garner scholarly attention, a body of criticism on Baby of the Family has begun to emerge.

Bibliography

Billingslea-Brown, Alma Jean. “Folk Magic, Women, and Identity.” In Crossing Borders Through African American Women’s Fiction and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Discusses the presentation of folk belief as a source of power for women in the visual art and literature of contemporary African American women.

Magee, Rosemary M. “From Grandmother to Mother to Me: Birth Narratives and Tradition in the Fiction of Southern Women.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Provides a brief discussion of the transfer of memory, identity, and psychological wholeness from generation to generation in literature by contemporary southern women writers.

Okonkwo, Christopher. “Of Caul and Response: Baby of the Family, Ansa’s Neglected Metafiction of the Veil of Blackness.” CLA Journal 49, no. 2 (December, 2005): 144-167. Argues that Ansa renders Lena’s experience as a metonymy of contemporary African American racial experience and an extension of traditional literary themes by comparing her use of the caul or veil with those of W. E. B. Du Bois and Arna Bontemps.

Town, Caren. “’A Whole World of Possibilities Spinning Around Her’: Female Adolescence in the Contemporary Southern Fiction of Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorckle, and Tina Ansa.” Southern Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 89-108. Argues that these contemporary representations of southern adolescence extend and revise the traditional rebellious southern heroine, offering more optimistic outcomes for them than earlier writers were able to offer.

Warren, Nagueyalti. “Resistant Mothers in Alice Walker’s Meridian and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways.” In Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Useful discussion of obstacles, including motherhood, to female self-realization.