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Chapter 3: Shirley
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Winsome is cooking her family’s favorite meal as the sea breeze drifts into the kitchen. Shirley, Lennox, her granddaughter Rachel, and Rachel’s daughter are visiting and the rest of the family will arrive later in the summer. She loves when her family visits. Shirley’s best friend Amma has even visited before. While Winsome loved that her daughter had such a close friend, she didn’t want her to follow in Amma’s bold footsteps. When Amma came out Winsome feared she would suffer in an intolerant society, and feared that Shirley might end up gay, too. Her fears, she admits, all turned out to be wrong.
Winsome feared that Shirley would follow in Amma’s radical footsteps, which would risk her chances at the upward mobility she and her husband sacrificed so much for. A radical political identity is itself a privilege less accessible to those who are fighting just to survive. It’s not so much that she’s not accepting of gay people, but that another intersecting, marginalized identity would make her daughter’s life as a Black woman more complicated than it already is. Her fears didn't pan out in reality, but that fear is real and can be all-consuming in the lives of immigrants struggling in a discriminatory, white-supremacist society.
Themes
Shirley acts like a tourist when she visits Barbados and doesn’t help around the house. She never confronts her though because Shirley’s unbearable when she’s upset. She notices that Shirley arrives looking exhausted after a year spent at her terrible job, which she complains about all summer long. Winsome encourages her to quit, but instead Shirley dumps her emotions on her mother and leaves at the end of the summer imbued with new life. Winsome likes that she leaves looking like a girl from Barbados rather than one raised in the cold U.K.
Shirley is not at home in her parents’ native Barbados. She’s a girl from the U.K. who’s been transformed by her assimilation into the white middle-class. Winsome has to tiptoe around Shirley’s emotionally explosive personality. Her unhappiness at work isn’t what she expected for her daughter after struggling for all those years in the U.K. to earn her better opportunities in life. Winsome’s complicated feelings about Shirley’s identity highlight the ways in which first-generation immigrant parents can’t fully anticipate how their decision to raise their children abroad will impact their racial and cultural identities. Winsome and Shirley’s story parallels Bummi and Carole’s in this way. At the end of the summer, however, months spent in Barbados return pieces of that culture and identity to Shirley.
Themes
Winsome is frustrated with how Shirley is never satisfied with the life that is so much better than the one she led as a newly arrived immigrant whose work as a bus conductor was backbreaking. She’s incredibly grateful that she was able to escape the cold U.K. to retire in Barbados. She belongs to a book club where she bonds with other women who’ve come back home after years spent abroad. All her favorite books are authored by Caribbean women. She loves the intellectual stimulation the book club provides.
Winsome feels Shirley’s dissatisfaction as a betrayal. Shirley doesn’t express her gratitude for her mother’s sacrifices, and perhaps doesn’t even realize how ungrateful she appears in her mother’s eyes. As the first generation, Winsome worked hard to survive and tolerated the physically demanding, low-paid work available to immigrants. Winsome’s return to her native country challenges narratives of immigration that claim life in Western countries is always better than the life available back home. In Barbados she can live a life that’s more than just backbreaking work. She’s surrounded by friends and is able to pursue an intellectual life not afforded to her in the U.K. Her ability to retire comfortably in Barbados, however, is dependent upon the financial advantages that she earned through her years working abroad.
Themes
Winsome watches Lennox and her husband, Clovis, head out to fix up a fishing boat. Winsome admires Lennox from afar. She’s attracted to him and tells Shirley she’s lucky to have him, but Shirley retorts he’s lucky to have her. Lennox helps Clovis out more than his own sons, Tony and Errol, do. Winsome suspects they may still be angry at him for how he beat them as kids, but he was protecting them from their racist society the best way he knew how. Girls needed less protection, she thought. All three of their children did well in life because she and Clovis provided them with a solid foundation from which to launch.
