Mrs. Thelma Brickman/The Black Witch Character Analysis

The Windigo, he said, was a terrible giant, a monster that had once been a man but some dark magic had turned him into a cannibal beast with a hunger for human flesh, a hunger that could never be satisfied.

[…]

At length, Mose tapped my shoulder and took my hand. You tell stories but they’re real. There are monsters and they eat the hearts of children.

“You’re saying she’s got some hillbilly in her?”

“Just like us.”

We’d been raised in a little town deep in a hollow of the Missouri Ozarks. When we first came to Lincoln School, we still spoke with a strong Ozark accent. That twang, along with a lot of who we were, had been lost over our years at the school.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m just saying, Odie, that nobody’s born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.”

Maybe so, but I still hated her little black heart.

God be with you. That was the last thing Miss Stratton had said to me. But the God I knew now was not a God I wanted with me. In my experience, he was a God who didn’t give but only took, a God of unpredictable whim and terrible consequence. My anger at him surpassed even my hatred of the Brickmans, because the way they treated me was exactly what I expected. But God? I’d had my hopes once; now I had no idea what to expect.

The Vagabonds told the woman they were tired of wandering and asked if they could stay with her, but she looked into them, all the way down to their souls, and knew the true reason for their wandering. They were in search of their hearts’ desires, which were different for each of them, and she knew they would never find what they were looking for if they stayed in the safety of her forest.

Instead, she sent them on an odyssey.

“But when I heard the music from your harmonica, it made me want to sing. When I looked out the window, I saw a change in my people. I saw life returning to their faces. I saw fire in their eyes again. I think if you keep playing and I keep singing, we might save them.”

And that’s what they did. He played his magic harmonica and she sang in her beautiful voice, which came from her deep love for her people, and slowly everyone in the castle, everyone who’d lost their souls, woke up, and new souls grew in them and they were whole and happy again.

We did his route together, tramping up one street and down the next, the houses all white columns, gingerbread trim, fancy shutters, and ornate wrought-iron fences, everything screaming wealth, and I thought about the world as I knew it then. There seemed to me two kinds of people—those with and those without. Those with were like the Brickmans, who’d got everything they had by stealing from those without. Were all the people sleeping in the great houses on Cathedral Hill like the Brickmans? If so, I decided I’d rather be one of those without.

We are creatures of spirit, I have come to believe, and this spirit runs through us like electricity and can be passed one to another. That’s what I felt coming from my mother’s hand, the spirit of her deep longing. I was her son, her only son, and the photographs in her lap, the money she’d sent, her naïve willingness to believe the lies of the Black Witch, all told me that she’d never stopped loving me.

The Windigo, he said, was a terrible giant, a monster that had once been a man but some dark magic had turned him into a cannibal beast with a hunger for human flesh, a hunger that could never be satisfied.

[…]

At length, Mose tapped my shoulder and took my hand. You tell stories but they’re real. There are monsters and they eat the hearts of children.

“You’re saying she’s got some hillbilly in her?”

“Just like us.”

We’d been raised in a little town deep in a hollow of the Missouri Ozarks. When we first came to Lincoln School, we still spoke with a strong Ozark accent. That twang, along with a lot of who we were, had been lost over our years at the school.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m just saying, Odie, that nobody’s born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.”

Maybe so, but I still hated her little black heart.

God be with you. That was the last thing Miss Stratton had said to me. But the God I knew now was not a God I wanted with me. In my experience, he was a God who didn’t give but only took, a God of unpredictable whim and terrible consequence. My anger at him surpassed even my hatred of the Brickmans, because the way they treated me was exactly what I expected. But God? I’d had my hopes once; now I had no idea what to expect.

The Vagabonds told the woman they were tired of wandering and asked if they could stay with her, but she looked into them, all the way down to their souls, and knew the true reason for their wandering. They were in search of their hearts’ desires, which were different for each of them, and she knew they would never find what they were looking for if they stayed in the safety of her forest.

Instead, she sent them on an odyssey.

“But when I heard the music from your harmonica, it made me want to sing. When I looked out the window, I saw a change in my people. I saw life returning to their faces. I saw fire in their eyes again. I think if you keep playing and I keep singing, we might save them.”

And that’s what they did. He played his magic harmonica and she sang in her beautiful voice, which came from her deep love for her people, and slowly everyone in the castle, everyone who’d lost their souls, woke up, and new souls grew in them and they were whole and happy again.

We did his route together, tramping up one street and down the next, the houses all white columns, gingerbread trim, fancy shutters, and ornate wrought-iron fences, everything screaming wealth, and I thought about the world as I knew it then. There seemed to me two kinds of people—those with and those without. Those with were like the Brickmans, who’d got everything they had by stealing from those without. Were all the people sleeping in the great houses on Cathedral Hill like the Brickmans? If so, I decided I’d rather be one of those without.

We are creatures of spirit, I have come to believe, and this spirit runs through us like electricity and can be passed one to another. That’s what I felt coming from my mother’s hand, the spirit of her deep longing. I was her son, her only son, and the photographs in her lap, the money she’d sent, her naïve willingness to believe the lies of the Black Witch, all told me that she’d never stopped loving me.