Ellen Foster

“I do remember when I was scared. Everything was so wrong like somebody had knocked something loose and my family was shaking itself to death. Some wild ride broke and the one in charge strolled off and let us spin and shake and fly off the rail.”

Ellen describes her emotions when she understood her mother was ill and her father was not going to behave as a properly nurturing authority. The metaphor of the roller coaster going off the rail captures Ellen’s fear and sense of having no control.

“And oh how I have my rage and desire for the lightning to come and strike a vengeance on him. But I do not control the clouds or the thunder. And the way the Lord moves is his business.”

This is a further example of Ellen’s voice and the prose style that pervades the novel. She thinks this while listening to a storm as she lies beside her mother, just home from the hospital, and the suggestion that she cannot rely on God for help reflects Ellen’s prosaic form of belief and her self-reliance, since the adults in her life have failed to protect her.

“You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.”

Ellen’s address to her mother, who has died after overdosing on pills, shows the tender concern she feels toward her mama and Ellen’s nurturing abilities, a strong theme in the novel. She understands death as a type of rest—an enduring and long-lived metaphor—but also expresses the child’s wish not to be parted.

“I keep calling things mine but nothing actually belongs to me except a few things that I moved out here with. But while you use or play with the things here it is OK to call it yours. When you get through with something, clean it up and put it back so the next one can call it his. That is the rule.”

Ellen’s reflection on the rules of her foster home illustrate a characteristic habit of hers to describe her experiences in the form of instructions for others. The occasional use of “you” demonstrates how Ellen sees herself as addressing an internal audience. The lack of personal belongings reveals her conditional living situation, but Ellen also expresses her preference for rules and order, an adaptation as a consequence of the trauma she experienced.

“I always walked in wide circles around him.”

Ellen’s figure of speech expresses how she tried to avoid her father. The image is characteristic of the novel’s declarative style, which affords no room for sentiment or melodrama.

“He pulls the evil back into his self and Lord I run. Run down the road to Starletta. Now to the smoke coming out of the chimney against the night sky I run. Down the path into the darkness I gather my head and all that is spinning and flying out from me and wonder oh you just have to wonder what the world has come to.”

Ellen frequently uses spinning imagery to represent when her feelings are out of control, and she is stunned the first time her father molests her. The fragmented sentences imitate her fractured state of mind, and the rushing rhythm intimates her duress. The focus on the detail such as the smoke coming out of the chimney—a sign of Starletta’s house and refuge—indicate her shock. The image that an “evil” came out of her father indicates a child’s level of understanding.

“I will just have to lock myself up is what I thought. If I have to stay here I can lock myself up. Push the chair up to the door and keep something in there to hit with just in case.”

Ellen’s plans to protect herself are indicative of her practical personality, but her resolve and her strategizing are heartbreaking considering that she sees herself as having no one to rely on, since her Aunt Betsy returned her to her father’s home. Ellen’s matter-of-fact account is part of how she deals with traumatizing circumstances.

“You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you only started with one solitary season out of your life. That is how I do it.”

When she gardens with Julia and Roy, Ellen remembers the season her mother was well, and Ellen helped her weed and pick beans in the garden. This passage captures Ellen’s imagination, tenacity, and stalwart character, but also her ability to be optimistic as she clings to this joyful memory of shared time with her mother. Gardening represents the kind of healthy nurturance for which Ellen longs.

“You have to wonder what they will remember when they are big. A man coming to school? A man waving dollars and screaming? One man my daddy waving dollars, yelling and undoing his britches during naptime?”

In a moment of dissociation, Ellen avoids confronting her own feelings of fear and terror by wondering at the astonishment and alarm her classmates might feel. Looking on the situation through another’s eyes is the only way she can handle this traumatizing experience.

“What do you do when the judge talks about the family society’s cornerstone but you know yours was never a Roman pillar but is and always has been a crumbly old brick?”

In a cruel irony, the judge giving Ellen to her grandmother’s custody cites the image of the conventional family as his justification. Ellen’s image of her birth family as crumbling brick aptly exposes the lack of nurturance that she has felt from those related to her by blood, speaking to the novel’s central theme of family bonds.

“It makes me slow down and sad to think about my mama’s mama’s house. All the time was like a record you play on the wrong speed.”

Ellen’s image of the vinyl record played at a slower speed—which would deepen the pitch and distort the sound of the recording—powerfully captures the sense of isolation and loneliness she feels while staying with her grandmother. The cruelty and hostility she encounters there is a distortion of the care the judge assumed she would receive by being under the care of “family.”

“While I watched Mavis and her family I thought I would bust open if I did not get one of them for my own self soon. Back then I had not figured out how to go about getting one but I had a feeling it could be got.”

Ellen expresses her wishes for a home and family with her direct vocabulary—she will “bust.” Her sense that she can “get,” earn, or pay for a new family indicates Ellen’s transactional notion of care. In addition, it is the Black households she observes that exhibit the loving, affectionate forms of interaction, protection, and care that Ellen understands are the real basis of family.