Winsome admires Lennox because he’s different from both her husband and her sons. Lennox and Shirley’s relationship is an equitable, feminist one. The need to survive in a hostile, white-supremacist society causes conflicts between first-generation parents and their second-generation kids. Clovis hurt his own sons because, to him, it was better than them being hurt by white people. Either way, for Tony and Errol, there was no escaping the hurt. Winsome feels satisfied that she and Clovis were able to do what all first-generation parents strive to do, give their kids the opportunity to get ahead in life.
Themes
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Winsome’s granddaughter, Rachel, and great-granddaughter come into the kitchen. She inhales her granddaughter’s shampoo smell, still clean from the flight. Winsome taught Shirley that it was important to be clean and properly dressed when traveling, and Shirley passed this knowledge onto her daughter who passed it on to her own daughter. Rachel asks Winsome to tell her about how she and Clovis met. Winsome is taken aback, accustomed to hearing about her grandchildren’s lives but never being asked about her own. She’s forgiving because she knows young people are self-centered, viewing the elderly as only their caretakers. So Winsome is happy that Rachel is curious about who she was before she was a mother, when she was “a person in her own right.” But Winsome realizes that she’s never been her own person. She went from daughter to wife and mother, to grandmother and great-grandmother.
Even the small piece of advice about air travel demonstrates how knowledge is transferred down through the generations of a family. In both big and small ways, the first generation of a family will shape and affect the generations that come after. Winsome’s choices as the first generation in the U.K. are what paved the path for the life that her granddaughter lives now. The younger generation doesn’t always appreciate their elders, despite how their lives, both successes and failures, are inextricably tied to them. When Rachel shows interest in Winsome she’s showing interest in how her life, as the third generation in the U.K., came to be. Winsome realizes that she, like many women of her generation, was never afforded the time and space to be her own person. Instead, she was always defined in relationship to others, forced into a supporting role. It’s only now in her retirement in Barbados that she’s able to live life on her own terms and discover who she is among her friends and intellectual pursuits.
Themes
Winsome flashes back in time and tells her story. She meets Clovis at a West Indian gathering shortly after she’d moved to London. He’d been in England for two years already and warned her how hard it’s been. Clovis becomes a huge source of support to her as she adjusts to life in this new country and culture. Even though he’s not as handsome or charming as she expected her future husband to be, Clovis is loyal, not like other men who sleep around with many women and abandon their children. She accepts that “it was easier to dream” of the perfect man “than it was to make the dream come true.”
Winsome settles for Clovis, a good man, but not the man of her dreams, because he can provide her with a new and familiar home. As a newly arrived immigrant, she’d just lost the home and community she’d always known, and she struggles amidst hardships to put down new roots in the U.K. Winsome has to sacrifice her personal dreams in order to survive in this new place. The dream of finding a perfect partner is as hard to fulfill as is the dream of becoming successful as an immigrant in this new country. She chooses Clovis in hopes that, together, they’ll be better positioned to make that latter dream come true.
Themes
When they marry, they move into a room in a crowded boarding house. They work 12-hour shifts in a fertilizer factory and save money for a house. Clovis wants to move to south-west England, to be near the sea and work as a fisherman like both their fathers had back home. Having grown up a fisherman’s daughter who had to wake up early to help her father, she knows being a fisherman’s wife will be hard, too. But women are expected to obey their husbands, and marriage is a “life-sentence,” so they move.
Winsome and Clovis work hard in physically demanding, low-paid jobs as many immigrants are forced to upon arrival. Clovis wants to move south in an effort to reestablish the home he once had, and misses, in Barbados. From a distance, Clovis romanticizes the life he left behind, but Winsome remembers the reality. She knows that making a living as a fisherman won’t be any easier. She’s part of a generation of women that obeyed their husband’s wishes and desires, shaping her life around his ambitions alone. Winsome can’t say no, despite the fact that she has very logical reasons to do so. In this way, her relationship with Clovis stands in stark contrast with the relationship Shirley will later share with Lennox.
