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Chapter 2: Lucy
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Five Little Indians, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Resilience and Redemption
Cruelty and Trauma
Family
Finding Home
Summary
Analysis
Telling her story in first person, Maisie describes how tightly Lucy clings to her. Lucy describes her terrifying experience the previous night with Walt. Maisie knows Walt. She explains that he’s a pimp—a man who makes his money by forcing women to have sex—and warns Lucy to stay away from him. She wants to know why Lucy didn’t write ahead so that she could meet her at the bus station. Lucy says that Sister left her almost no time to prepare. Maisie’s behavior shocks Lucy: she smokes and swears. But she soon becomes comfortable as they reminisce about evil Sister Mary and start making plans for Lucy’s future.
The narration’s switch to the first-person perspective emphasizes Maisie’s voice, asking readers to pay special attention to her story. In Lucy’s eyes, Maisie is a success, having learned to navigate the outside world successfully in the year since she left the school. She immediately adopts Maisie as her protector and guide. Their shared stories from the school link them as intimately as sisters, and their storytelling suggests that they suffered much more there than the novel details.
Themes
Before long, Maisie’s boyfriend Jimmy arrives. Lucy is shocked to see them talking freely, embracing, and kissing—boys and girls were strictly segregated at the mission school. Jimmy’s parents—who had been through the residential school system themselves—took him into the United States to keep him from being taken. He can’t imagine what Maisie and Lucy have experienced.
Lucy’s shock over Maisie’s habits reminds readers just how controlling the residential school was—and how bad its priorities were. Lucy has been sheltered from swear words but not protected from sexual abuse. Jimmy’s inability to imagine the abuses of the schools points to how inhumane their conditions were—far beyond the scope of what people would normally consider acceptable.
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When Jimmy takes Maisie and Lucy to lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant called the Only, Walt saunters past the window. Lucy panics. Maisie rushes outside, chasing Walt down, yelling at him to leave Lucy alone and kicking him in the groin to show him how serious she is about protecting her friend.
The trauma Lucy and Maisie experienced lives on in their responses to stress: Lucy freezes and Maisie fights. And while both reactions are protective, neither is helpful for making one’s way through life. These girls have been irrevocably shaped by the school.
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The next morning, Maisie—jittery and anxious because Lucy’s arrival prevented her from going out the previous night—wakes her friend and takes her to the Manitou, the seedy hotel where she works. Maisie’s boss, Harlan, makes lascivious comments about Lucy, whom Maisie tries to shield. Clara, one of the other hotel maids, attended mission school with them, although she’s much older. She vaguely remembers Lucy and Kenny, though.
Maisie hints that there’s another aspect to her life in Vancouver. Though she doesn’t yet let readers see what it is, it’s clear that her life is more complicated than she’s been letting on to Lucy. And that’s saying something because her daytime life isn’t easy: the cost of her independence is doing a degrading job for an unsavory man. Still, she is surviving.
Themes
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Teaching Lucy to cook scrambled eggs for dinner that night, Maisie remembers helping her mom make spaghetti sauce when she was a little girl. When she turned 16, the school sent Maisie back to her parents. She arrived in their village along with dozens of other kids who had all grown up so much that most of the parents struggled to pick out their kids. Although she had spent years looking forward to her return, Maisie soon realized it wasn’t home any longer. She found it hard to trust her parents’ love. She knew they had not relinquished her, but she still felt betrayed because they weren’t able to protect or rescue her. Being back at home painfully reminded her of the childhood that had been stolen from her. So she left and came to Vancouver. Soon after she arrived, she learned her mother had died.
In this extended flashback, Maisie gives readers a glimpse into what the mission school cost her and her family. Her difficulty reintegrating into her family and community speaks to the intergenerational nature of the trauma caused by the residential school system, which thus managed to touch even family members who were spared direct experience. Assimilation required separating Indigenous children from their families and their cultures—something that has retroactively been recognized as cultural genocide. Maisie’s inability to trust her parents shows the success of these efforts.
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After dinner, Maisie tells Lucy that she’s going on a date with Jimmy. Lucy says she’ll be fine alone as long as she can leave a window open. Ever since she started cleaning Father Levesque’s rooms, not having fresh air makes her anxious. Maisie understands—she cleaned Father’s rooms, too. Maisie dresses up as “Jimmy’s girl”—clean, pretty, innocent—but she takes a bag full of bright red lipstick, revealing clothing, and leather boots with her. She rides the bus to another neighborhood where she changes clothes in the bathroom of a bar called the Knight and Day. Then she waits for the Old Man.
Maisie reacts strongly to the subtle reminder of Lucy’s—and her own—sexual abuse. It’s notable that this is the last thing she talks about with Lucy before engaging in her metamorphosis from ”Jimmy’s girl”—the self she wants to be—into the bad girl who meets the Old Man. That personal reflects the messages she received at the school and through the abuse she suffered from Father Levesque. The seedy bar emphasizes the dichotomy of Maisie’s personalities in its punny name—Maisie is a different person at night than she is by day.
Themes
When he appears, Maisie follows the Old Man to an alley. She hands him a small candy bar then turns to face the wall. While he has sex with her, she makes him say the things Father Levesque used to, things like “Slut. Savage. Filth.” She feels like this ritual is essential to her very survival. When he’s done, the Old Man tucks two $10 bills into her bra. Then he gives her the candy bar, just like Father used to do. After he leaves, she eats the chocolate, smokes a cigarette, changes back into her good-girl outfit, and goes home.
