Jessie Mitchell's Mother

In this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks entitled Jessie Mitchell's Mother we start with the opinion of Jessie Mitchell, flabbergasted perhaps by her feelings toward her mother, especially when we have been trained to believe all the sentimental stuff about mother/daughter relationships and respecting your elders. The throwaway --

“only a habit would cry if she should die” 

seems particularly unsettling.

But we are also drawn along with Jessie while we are busy disapproving of her from our lofty moral high-horse. The mother looks like a “stretched yellow rag” and yes we do despise her a little for it. Next all of the sudden Brooks chooses to switch perspectives as the line overruns and Jessie’s significantly nameless “mother / reviewed her.”

There is a flower motif. Jessie is “thin, and so straight”. Swimming in her own cruelty, the mother internally foretelling her daughter’s wilting. The agent of destruction is Brooks’s long noun phrase, “the rent of things in life that were for poor women”, almost a magic formula, a direct translation from another, less conceptual language. This “rent of things etc.” is then personified while the poor women themselves retreat into the almost inanimate third person pronoun: “coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill”. These “things” are crueller than the unloving daughter or mother.

And in Brook’s sharply observed tragedy of race and class, Jessie’s mother converts her jealousy (“almost hating her daughter) into petty triumphalism. She remembers that Jessie is black and she prides herself on the slight hierarchy of yellow, rather than black, skin.  She exults in the memory of the dead flowers of her youth, vainly “forced perfume into old petals” and forgets the lesson that she herself has learned: that Jessie’s loveliness will be broken by the sufferings that poor, black women must go through.

The last line’s irony is genius. The flowers in reality have wilted in Jessie’s mother’s--

 “exquisite yellow youth”.