Themes
When they arrive in the seaside town of Plymouth, Clovis can’t find work. The people in town are poor and don’t want to give work to a stranger. Winsome wants to return to London, but Clovis insists on becoming a fisherman. She asks him why they don’t just move back home where they belong if that’s what he wants to do. Instead, he convinces her to move further south to the Isles of Scilly where the townspeople stop in their tracks to ogle at these “monkey people” who’ve shown up on their island. Restaurants and hotels won’t let them in, let alone give Clovis a job.
In both southern towns they travel to, Winsome and Clovis are met with racism and xenophobia. The poor, white working class harbor anti-immigrant sentiments because they see immigrants, and their willingness to work for low wages, as an economic threat. They’re unable to see how their oppressions intersect. Both immigrants and the white lower class are economic allies, and would be stronger together if not divided by racism. Far from London, where there are large immigrant communities, Winsome and Clovis are subject to especially hostile and severe discrimination.
Themes
A policeman tells them the only thing they can do is leave and never come back, so they do. That night they’re forced to sleep in the doorway of a church when the people inside won’t let them in. Winsome insists they go back to London where there are other people of color, but Clovis is determined to give Plymouth another chance. He says that once they have kids, living in the countryside will be better. They’ll be able to “roam free like on Barbados.” He tells Winsome to trust his instinct that his plan will work out.
That they are dismissed by the policeman shows how racism and xenophobia are enforced by white-supremacist society and its institutions. Symbolically, not even the church, a supposed refuge for all, will let them in. The only option is to run. Clovis, however, doesn’t want to give in to this command. He’s desperate to recreate a life that resembles the one he left behind in Barbados. He has a vision for how he wants his kids to grow up, and the countryside is the setting for that vision. Unlike on Barbados, though, a country whose population is predominantly of African descent, in the U.K. his Black children won’t be free to roam. They’ll not only be limited by racism, but in potential danger because of it.
Themes
They settle in Plymouth, Clovis becoming a longshoreman unloading cargo from ships and Winsome having three children in three years. Clovis drinks after work, on bad days coming home drunk, leaving Winsome alone with the kids until late at night. The townspeople are openly racist towards them, serving her last in shops, leaving rats on their doorstep, and painting “go home” on their front door. Eventually, after they prove themselves “civilized,” people get used to their presence in town. Mrs. Beresford, a neighbor, becomes Winsome’s first friend, inviting her into her home, introducing her to new people, and teaching her how to prepare English foods.
Winsome continues to give in to Clovis’s wishes for their lives. While he works and drinks, she gets pregnant and cares for the children as is traditionally expected of women, especially women of her generation. Winsome and her family continue to endure acts of outright and hostile racism, confirming that Clovis’s vision for this new home is far from what he imagined. Only once they prove themselves as “civilized,” meaning once they’ve assimilated enough to appease their neighbors, are they tolerated, a far cry from acceptance. Winsome’s first friend helps her further her assimilation into English culture.
Themes
At school Shirley and her brothers are called racial slurs and punished unfairly by their teachers, their liveliness interpreted as misbehavior. Winsome goes to the school to complain but is ignored. One day another Black girl shows up at school. She’s mixed, her mother white and her father Black, and with her lighter skin and loose curls she’s readily accepted by teachers and students at the school. At wit’s end, Winsome asserts herself and tells Clovis she is taking the children back to London with or without him.
Shirley, Tony, and Errol are disproportionately targeted and punished at school. Black students are punished and suspended at disproportionately higher rates because white schools and teachers view Black students through stereotypical and biased lenses. Years before she herself becomes a teacher, Shirley is being looked down on and singled out in the ways that her future students will be, too. For Winsome, the hypocrisy she witnesses when the students and teachers accept the new, mixed-race girl becomes too much to bear. In the eyes of the white townspeople, this girl is Black but not “too Black” to be accepted. Winsome’s anger gives her the strength to stand up against her husband, breaking free of the gender norms that kept her silent.
Themes
Mid-story, Winsome is distracted by Lennox and Clovis headed back from fixing up the boat. She thinks Shirley likely married Lennox because he subconsciously reminded her of her father, and Winsome thinks maybe that’s why she’s also attracted to this younger version of her husband. That summer they’ll eventually restore the boat and take it out for early morning fishing trips, which are still a crucial part of Clovis’s identity and manhood. Rachel thanks Winsome for telling her “trailblazing” story, but Winsome doesn’t see anything trailblazing about her immigration experience.
