Roselily

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973

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Themes

Compromises Black Women Must Make to Survive

Roselily is a complex character with a rich inner life, and she is keenly aware of her position in society as a single Black mother of four children. The first full line of the story after the preacher’s opening, “Dearly beloved,” is “She dreams; dragging herself across the world” (3). By pairing dreaming with dragging, Walker sets up the dichotomy of Roselily’s life, both overall and in the moment of her wedding: her mind is racing into the past and the future as she walks down the aisle on her family’s land, and she has lived a life of struggle while retaining a sense of herself as someone with hopes and dreams.

This juxtaposition of material struggle and mental energy position Roselily’s marriage to the groom as bittersweet. The tradeoff is clear: she will no longer have to work as a seamstress and support her three children alone, and she will escape the sadder parts of her life in the South: the nonexistent relationships with the fathers of her children, her friends, and their husbands, even perhaps the omnipresence of the White people on the highway. This escape also means loss, however. Roselily is putting herself into a compromised position with someone she is not sure she loves, and the uncertainty of her position will be amplified by leaving home and stepping into a new religion within a household that requires subservience. She is well aware of the cost of her decision, and wonders what will become of her identity without her family and heritage.

The groom’s love for her makes it clear that she has never been loved in a way that matters, highlighting that her earlier choices have never left her truly fulfilled. By choosing to marry the groom, Roselily is taking the best possible option that she can see, but it still comes at a cost, and she is not sure what that cost will mean. Roselily’s analysis of how social and religious institutions limit her options due to her race and gender suggests that the dilemmas of how to live as one’s true self and how to exercise choice are not just her dilemmas, but are challenging puzzles faced by many Black American women.

Tension Between Kinds of Black Identity

Black identity in America is complex and fraught, in part because it has always been forced to exist in relationship with systems of oppression. American history is fundamentally a history of the exploitation of Black people: centuries of enslavement followed by another century of Jim Crow policies that aimed to prevent Black Americans from living secure and dignified lives. The Civil Rights era accomplished many changes, but did not erase the deeply ingrained racism that Black people experience daily. In the 20th century, there was a great deal of debate about how Black people should live, especially in relationship to their history and with White people. “Roselily” marks the tension between two prominent Black cultures of the era: Black Christian Southerners, who in some ways embodied White traditions that had been thrust upon them under slavery, and Black Muslims, who primarily lived in Northern urban communities during the time period of this short story, and whose ideology was based in part on a rejection of the legacy of slavery.

The religious tension between Roselily, her family, and the groom takes on deeper meaning in this context. On one hand, the groom thinks of Roselily as a person with a condition that he intends to save her from. That condition, broadly, is living in the rural South. He cannot see the merit in a Christian wedding because for him it is too closely tied to the influence of the White people who drive by on the highway at the edge of the property. Christianity is their religion, and they are passing through the poor and segregated landscape of Panther Burn only in order to get to more prosperous places. On the other hand, the older Black people at the wedding see the groom as someone who has abandoned his heritage by embracing Islam.

At the center of this tension is Roselily, who is choosing to move away from the South and her family’s faith. She is aware that her life in Panther Burn is a struggle, and she has no love for Christianity as an institution, but she is concerned about retaining her roots and a connection to the family that she is leaving behind (including her dead mother, who is buried there). Roselily is asked to embrace another way of life and another faith, but does not see moving to Chicago as straightforwardly as the groom does—as a rescue from a place of racism and poverty into a more correct Black identity. Her inner conflict illustrates the way that race affects every aspect of Black life in a way that it doesn’t for White Americans.

Inner and Outer Life

“Roselily,” in its length and its structure, could be called a work of flash fiction, a genre that often focuses on one moment in time as a way to depict a character at a point of change or transition. A moment that has a before and an after, like a wedding, is a natural time for characters to reflect on who they are. Another tradition at work in “Roselily” is the idea of human complexity and self-awareness that 19th-century poet Walt Whitman summed up in the line “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Roselily is viewed from the outside by the groom and by the wedding guests. Walker’s stream-of-consciousness narration draws attention to Roselily’s awareness of how they perceive her while refuting the relatively narrow role that the wedding participants would slot her into. Roselily is a complicated, thoughtful woman despite her lack of education and her poverty, and she asks herself difficult questions about what meaning she will find in her new life. Her thought process shows the reader that her inner self is more than what people who look at her outer self might expect to find.

The interplay between the ceremony and Roselily’s narration grounds the story in place and time while creating the effect of a racing, doubtful mind. This effect is heightened each time the ceremonial phrases of the wedding intrude on Roselily’s thoughts. She takes up each phrase the preacher utters and grapples with its meaning in her life. Some phrases remind her of her past, some she answers with her own rueful thoughts, and some she completes with what is to come.

On the surface, it seems as though Roselily is a character with little agency: she lacks resources, and her actions are rooted in cultural and ceremonial expectations. The story does not linger on any moments where Roselily is expected to act; there is no moment where she recites vows or otherwise takes ownership of the ceremony. However, it is clear from Roselily’s inner monologue that she has made the choice to marry the groom with a full sense of self and agency, and that her lack of agency comes not from within, but from a society that has limited her ability to be self-actualized. The surface is not her full story.

Ultimately, this portrait of Roselily’s internal life asks the reader to empathize with her. Empathy is the process of entering into the mindset of another person, whereas sympathy doesn’t require the labor of understanding another person’s complexity and motivation and is usually rooted in pity, a way of looking at a Black woman’s choices which “Roselily” rejects. Instead, the story asserts that Roselily is much more than a bride, a Black woman, or a poor mother, and that no one of those roles is enough to contain her.