Angeline Moffit Character Analysis

“Sorry Bluet. It got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit and threw it outside. I’m glad you’re back ’cause he lit at me good for not being able to read him his own loan. Said a colored shouldn’t be able to read better than me. Real sorry…” She latched on to my hand and laid the apology with a firm grip. I looked down at us bound together like that, tried to draw back, but Angeline squeezed tighter and whispered, “Hain’t no harm. Our hands don’t care they’re different colors. Feels nice jus’ the same, huh?”

It did. But Mr. Moffit didn’t like folks who weren’t his color. He used to demand that I stay put in the yard.

For a minute I envied her, wanted to send Junia home, unlace my heavy, tight shoes, and run free with her to escape Frazier, the doc and his medical tests, and everything damning to me—to hunt and fish in the woods like I’d done as a child. To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn’t tread, dared not venture—the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills—but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid. And I longed to lift bare feet onto ancient paths and be wilded once again.

“Where’s my manners? I hope you get to feeling pert soon, ma’am. I miss seeing my bonny Picasso.” He grinned.

I stared at him blankly, and he added, “Picasso’s painting of the pretty blue lady, the Woman with a Helmet of Hair that I’d seen in one of the magazines you brought us? You remind me of her. Your fine color. My woman always said God saved that best color for His home.” He pointed a finger up to a patch of blue sky parting the gray clouds. “Guess He must’ve had Himself a little bit left over.”

Astonished, I could feel my face warm. No one, not a soul, ever said that my old color was fine. The best.

I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if the Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace.

“Let me tell you, Cussy, a miner’s life is a short one.”

“Oh, Pa,” I fanned his words away.

“Daughter, they buried eight of ’em last January after the collapse. Sealed that pit with them eight poor souls trapped inside it.”

I had heard the horror of it all. How the men and young boys were trapped so far down in the midnight dust and crumbling rock, no one could reach them. Then a leak of poisonous gas put them to sleep. There weren’t anything left to do, no way to rescue them except to cover the tomb and have a preacher hold a burial service at the face of the mine.

“Sorry Bluet. It got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit and threw it outside. I’m glad you’re back ’cause he lit at me good for not being able to read him his own loan. Said a colored shouldn’t be able to read better than me. Real sorry…” She latched on to my hand and laid the apology with a firm grip. I looked down at us bound together like that, tried to draw back, but Angeline squeezed tighter and whispered, “Hain’t no harm. Our hands don’t care they’re different colors. Feels nice jus’ the same, huh?”

It did. But Mr. Moffit didn’t like folks who weren’t his color. He used to demand that I stay put in the yard.

For a minute I envied her, wanted to send Junia home, unlace my heavy, tight shoes, and run free with her to escape Frazier, the doc and his medical tests, and everything damning to me—to hunt and fish in the woods like I’d done as a child. To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn’t tread, dared not venture—the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills—but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid. And I longed to lift bare feet onto ancient paths and be wilded once again.

“Where’s my manners? I hope you get to feeling pert soon, ma’am. I miss seeing my bonny Picasso.” He grinned.

I stared at him blankly, and he added, “Picasso’s painting of the pretty blue lady, the Woman with a Helmet of Hair that I’d seen in one of the magazines you brought us? You remind me of her. Your fine color. My woman always said God saved that best color for His home.” He pointed a finger up to a patch of blue sky parting the gray clouds. “Guess He must’ve had Himself a little bit left over.”

Astonished, I could feel my face warm. No one, not a soul, ever said that my old color was fine. The best.

I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if the Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace.

“Let me tell you, Cussy, a miner’s life is a short one.”

“Oh, Pa,” I fanned his words away.

“Daughter, they buried eight of ’em last January after the collapse. Sealed that pit with them eight poor souls trapped inside it.”

I had heard the horror of it all. How the men and young boys were trapped so far down in the midnight dust and crumbling rock, no one could reach them. Then a leak of poisonous gas put them to sleep. There weren’t anything left to do, no way to rescue them except to cover the tomb and have a preacher hold a burial service at the face of the mine.