DALTON
435
Concerns with sex, race, and the female body reappear in one of the
most disturbing episodes in the novel, the scene in which Antoinette is
harassed on her way to school by two bullies, a boy and a girl:
The boy was about fourteen and tall and big for his age, he had a
white skin, a dull ugly white covered with freckles, his mouth was
a negro's mouth and he had small eyes, like bits of green glass. He
had the eyes of a dead fish. Worst, most horrible of all, his hair was
crinkled, a negro's hair, but bright red, and his eyebrows and eye–
lashes were red . The girl was very black and wore no head hand–
kerchief. Her hair had been plaited and I could smell the sickening
oil she had daubed on it.
Up to this point, blacks have been presented as variously appealing or
frightening, but never as physically repellent. This unknown pair, how–
ever, provoke a kind of uncanny horror and revulsion. And yet they are
perhaps not entirely unknown.
In the menacing black girl, there are echoes of Tia. After the fire, Tia
disappears from the narrative, suggesting that the identification with her
is repressed. In this encounter, that repressed identification seems to come
back in the form of a persecutor. Like Tia, the girl can be seen as a dou–
ble of Antoinette, here transformed, after the crisis of adolescence, into a
sort of negative anti-self-the feared and despised aspects of the female
body projected outwards in the person of a bad-smelling black girl.
The final confrontation with Tia was above all visual: "I saw Tia . ...
I looked at her and saw her face . . .we stared at each other.. .
.I
saw
myself. Like in a looking-glass." In contrast, the bad-smelling girl says to
Antoinette, "Why you won't look at me.. ..You don't want to look at
me, eh, I make you look at me." This girl too is a reflection of Antoinette,
but one she is afraid to look at. What drew her to Tia has become ugly
and frightening in the dark mirror of the unconscious.
Even more terrifying than the girl is her companion, not only because
he is sexually threatening-"You wait," he says, "one day I catch you
alone"-but because of the way he looks. What seems so dreadful is an
apparent anomaly: the boy is literally white, even freckled and red-haired;
yet at the same time he is somehow
not
white. The boy is probably an
albino, or perhaps a person of mixed race, descended like many West Indi–
ans from the encounters of Scottish and English slaveholders such as
Antoinette's father with black or mulatto women. In either case, the dis–
proportionate horror he inspires in Antoinette may come from his being
in a sense the very thing she herself has been called, a "white nigger," and
