The Friends by Rosa Guy

First published: 1973

Type of work: Domestic realism

Themes: Friendship, family, and poverty

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Harlem, New York

Principal Characters:

• Phyllisia Cathy, a plain girl in a good-looking family, too tall for fourteen, thin, and shapeless
• Edith Jackson, a streetwise, proud girl who lives in abject poverty
• Ruby Cathy, Phyllisia’s sixteen-year-old sister, who tends their dying mother and tries to appease their father
• Calvin Cathy, a proud, strong-willed, strict, and demanding father
• Ramona Cathy, their beautiful mother, who dies from breast cancer

The Story

As The Friends opens, Phyllisia Cathy has just moved to Harlem from the West Indies. Her West Indian accent and her excellent school achievement make her a target for other students’ cruelty. Miss Lass, her teacher, points to Phyllisia as a model student, which focuses the eighth-graders’ hatred on their classmate rather than the teacher, who fears her all-black class. Only Edith Jackson, with her dirty, ragged clothes, befriends Phyllisia after she is injured in a schoolyard fight. Edith tells the whole class that Phyllisia is her best friend and no one is to hurt her.

Despite Phyllisia’s initial distaste for Edith’s appearance and her pretense of friendship, they become friends, although Phyllisia continues to be ashamed of Edith. She callously tells about all the clothes she will buy for high school, enjoying the pain she is inflicting but noticing that Edith ignores her meanness. Phyllisia refuses to bring Edith home, but the enormity of her betrayal stuns her, so she decides to buy Edith silk stockings to make up for her neglect. Visiting Edith’s apartment, she discovers that Edith’s father has disappeared; with her mother dead, Edith has become not only the caretaker for four younger sisters and an older brother but the breadwinner also. Edith drops out of school, and the girls see each other only infrequently.

When Phyllisia finds out that her mother, Ramona, is dying, Phyllisia seeks out Edith, because she will understand what it means to lose a mother. During the visit Phyllisia is surprised that her sister, Ruby, and her mother disregard Edith’s shabbiness. When Ruby teasingly comments that in the Islands Phyllisia went barefoot, Phyllisia goes wild, shouting that it is a lie, because she does not want Edith to think that they are on the same economic level. Coming home unexpectedly and enraged by Edith’s obvious poverty, Calvin throws her out of the house. Calvin’s angry actions satisfy Phyllisia, although she later is ashamed of her feelings. Her mother remembers that her father had been similarly cruel to Calvin once; she begs Phyllisia to be the kind of person who will make the world better for people such as Edith.

Overcome with grief for her mother’s death and remorse for her cruelty to Edith, Phyllisia hears that Randy Jackson, Edith’s older brother, has been killed by the police, but she still does not go to see Edith. When Calvin catches Ruby kissing a boy, he confines his daughters to the house except for school. At first compliant, Phyllisia rebels: She skips school, quits doing homework, and comes home when she pleases.

Calvin decides to send the girls back to the West Indies. Phyllisia, now almost sixteen, visits Edith one last time, only to find that the youngest sister has died of malnutrition and the others are in an orphanage. Although Edith blames herself, Phyllisia knows that the only blameless person among them is Edith, that she alone has always acted with unselfish love.

Phyllisia manages a reconciliation with her father by talking with him, something she has never done before. They do not know each other, yet her mother had said that they are alike. Now they will have the opportunity to try to establish a relationship.

Context

The Friends, generally acknowledged as Rosa Guy’s finest work, is the first novel in a trilogy followed by Ruby (1976) and Edith Jackson (1978), drawing on Guy’s own experience as a transplanted youth in Harlem and covering approximately two years’ time. Incidents from The Friends are alluded to in both books; however, each of the three can stand alone. Taken individually or as a trilogy, they provide black heroines who mature as they resolve conflicts and deal with special problems of black youth trying to overcome traditionally imposed societal roles.

A coming-of-age novel set in a realistic social context, The Friends goes beyond either category. Although Phyllisia is somewhat aware of her own maturing process because other girls around her focus on boys and clothes, her growth involves taking responsibility for interpersonal relationships—for opening the communication barrier between herself and her father and for finally asserting that, regardless of what others might think, she loves Edith as a dear, loyal friend. In addition to the socioeconomic implications of poverty, some other social issues are interwoven into the plot: street riots with looting and police brutality, and an educational system filled with teachers who at best expect nothing from their students and at worst fear them.

Despite its setting, The Friends expresses a universal truth about people in any social context: Interpersonal relationships are complex structures, entered into and nurtured for many reasons perhaps never fully understood.