DALTON
433
body are inextricably connected. The story of the relationship with Tia
is also a symbolic account of Antoinette's traumatic passage through
puberty and her assumption of a soiled and damaged female sexuality.
Tia is a kind of double, at once the black part of Antoinette's divided
identity and a fantasied other self through whom she might pass over
into the feared and envied black majority. But the friendship ends in a
quarrel at a forest pool, with overtones of sexual and racial humiliation
and a foretaste of death . With Antoinette's few pennies as the stake, Tia
bets her that she can't do an underwater somersault, then refuses to
acknowledge that she's done it. "Tia laughed and told me that it cer–
tainly look like I drown dead that time. Then she picked up the money."
Antoinette calls Tia "cheating nigger," and Tia insults her back, saying
"Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger
better than white nigger." She makes off with Antoinette's clean dress,
leaving her own soiled one behind.
The challenge of the underwater somersault may be seen as a promise
of metamorphosis: immersion in water, as in baptism, signifies the death
of the old self and the birth of the new.
If
Antoinette could do the som–
ersault to Tia's satisfaction, perhaps she would emerge from the pool
cleansed of her alienating whiteness, reborn black like her friend. But of
course this does not happen. To get rid of her white self, Antoinette
would literally have to "drown dead ." Tia laughs at her for even trying.
Paradoxically, she jeers at Antoinette for being her friend and thereby
compromising further her precarious status as a white person. "Real
white people, they got gold money," says Tia, "nobody see them come
near us."
Back at Coulibri wearing Tia's soiled dress, Antoinette is laughed at
again, this time by white people, her mother's elegant English visitors.
Her mother, French via Martinique but "no white nigger either," refuses
even to look at her. "She is ashamed of me," thinks Antoinette, "what
Tia said is true."
The incident with the dress has sexual as well as racial implications.
To be robbed of one's clothes, laughed at, and made to feel dirty, would
be a severe social and sexual humiliation at any age, but perhaps espe–
cially for a pubescent girl. Moreover, a dress is an image of the female
body, a kind of second skin that both conceals and reveals, manifesting
sexual status and desirability; indeed the dress-this one and others-is
a recurrent trope in the novel.
In
putting on the dirty dress of a black girl,
Antoinette is putting on her status. What seemed acceptable and even
attractive in Tia means degradation and ridicule for Antoinette. Her
mother has the dress burned, as if it carried the contagion of blackness.
