She wants to live for once. But doesn’t know quite what that means.
As she is getting married, Roselily gets cold feet and reminisces upon her life. She thinks about the four children she already has, more than one of which may have been out-of-wedlock. The fathers do not support her or her children. Her last marriage broke because her husband didn’t want to take care of all of her children. She had to work at a sewing factory to make ends meet while looking after her kids. The whole thing has left her weary so she accepts when a man, who is not even from her religion, proposes to her. But, thinking of his strict demeanor and orthodox ideas about financial independence of a woman, she realizes she doesn’t love him and is marrying simply for the convenience of it. She realizes that she really wants to live like she had none of the liabilities and responsibilities. She wants to live a life like that, but having never lived a life like that she doesn’t even know what to even imagine that that life would entail.
How else could I repay him? All I owned in any supply were my jars of cold cream!
When Mordecai Rich asks to see her work, she doesn’t expect him to appreciate it. Having never heard a good word from her husband, she feels inferior about her writing. But, when she shows it to Mordecai, she decides to sleep with him if he says he likes it. She realizes that this is the only way she can repay him for appreciating her, as she doesn’t have anything of value to give in return. She is financially dependent on her husband who gets her as many beauty products as she would want to have, but none of the financial freedom she wants.
She’s probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.
When Dee visits her mother and sister, her mother realizes that Dee has undergone a transformation which has led Dee to see everything from the perspective of her African ‘heritage’. She has changed her name to an African name her mother can’t pronounce. She eventually asks for all the old things her mother asks to keep in the name of heritage. But, when she asks for two quilts made by her grandmother, her mother refuses saying that those had been promised to Maggie. Dee says that Maggie, who is uneducated and wouldn’t know her heritage to put them to everyday use, not realizing the poverty her mother had been living in already. Her mother is disappointed at Dee’s attitude that wants everything that flaunts heritage but nothing that tells of their true condition.
How black was she?
When the narrator goes to Sarah Maire to confront her if she refused to give Hannah Kemhuff rations on stamps, Hannah Kemhuff asks her back as she used to associate color to people to remember them. This is probably the most problematic racist comments she makes. Sarah Marie is remembered as a beautiful philanthropist, who was considered a pillar to community and church, and despite her own admissions of not being a racist, this statement proves that Hannah associated color to people.
When her father died, he proudly left his money to “the schoolteacher” to share or not with his wife, as he had the “learnin’ enough to see it”
The lines tell one of the deeply patriarchal and misogynist mindset of the father of the unnamed narrator in ‘Her Young Jerome’. While she was financially independent and didn’t ask him for any money, her still left it to his son-in-law. Jerome, the schoolteacher, had married her for money and was abusive to her simply because she was uneducated and fat. But, for her father, this ‘learnin’’ was good enough to leave his son-in-law money that his daughter truly and fairly deserved.
