The Middleman and Other Stories 809understand that the color of the tar is like the color
of the first nameless woman in the European mar-
ket, and, as such, it is an important part of Jade’s
heritage from which she is trying to escape. The
gaze of the women from the rafters of trees seems
to suggest to Jade that, although she is successful
by European standards, she has lost track of—even,
perhaps, rejected—her African roots.
This rejection seems no more clear than in Jade’s
first meeting with Son, the descendant of Africans
who hides in the home of Jade’s benefactor, Vale-
rian Street. Understood as primitive by the wealthy
Americans on the island, and even, to an extent,
Jadine, Son is the opposite of Jade: Whereas she
chooses the city life of Paris or New York, Son values
his home in Eloe, Florida; whereas Jade thinks of
herself as an enlightened intellectual, Son embraces
the communal life of a small southern town.
Son’s connection to his past, however, suggests
a different kind of success for Jade—one that she is
able to entertain briefly by visiting Eloe with Son,
but that she ultimately rejects for brighter lights
and a bigger city. Son, in an attempt to make things
work with Jade, in an attempt to foster the meeting
of two different lives and perspectives on success,
moves briefly with Jade to New York City, where he
observes that black girls in New York City are per-
petually unhappy and their husbands and boyfriends
do not seem to notice. He thinks the men did not
wish to see the “crying girls split into two parts by
their tight jeans, screaming at the top of their high,
high heels, straining against the pull of their braids
and the fluorescent combs holding their hair.” Even
in New York, together, trying to make their relation-
ship work, Son notices what Jadine does not: that
“success” in New York causes women to cry and
men to become oblivious; it requires the black girls,
in particular, to suffer as they wear such unnatural
styles as tight jeans, high heels, and dramatic hair.
In this way, Son appears in the novel as an
unlikely doppelgänger for Jade’s benefactor, Vale-
rian. A wealthy, white, Philadelphia businessman,
Valerian is the only nonplussed resident of L’Arbe
de la Croix when Son appears before them, cramped
in the closet of Valerian’s wife. In fact, rather than
turn Son in, Valerian and Son bond over plants
struggling to thrive in Valerian’s greenhouse. An
important symbol for living things struggling to
grow outside of their natural element, the plants
represent the women both Son and Valerian love—
women driven by success in innumerable ways, but
who fall far short when it comes to personal happi-
ness. Becoming the wife of Valerian and a mother at
a young age, and taking over his impressive mansion
in the Caribbean, Margaret is driven to abuse their
only son and thus purge herself of his life in adult-
hood; becoming a successful model and European
scholar at a young age, and escaping the visions of
women who are trying to call her home, results in
an equal sense of loss for Jade—loss not only of a
particular kind of success, but also of identity, and,
crucially, of the love that might save her.
Aimee PozorskimukHErjEE, bHaraTi The
Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
Bharati Mukherjee offers new ways of examining
East-West migration patterns in this complex col-
lection of short stories. These stories unearth invis-
ible spaces, silenced voices, and unknown borders
from within the bowels of Western societies in Can-
ada, Latin America, Europe, and largely America.
The reader is introduced to a variety of immi-
grant characters who have arrived at the homeland
at different times. The eponymous middleman is
the classic migrant persona of the wandering Jew
exiled in a contemporary setting: Latin American
guerrilla territory. In this story, Mukherjee’s middle-
man embodies basic principles that guide all of her
other migrant characters. Life in a new homeland is
based on two things: provisional loyalty and/or the
ability to remain consistently useful. Mukherjee’s
other migrants follow either one or both of these
doctrines, which have interesting results, such as
fluid identification and cultural patterns as well as
the creation of new social and economic networks to
facilitate both natives and other migrants.
However, Mukherjee also introduces another
significant perspective in this collection: the citi-
zens who have to deal with this influx of migrants
through their borders. In this group Mukherjee
represents a wide cross section of American society,
hinting at its own variety and its older waves of