“He was weak as water I have heard more than one person say about him. And that is just what you do not need to be if you have dealings with my mama’s mama. She would come rolling in a wave over you and leave you there on your behind choking […] That is how she confused my daddy.”

Ellen uses water imagery to represent how her grandmother manipulated Ellen’s father, further seeking to punish him for his abuse of Ellen’s mama, her daughter. Elsewhere, Ellen regards the ocean as a powerful entity, demanding respect. This moment of empathy, if not sympathy, hints at how Ellen tries to avoid acknowledging grief or regret at her father’s death.

“I said to her the score is two to one now. I might have my mama’s soul to worry over but you’ve got my daddy’s and your own. The score is two to one but I win.”

Further evidence of her practical, transactional style, Ellen keeps score at her grandmother’s death. She imagines that while she, Ellen, is responsible for her mother’s death, she sees her grandmother as responsible for both Ellen’s father’s death and her own. This imaginative thinking is a common response to immense emotional pain, as is bargaining with a higher power.

“I know for a fact I would not ever forget her but you can never be sure about how somebody else thinks about you except if they beat it into your head. At least that is how I am worried about Starletta […] before long I will have to know I am in her head like she is in mine. It is good to have a friend like her.”

Ellen demonstrates the awareness that Starletta might regard Ellen differently than she regards Starletta—evidence of Ellen’s maturing outlook. The tangle of affection for her friend and a possessiveness toward Starletta is typical of Ellen’s feelings for the other girl, who acts as a foil for Ellen throughout the novel.

“And then he will not let go of a word but he has to bend and pull and stretch what I said into something he can see on paper and see how it has changed like a miracle into exactly what he wanted me to say.”

Ellen, who is straightforward with her language but vigilant about her thinking and what she reveals, dreads the counselor she sees at school because he wants to interrogate and interpret her. Her image of the counselor as a taffy-puller, magician, and illusionist signals her distrust of his intentions or regard for her.

“You just let the motion in your head wear you out. Never think about it. You just make a bigger mess that way.”

Ellen’s response to her trauma is not to let other thoughts distract her from painful memories. While not a healthy adaptive mechanism, avoidance works for her. This makes Ellen, if not an unreliable narrator, one whose words must be mined for context—much like her counselor does.

“That is why I think I am somebody now because I said by damn this is how it is going to be and before I knew it I had a new mama. And I looked her over plenty good too before I decided she was a keeper.”

Ellen’s crediting herself for locating, evaluating, and deciding on her new mama introduces a humorous note into the novel, showing her practical, businesslike attitude once again, but also her innocence. Equally, Ellen’s satisfaction that she found for herself an arrangement pleasing to her speaks to the novel’s evaluation of what makes a functional family.

“I said I look like I am worth something today and she will notice the dress first and then me inside it and say to herself I sure would like to have a little girl like her.”

Ellen doesn’t trust in her own value, or her need for help, to be persuasive argument on their own. She believes she will need to attract new mama’s eye to secure her affection. Ellen has been hoping she will prove to be the girl someone wants and has been trying different strategies to make herself appealing or loveable. Here, she settles on looking the best she can.

“But you have to be careful with dreaming like that especially about people you do not know good.”

Ellen grimly reflects on the disappointment of her hopes that she might have a real Christmas with Nadine and Dora, which would be evidence of their acceptance of and affection for her. The line provides an example of Ellen’s habitual expression, which is advice for her listener based on her own life experience and vocabulary that is direct if not always grammatically correct.

“So what do you do when that spinning starts and the motion carries the time wild by you and you cannot stop to see one thing to grab and stop yourself? You stand still the best you can and say strong and loud for the circle of spinning to stop so you can walk away from the noise.”

The spinning image indicates how deeply Nadine’s rejection of Ellen stuns her. As much as she tried to hold herself apart, the ache of rejection upends her, in a parallel to the image of the off-the-rails roller coaster from earlier that represented her broken family. The “you” is also a moment of dissociation as Ellen is not instructing an audience but referring to herself in a purposefully distanced manner.

“That is when I told her I thought she was the crazy one. That she and Dora had told each other so many lies about the way the world worked that they believed them. You two are bumping around in this house lost and foolish over each other. You two are the same as the people who would not believe the world was round. That is exactly what you are like!”

Ellen’s fury and envy over the affectionate, doting relationship between Nadine and Dora carries her grief and resentment that she has been denied her own mother. She not only suggests that the fanciful praise they give each other is untrue, but also suggests that the whole notion of a loving family is a fantasy—like Santa Claus.

“If I think about my life like that I can see how lucky I am.”

Ellen reaffirms her feeling that her situation has improved a great deal with her new mama. That she considers herself lucky to have what she does is a mark of Ellen’s resilience.