Poverty, Social Support, and Desperation Theme Analysis

Monday’s family’s poverty, as well as the impending closing of the Ed Borough housing projects, form the backdrop of Monday’s Not Coming. Claudia, as a relatively privileged narrator, doesn’t necessarily recognize the significance of Monday’s consistently threadbare clothes or what it might mean for Monday’s family to lose their home. The novel shows that poverty, desperation, and a dissolving community form the roots of Monday’s family’s problems and help create a closed-off, dangerous environment where the Charles family’s violence takes place and Monday’s disappearance can go unnoticed.

Monday’s Not Coming suggests that the possibility that Monday’s family will lose their home in the present is a product of years of racism and discrimination. Claudia explains that Ed Borough, the low-income housing complex where Monday and several other classmates live, was first built in the 1940s. It was supposed to be a place where low-income Black families could realize their dreams by giving them a safe, welcoming place to live. And for decades, that’s what Ed Borough was: a close-knit community of Black families where, as one of the elderly church ladies says, it was normal to see one’s neighbors and family members regularly for Sunday dinners.

However, this community gradually fractured over the decades before Claudia’s story begins. Claudia notes that it didn’t take white developers long to realize that Ed Borough sits on a prime piece of real estate by the river and decided to figure out how to move the complex’s Black residents off the land. She says that in the 1980s and 90s, it was “convenient” that the crack epidemic hit Ed Borough hard—implying that white developers, at least, didn’t see the crack epidemic as something to solve for the sake of the affected communities. Rather, they saw it as an easy excuse to break up what suddenly seemed like a dangerous, lawless neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and redevelop the land. In all three of the novel’s timelines, this fight is still ongoing. While crack is no longer the issue it was a few decades ago, the city is nevertheless moving forward with plans to evict the Black and low-income Ed Borough residents within the next few years. This subplot highlights the fear that Monday’s family could lose their home at any moment. And this fear becomes increasingly real as Mrs. Charles loses her job and can’t find another one—something she attributes to being Black.

Monday’s Not Coming also illustrates how Monday’s family’s poverty leads to desperation. Because Mrs. Charles can’t financially support the family with just her babysitting jobs, Monday’s older sister, April, steps in to help by engaging in sex work. With the money she earns, April is able to buy Monday and August their school uniforms, ensuring that they’ll be able to attend school and get an education. The novel doesn’t go into great detail about this sex work, but it does suggest that April is unfairly punished for engaging in work that she sees as a necessity. Everywhere April goes, her peers stare at her and make snide remarks about her promiscuity, with seemingly no understanding of how or why April’s poor reputation exists in the first place. In this way, April—and, by extension, her entire family—are made to suffer even more for their economic struggles.

Finally, the novel suggests that the combination of a fracturing community and desperate measures create a situation where Monday’s disappearance can go unnoticed. One of the reasons why Claudia and Monday’s school neglects to follow up when Monday doesn’t return for eighth grade is because many kids from Ed Borough aren’t registering for eighth grade—Monday isn’t an outlier. The secretary explains to Claudia and Ms. Valente that many kids had to move out of town with their families when the rent increased, so the same thing probably happened to the Charles family. In this way, the novel illustrates how Ed Borough’s closing creates a situation where it’s all too easy for kids to slip through the cracks and simply disappear.

An Ed Borough resident named Ms. Roundtree explains that this also happens at the community level. At the end of the book, Claudia asks Ms. Roundtree why she didn’t say anything when she suspected something happened to Monday. Ms. Roundtree explains that, these days, it’s not abnormal for kids to move around, get busy, and seem to disappear—but usually, that’s not an indicator that anything is wrong. She didn’t see any reason for concern given that there were so many plausible explanations for Monday’s whereabouts aside from death. In this way, Monday’s Not Coming acknowledges that Monday’s disappearance and death are tragic—but in some ways, are perhaps unsurprising. The novel bleakly suggests that when a city sees its poor Black residents as a problem to solve, not as people deserving of care and dignity, and when a community accepts as fact that children will disappear for perfectly legitimate reasons, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that few seem to care when a Black child goes missing.