Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

While I was easedropping at the colored house I started a list of all that a family should have.  Of course there is the mama and the daddy but if one has to be missing then it is OK if the one left can count for two.  But not just anybody can count for more than his or her self.

The title narrator of Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster is a ten-year old girl in the South who skips from home to home after the death of her parents.  Her mother dies by suicide, having taken a bunch of pills, while Ellen watches, her father forbidding Ellen to help; her shitbag father dies in prison.  Obviously, this is a horrible beginning for young Ellen, but the novel's childlike voice keeps these events at arm's length.  The confrontational realism of Bastard Out of Carolina--a similar story of parental abuse in the South--is missing here.  The homes that Ellen bounces through, moving largely from one to the other on her own accord, have a kind of Goldilocks-and-the-Three-Bears quality to them: her mama's mama blames Ellen for her daughter's death; her two aunts are incapable of caring for Ellen each in their own way.

We know from the beginning of the novel that Ellen ends up with her "new mama": a woman she spies at church with a group of dissimilar kids in tow.  She's told this is the woman's "Foster family," so she hatches a scheme to join them, even changing her name mistakenly to "Ellen Foster."  (That she holds on to this name even after being corrected shows her stubbornness, but also the power of her will.)  Gibbons' insistence on writing everything, both past and present, in the present tense--a component of Ellen's voice, I suppose--makes navigating time in this slim little novel kind of a chore.

Ellen's search for a new, supporting family is one of the novel's two threads.  The other is her "awakening" on race: Ellen has a "colored" friend named Starletta.  Like a milder Huck Finn, she's torn between her strong feelings of affection for Starletta and her primitive understanding of racial stratification.  On a desperate night she stays at Starletta's house, welcomed with open arms by Starletta's mother, and in the morning she says, "I was surprised because it did not feel like I had slept in a colored house.  I cannot say I officially slept in the bed because i stayed in my coat on top of the covers."

Ellen comes to see her unwillingness to sleep in a black family's bed, or eat a black woman's biscuit, as foolishness, and at the end she makes a gesture of reciprocation by inviting Starletta to stay with her for the weekend at new mama's house.  "Nobody but a handful of folks I know pays attention to rules about how you treat somebody anyway," Ellen says at the end.  "But as I lay in that bed and watch my Starletta fall asleep I figure that if they could fight a war over how I'm supposed to think about her then I'm obligated to do it.  It seems like the decent thing to do."  Okay.  It makes you wonder, though, why Gibbons steers clear of one obvious resolution: Ellen comes to live with Starletta.  Are sleepovers the best version of integration Ellen and Starletta can accept?

I understand why people are attracted to this novel, with its plucky heroine and ironic, wise-beyond-her-years voice.  Walker Percy called Ellen a "southern Holden Caulfield," which is awfully silly, mostly because the difference between Ellen's ten and Holden's sixteen makes a big difference in terms of how the voice operates.  But by the time I was getting into it, the novel was over.  My impression was this: for a novel in which the character watches her own mother commit suicide, Ellen Foster is mostly toothless.  I kept waiting for a little heat on the Starletta front--does Starletta's saintly mother notice that Ellen won't eat a biscuit made by a black woman?--which never came.  Instead, Ellen Foster provides another version of a white person's racial enlightenment that dismisses the possibility of black anger or resentment.