and kiss me on my lips and then on my neck”
[25]) begins ushering her from the self-created
safety of childhood (she hid her favorite books
and the marbles she was not allowed to play with
under her house) into adolescence and young
womanhood—into “young lady business” (27).
When Annie seeks to have a dress made from the
same material as her mother’s, as she had always
done, her mother tells her; “It is time you had
your own clothes. You just cannot go around
the rest of your life looking like a little me”
(26). When her mother sees Annie talking to a
group of boys after school one day, she calls her a
slut, to which Annie responds, “like mother like
daughter” (102).
At the end of the novel, Annie’s parents pro-
vide or perform the appropriate rituals—bath-
ing, dressing, braiding her hair, eating, and so
forth—necessary to complete her rites of passage
into young womanhood. As she walks through
her village to the ship that will take her away,
Annie passes the significant sites where, as a nov-
ice, she had been guided and shaped by the ap-
propriate ritual priests/priestess: Miss Dulcie’s
(the seamstress), the schoolhouse, church (where
she had been christened), the store, the pharmacy
(where she had gone on errands for her mother),
the doctor’s office, the bank (where she had saved
her weekly allowance). She recalls, “As I passed
all these places, it was as if I were in a dream....
I didn’t feel my feet touch ground, I didn’t even
feel my own body” (143). Upon parting, Annie’s
mother proudly tells her, “Of course, you are a
young lady now, and we won’t be surprised if in
due time you write to say that one day soon you
are to be married” (136). Annie curtly responds,
“How absurd!” (136).
Reviewing Annie John for the New York Times
Book Review, Susan Kenney wrote, “I can’t remem-
ber reading a book that illustrates [the results of
growing up] more poignantly than Annie John....
[Annie John’s] story is so touching and familiar it
could be happening in Anchorage, so inevitable
it could be happening to any of us, anywhere,
any time, any place. And that’s exactly the book’s
strength, its wisdom and its truth” (Kenney, 7).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenney, Susan. Review of Annie John. New York Times
Book Review, 17 April 1985, p. 6ff.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1985.
Wilfred D. SamuelsAnother Country James Baldwin (1962)
Divided into three sections, Baldwin’s third novel,
Another Country, begins by introducing Rufus
Scott, a black jazz musician who mysteriously
commits suicide by the end of the first section,
although he remains the focus of the narrative
throughout the remaining two sections. In the
end, Another Country is a novel about sexual
and racial identities. Rufus Scott, who is uncer-
tain about his sexual orientation and frustrated
by being a southern, black American male, is
involved with Leona, a white southerner who
is seeking to escape her failure as both wife and
mother. Their physically and mentally debilitat-
ing and dysfunctional relationship, the conse-
quence of poor self esteem, leads Scott to jump to
his death from a bridge and to Leona’s breakdown
and institutionalization.
Baldwin develops Another Country, criticized
for what was seen as its flawed form, around the life
experiences of its richly eclectic characters, who,
like Rufus, are also engaged in a process of self-
discovery and, in Baldwinesque form, a process
of finding meaningful love. Vivaldo, Rufus’s best
friend, is a struggling writer and former student
and a friend of novelist Richard Salenski. Richard’s
socially conscious wife and the mother of their two
boys, Cass, disillusioned by her husband’s nominal
success in writing a “popular” novel, has an affair
with Eric, an actor from Alabama and Rufus’s erst-
while lover. Eric, meanwhile, is awaiting the arrival
of his current young homosexual lover, Yves, from
France, where the two met while Eric was living
abroad. Completing the group, Ida, Rufus’s sister
and Vivaldo’s lover, has a short-lived affair with
Ellis, the white promoter who promises to help get
her singing career off the ground.16 Another Country