Petra Character Analysis

The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing.

The women in the camps had advised the mother, To run away from your husband would be a mistake. He would stalk her and the children, not because he wanted them back, they proposed, but because it was a slap in the face, and he would swear over the seventh beer that he would find her and kill them all. Estrella’s godmother said the same thing and more. You’ll be a forever alone woman, she said to Estrella’s mother, nobody wants a woman with a bunch of orphans, nobody.

He had the nerve, damn him, the spine to do it. She was almost jealous.

Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.

Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.

She envied the car, then envied the landlord of the car who could travel from one splat dot to another. She thought him a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé jars in the stores were located…

The cotton balls in the jar looked too white, like imitation cotton to Petra. She noticed a scale near the desk much like the one used for measuring the weight of picked cotton. The scale reminded her how she’d wet the cotton or hid handsized rocks in the middle of her sack so that the scale tipped in her favor when the cotton was weighed. The scale predicted what she would be able to eat, the measurement of her work…

Even the many things on the nurse’s desk implied fakery; the pictures of her smiling boys (Who did they think they were, smiling so boldly at the camera?), the porcelain statue of a calico kitten with a little stethoscope, wearing a folded white cap with a red cross between its too cute perky little ears…

The clinic visit is the family’s only interaction with middle-class America in the book; the nurse is the only character who isn’t a laborer, and the clinic is one of the few real buildings that the family enters. In this context, Petra’s unease represents her total alienation from that society; the fact that ordinary accessories of middle-class life, like desk ornaments and grinning photos, are so upsetting to her emphasizes the extent to which she lives outside this society. However, it’s important that rather than accepting her exclusion, Petra pushes back. The reality of field work is often erased and ignored by the larger society, but Petra insists that her grim reality is just as important – even more real – than this seemingly normal scene. Even though this moment underlines her poverty, it’s also an important reclamation of her own narrative.

10100

The head of Jesucristo broke from His neck and when His eyes stared up at her like pools of dark ominous water, she felt a wave of anger swelling against her chest.

The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing.

The women in the camps had advised the mother, To run away from your husband would be a mistake. He would stalk her and the children, not because he wanted them back, they proposed, but because it was a slap in the face, and he would swear over the seventh beer that he would find her and kill them all. Estrella’s godmother said the same thing and more. You’ll be a forever alone woman, she said to Estrella’s mother, nobody wants a woman with a bunch of orphans, nobody.

He had the nerve, damn him, the spine to do it. She was almost jealous.

Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.

Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.

She envied the car, then envied the landlord of the car who could travel from one splat dot to another. She thought him a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé jars in the stores were located…

The cotton balls in the jar looked too white, like imitation cotton to Petra. She noticed a scale near the desk much like the one used for measuring the weight of picked cotton. The scale reminded her how she’d wet the cotton or hid handsized rocks in the middle of her sack so that the scale tipped in her favor when the cotton was weighed. The scale predicted what she would be able to eat, the measurement of her work…

Even the many things on the nurse’s desk implied fakery; the pictures of her smiling boys (Who did they think they were, smiling so boldly at the camera?), the porcelain statue of a calico kitten with a little stethoscope, wearing a folded white cap with a red cross between its too cute perky little ears…

The clinic visit is the family’s only interaction with middle-class America in the book; the nurse is the only character who isn’t a laborer, and the clinic is one of the few real buildings that the family enters. In this context, Petra’s unease represents her total alienation from that society; the fact that ordinary accessories of middle-class life, like desk ornaments and grinning photos, are so upsetting to her emphasizes the extent to which she lives outside this society. However, it’s important that rather than accepting her exclusion, Petra pushes back. The reality of field work is often erased and ignored by the larger society, but Petra insists that her grim reality is just as important – even more real – than this seemingly normal scene. Even though this moment underlines her poverty, it’s also an important reclamation of her own narrative.

10100

The head of Jesucristo broke from His neck and when His eyes stared up at her like pools of dark ominous water, she felt a wave of anger swelling against her chest.