onstrate the difficulties of personal and social
restoration when those who incur “debts” do not
acknowledge them.
Hosanna and Gilda open a business and learn
the ways that racism functions in commercial es-
tablishments. Although Hosanna is the engine be-
hind the business and makes all the sales, Gilda’s
white skin gives her access to the ladder of eco-
nomic advancement. Their business venture pros-
pers as long as suppliers and bankers do not “see”
Hosanna. The business venture folds, however,
when Gilda’s uncle discovers it and discovers that
Hosanna is black.
For the rest of Hosanna’s life, she sells cosmetics
out of her car, never able to achieve her dream of
owning a prosperous cosmetic business that builds
black women’s self-esteem. As a result of Gilda’s
betrayal, Hosanna harbors a tenacious bitterness,
which she instills in her daughter, Matriece. Ho-
sanna’s stressful life causes her untimely death, but
she returns repeatedly in ghostly visits, insisting
that her daughter claim the business that Hosanna
was denied.
Determined to reclaim what was stolen from
her mother, Matriece’s entire life is also consumed
with work to the exclusion of all else, including
the loving husband and family that her older sis-
ter, Vonette, enjoys. Matriece’s compulsion, hatred
for her father, and uneasiness with intimacy un-
derscore the intergenerational personal damage
caused by Gilda’s betrayal. Gilda’s betrayal also
overshadows her own life. Although she now owns
a multimillion-dollar enterprise, Gilda Cosmet-
ics, her relationships with her own children are
strained and she has been married four times.
Hosanna’s peace, Matriece’s release from bitter-
ness, and Gilda’s release from guilt and evasion be-
come possible when Matriece reveals to Gilda who
her mother is and when Gilda acknowledges Ho-
sanna’s contribution to her success. From her place
beyond the grave, Hosanna rejoices. But the Clark
family still must contend with the knowledge that
they were defrauded of 200 acres in Inez, Texas. Be-
hind the Clarks’ claim and behind every act of be-
trayal in the novel, there is another unspoken and
unsettled but highly visible betrayal—the claim
still owed to African Americans for generations
of dispossession as slaves and decades of unequal
treatment as second-class citizens in America.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Jane. “An Interview with Bebe Moore
Campbell.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Ameri-
can Arts and Letters 22 (Fall 1999): 954–972.
Russell-Robinson, Joyce. “Bebe Moore Campbell.”
In Contemporary African American Novelists: A
Bio-Bibliographic Critical Sourcebook. Edited by
Emmanuel S. Nelson, 76–81. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1999.
Veta S. TuckerWheatley, Phillis (1753?–1784)
Phillis Wheatley, slave, poet, teenage celebrity,
pioneer, and one of the founders of the African-
American literary tradition, was a unique, talented,
assertive, controversial, and respected writer who,
from her early teens, earned and won her way into
the literary world of 18th-century Boston and, to a
degree, London. Wheatley’s accomplishments are
even more astonishing considering that, in 1761,
at age seven, she was bought “for a trifle” (Gates,
17) at a Boston slave auction. At the time a “frail
female child” (16), Wheatley had been kidnapped
from Senegal, West Africa. The slave child was
named Phillis, after the ship that deposited her in
New England, by Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a
prosperous tailor and merchant, who bought her
to serve as a domestic in their fashionable man-
sion on Kings Street, in the very shadows of the
site of the Boston Massacre, where black Crispus
Attucks would be the first to die during the initial
battle between the colonialists and British soldiers
for American independence.
Fascinated by her new playmate, Mary, the
Wheatley’s daughter, began to educate Phillis. The
inquisitive, precocious, and intellectually alert
Phillis learned to read and write English within 16
months of her arrival. She was tutored as well in
the Bible and Latin and introduced to the classics
and to British literature, particularly the poetryWheatley, Phillis 543