For Winsome, Lennox represents what Clovis could have been in a different time, place, and life circumstance. Winsome yearns for the lifestyle that her generation worked hard to make possible for their second-generation children. Rachel, the third generation, has more distance from Winsome than her own kids do, which affords her a more generous and expansive view of what she sacrificed in order to make their lives possible. Rachel thanks Winsome for sharing her story, but on a deeper level is thanking her for making her life possible. Winsome doesn’t give herself credit for how her presence and fight to survive in the U.K. as a Black, Caribbean, woman immigrant itself achieved social change.
Themes
When Shirley, Clovis, and the children move back to London, life settles into a predictable and secure routine. Although Winsome craved this comfort and security when she first moved to London and first fell in love with Clovis, as the years passed, she found herself craving an excitement her domesticated husband couldn’t give her. So, when Shirley first introduces them to Lennox, Winsome is flooded with sexual desire for his youthful vigor and beauty. After that first meeting, Winsome tries to visit with Shirley and Lennox as much as possible. His small affections—a kiss on the cheek or an arm around her shoulder—electrify her and she has to have sex with Clovis more often to get the excitement out of her system. She’s attracted to Lennox’s intelligence and sociability, which Clovis lacks. Winsome envies Shirley’s youth, beauty, and the opportunities she had in life that led her to her life with Lennox.
Winsome and Clovis finally build the secure and stable home that they desperately wanted for themselves and their children when they first immigrated. But now that life isn’t just a daily fight to survive, Winsome wants more for herself. She yearns to reap the benefits of her hard work and sacrifice. Shirley’s life and all that she has, including her husband, are rooted in the sacrifices Winsome made. Lennox is the dream man that Winsome couldn’t make real for herself. He’s come true for her daughter instead.
Themes
She notices that Lennox’s kisses linger on her cheeks too long. She doesn’t want to betray Clovis or Shirley but admits that if he made a move she couldn’t resist. One day Winsome is home alone and Lennox shows up. He passionately kisses her in a way Clovis never has. He undresses her and she feels like a new woman. She enjoys passionate sex with him in a way she never enjoyed sex before. They stop only when Winsome has to go pick up Karen and Rachel. Her guilt keeps her up late, but she decides that at almost 50 she deserves him. The affair lasts a year. They meet once or twice a week, and on weekends take Rachel and Karen to the seaside under the pretense of giving Shirley a break. Winsome tells herself that it’s better that Lennox satisfy his urges with her than with some other woman.
Winsome convinces herself that she deserves this happiness. It’s true that she deserves happiness at her age after working so hard, but her happiness puts the home and family she worked so hard to build up on the line. Winsome doesn’t want to betray her daughter or husband but betrays them both and fails to acknowledge how this betrayal is far worse for Shirley than if Lennox slept with another, random woman, because this is a betrayal by both her mother and her husband. Their deception and lies would hurt twofold.
Themes
Lennox ends the affair suddenly and without explanation, and Winsome never finds the courage to ask him why. Lennox can’t look at her for a while afterwards and Shirley notices that the two are less close than they once were, which Winsome tries to deny. Winsome wants Lennox more now that he’s retreated. She needs him to fill the longing and desire he’d awakened in her. Even now, decades since the affair, her attraction is reawakened when he visits each summer. Shirley always brags to Winsome that Lennox will never cheat, and Winsome always tells her that she’s so lucky to have found a good man.
One of the initial reasons Winsome loved Clovis is because she knew he wasn’t the type of man to run off and have an affair. In this crucial way Clovis and Lennox, who Winsome finds so fundamentally similar, differ. It's deeply ironic that Shirley brags to Winsome about Lennox’s faithfulness. This part of Winsome’s story challenges the narrative that suggests immigrant parents must always sacrifice their entire selves and desires for their second generation children.
Themes
