Ellen's narration is fascinating and very sad at the same time. She describes the funeral of her mother, who may have killed herself. In church she sees her mother's mother, who hates her father, and after looking daggers at him walks away.
Ellen is ten, and her only friend is Starletta, a black child, whose parents work in the field that belongs to her father. From her narration Ellen shows how racially prejudiced she is, which we imagine is the typical ideas of the time. Startletta's parents are good to her, and she often goes there as she does not want to be in the house with her father.
One night her father brings a group of men to the house, and she hides in a wardrobe. She overhears her father saying that he has a daughter, and one of the men makes a lewd comment about young girls. When Ellen thinks her father and the men are asleep, she tries to leave the house, and her father grabs her, but she manages to escape. The next day her teacher notices the bruises on her arm, and she tells her that her father did it. As a consequence, Ellen goes to live with her art teacher, Julia, and her husband, and during those few weeks she is happy.
Then her father causes an uproar when she turns up at her school. As a consequence, a judge orders that Ellen go to live with her grandmother. It is curious that Ellen never calls the woman 'grandmother' but her mother's mother. The old woman is not very kind and welcoming. She has lots of money and owns fields which black people work. The grandmother tells Ellen that she has to work, so she sends her to the field to work all day long. There she makes friend with a black woman, called Mavis, who tells her that she is the spitting image of her mother, but she shouldn't tell her grandmother she said that. What the grandmother says is that Ellen looks like her father, who she hates.
When her father dies and his brother comes to tell them, the woman seems displeased, and she is not very sympathetic to Ellen. After she fires the black people who served her in the house, the woman demands Ellen look after her.
I think this is a terrific read, and I love how Ellen sees the world through her particular prism.
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