The dirty alleyway where Maisie and the Old Man meet highlights and emphasizes the horror of what Maisie—and Lucy—suffered. Father Levesque treated them like trash, and Maisie absorbed the message that she isn’t worth much more than trash from him. The abusive dirty talk, especially the use of the word “Savage” for Indigenous person, reminds readers that the individual acts of cruelty and abuse that Maisie suffered are tied to broader systems of racism and prejudice.
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When Maisie gets back to her apartment, Lucy tells her that Jimmy had come by looking for her. Maisie avoids Lucy’s questions. After taking a hot bath, she cuts the skin on her chest with a sharp knife. This ritual has already left dozens of scars beneath her collarbone. The pain makes her feel clean. When Jimmy shows up early the next morning, she sticks to her story about the mixed-up date, even though he knows she’s lying. When the fight gets intense, she locks herself in her room to reopen her fresh cut. The pain helps her to feel like “Jimmy’s girl” again. She goes back out to the living room, where she apologizes and makes plans with Jimmy to take Lucy sightseeing the next day.
In the novel, Maisie exemplifies the worst outcomes of the residential school system. The novel clearly shows how all of her self-harming actions—the cutting, the reenactment of her sexual abuse, and the lies she tells the people around her—are symptoms of the traumatic abuse she suffered as a child. It’s clear that although Maisie may have left the school physically, she remains mentally trapped in the cycles it taught her. It’s a sign of her inner strength that she tries to keep going and to make things right for herself and with others.
Themes
Lucy is amazed by everything she sees on their outing. Her innocence both amuses and pains Maisie, who knows she must have looked much the same way a year ago when she first arrived in the city. Lucy finds the hippies particularly startling. She can only imagine what Sister would say about them. Jimmy chides Maisie and Lucy for “talking smack” about a woman whom he assumes was only “doing her job.” Maisie begins to argue with him, saying that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. He wasn’t there, and things happened there that he wouldn’t believe. Unable to leave well enough alone, Jimmy turns on Lucy and asks her to describe the worst thing that happened to her. She freezes. Telling him to “fuck right off,” Maisie storms home with Lucy.
During the day, Maisie slips back into her role as Lucy’s protector and guide, trying to give Lucy what her parents were unable to provide: help figuring out how to be an adult and how to live in the world after years of being sequestered in the school. In defending Sister Mary, Jimmy becomes novel’s voice for all the people who might wonder why residential school victims and survivors can’t—or don’t—just move on with their lives once they finally get out. The novel gives readers just a small glimpse into the horror of the school, but it’s enough to show why and how these experiences shape the rest of survivors’ lives.
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Maisie goes back to the Knight and Day that night, driven by a compulsion to reenact her trauma. The Old Man gets there first, and he’s visibly shocked to see her in her good girl clothes. He’s brought a friend—a drug dealer named Steve—to give her a hit of heroin that he’s already paid for. She insists on sex first as Steve watches. Then he injects the drug into her vein, and a delicious euphoria envelops her. Plucking the two $10 bills from her bra, Steve offers to sell her more whenever she wants. After he and the Old Man leave, Maisie loses consciousness. She comes to as police officer is forcing her into the back of his cruiser. He drives away without picking up the bag that contains her normal clothes and the only picture she has of her mother.
Only after showing Maisie as Lucy’s friend and protector and after explaining some of her history at the school does the novel delve into her self-destructive behavior. It thus traces her maladaptive actions to their roots in the violence she suffered at the hands of religious and civil authorities. And it shows how hard it is to escape systemic racism and abuse. No one helps Maisie process or deal with her trauma—or even to help her gain the necessary skills to be a productive member of society. The only attention society pays is to arrest her for her disorderly conduct.
Themes
The next morning, the police release Maisie from jail. Without any money, she’s forced to walk all the way home in her bad girl clothes. When she sees her reflection in a shop mirror, she can barely recognize it. Lucy and Jimmy are waiting for her in the apartment. Jimmy expresses shock and disgust over Maisie’s appearance, and he accuses her of being a prostitute. Maisie’s heart breaks as she realizes that she lost her opportunity to be “Jimmy’s girl” before she ever left the mission school.
Maisie’s inability to recognize her reflection speaks to the ways in which the residential school permanently wounded her. Maisie wants to feel loved, valued, and clean—like “Jimmy’s girl”—but the school told her over and over that she was unworthy of that role. She can’t recognize herself in the good girl she wants to be or the bad girl she fears she is.
Themes
Jimmy storms out, and after a tearful scene, Maisie sends Lucy to work. She takes a long, hot bath. When she gets out and sees herself in the mirror, she sees a stranger. Dressing once more as Jimmy’s girl, she takes her identification and her last $50 and heads to a park in a rough section of the city. Eventually, she calls the Old Man and asks him to send Steve over with more drugs and the necessary paraphernalia for shooting up. When he brings her the stuff, she promises to pay him back soon. After he leaves, she gives an old homeless woman her $50, then she sits down next to a bush and overdoses. The last thing she sees is the city skyline.
On her walk home, Maisie worried that her child self—her true self—was gone, destroyed by the residential school system and the ongoing racism and prejudice she’s had to face since she left. Jimmy’s reaction confirmed it in her mind. She takes her own life as a response to this feeling that she cannot escape her fate, even as her decision to do so in her good-girl persona suggests that she still has a choice. Thus, even this moment of finality suggests that a different outcome could have been possible, had Maisie not experienced such extreme abuse.
Themes
