The Girls in the Stilt House

Although Matilda has been eager to leave Natchez Trace, Teensy’s death changes her priorities and compels her to put her family ahead of herself, and this change further emphasizes The Resilience of Women. After Annis’s birth and Teensy’s sudden death, “Matilda knew where Teensy had gotten her strength, why she had overlooked so much and insisted on living in a bubble of happiness encased in the awfulness around them. She could almost hear her mother whisper a long-ago promise to make the best and brightest possible world for Matilda” (206). Not only did Teensy intentionally limit her experience of the world, choosing to focus only on her small family and the tiny moments of joy that were available to her, but she did it for her daughter—without ever alerting Matilda to her reason. Now that Matilda steps in as Annis’s surrogate mother, she makes a similar promise to her baby sister, shrinking her world—by abandoning her dream of moving to Cleveland—the same way Teensy did for her. It shows her resilience and flexibility as she tells Dalton, “I’m living for something else now” (211). Matilda gives up her dream so that she can support her father and raise her sister, even giving Dalton the money she saved for Cleveland so that he can buy a parcel of land.

Still, Matilda struggles with the injustice she encounters, highlighting The Moral Dilemmas Faced by People on Society’s Margins, and she begins to use writing as an outlet. Matilda is deeply challenged by her conflicting impulses regarding Frank Bowers—his theft and his apparent murder of Buddy Jones. If she tells Creedle about Frank’s actions, Frank will implicate Dalton, hurting Matilda’s family. Further, he’s threatened to harm Stella Mae, an innocent girl. On the other hand, Matilda sympathizes with Buddy’s widow, and she knows that revealing Frank as Buddy’s murderer is the morally right thing to do. However, if telling the truth will not lead to justice for Frank and may materially damage the innocent people who Matilda loves, then telling the truth about Frank might not be the best thing to do. She wonders, “Did she owe it to Cassie Jones to speak up? And what might she set in motion if she did? Should she confide in the pastor? In Gertie? Should she tell her father everything?” (189). Because Frank has so much more social power and privilege than Matilda, Dalton, or Stella Mae, doing the “right thing,” so to speak, isn’t an obvious or easy choice. If it comes down to his word or hers, their patriarchal and racist community will certainly believe the handsome, white lawyer’s story over whatever a young Black sharecropper’s daughter says. This is why Matilda turns to writing to maintain her sanity amid all her conflicting feelings and impulses: “In the months since her mother died, Matilda had filled the notebook with all the dangerous things she had otherwise held to herself” (225). Her strategy—writing down all the things she feels she cannot tell anyone—further demonstrates her resilience in addition to the unbelievably challenging social situation in which she finds herself.

For a long time, Cleveland represents all of Matilda’s hopes for escaping the Trace and finding somewhere more just to make a life, but when she feels compelled to give up this dream, her writing becomes a new symbol of hope in her life. When she gives up the Cleveland dream, she gives her father the coffee tin full of money she’d saved for the trip: “She had not taken out the tin in months. She hadn’t let herself think about it” (210). It hurts too much to think about what she had to give up, a sign that Cleveland represents something much greater to her than a city on a map: It symbolizes freedom. She associates it with Rainy’s much higher pay, with her great-uncle’s newspaper—meant especially for Black readers and covering stories that matter to their community—with financial independence as well as a higher degree of social independence. When she gives up Cleveland to focus on supporting Annis and Dalton, writing becomes a new symbol of her hopes for the future. For now, keeping her notebook helps her to deal with her difficult experiences, but she also “tell[s] herself that she would use [the writing] when the time was right” (225). This indicates her continued hope that she will have a future filled with more joy and justice than her present.