Home for Maud Martha - by Gwendolyn Brooks

 

 Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an Afro-American poet, author and a teacher. Her works are mostly lyrical as they often dealt with personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Annie Allen, making her the first African American person to receive the prize.

The setting of the short story is not specifically mentioned. However, by using the textual clues we can conclude that the story takes place in the South of the USA probably in the early to mid-20^th century. “Home for Maud Martha” is a classic short story as it contains all the main features of a good short story: it is short, and covers one specific event. It focuses on one location and deals with a limited number of characters. Most importantly, it deals with one main theme.

The eponymous main character of the short story is Maud Martha. The other characters are their parents and Martha’s sister Helen. Taken in isolation, the story does not provide any information on the race of the family. The conflict of the story arises from the fact that the family which would have had better times is experiencing a prolonged period of financial difficulties. Due to their financial difficulties their home is mortgaged to a notorious company called Home Owners' Loan. The father of the family (Papa) has already obtained an extension for the repayment of loan from the company. Their financial situation seems to have worsened. Consequently, that day Papa has gone to the Home Owners' Loan during his lunch hour to negotiate for another extension. The story opens in the afternoon of the same day with Mama, Martha and Helen sitting in their rocking chairs on the porch, one of their favourite places in the house it seems, rocking away the afternoon in a seemingly relaxed posture. However, all three women are worried and they are trying not to show their worry in order not to worry one another. The first few lines hint at a change that is not to their liking which they seemed to have no control over. But the reader at this point does not know what it is. By keeping the reason for the mental conflict hidden, Brooks generates suspense. Later, the reader gets to know that the women are worried about losing their home. Because of their recent stretch of hardships as well as of their fear of the pain of shattered hopes, the three women on the porch are reluctant to anticipate a positive answer from the mortgage company. Mama and Helen mentally prepare themselves to leave their beloved house where they have lived for more than 14 years; the omniscient third person narrator who has access to all the characters state:

What had been wanted was this always, this always to last, the talking softly on this porch […]These things might soon be theirs no longer. Those shafts of pools of light, the tree, the graceful iron, might soon be viewed possessively by different eyes.

The writer uses beautiful auditory and visual images to create a cosy yet tense atmosphere on the porch where the three women waited anxiously for Papa’s arrival: “Mama, Maud Martha, and Helen rocked slowly in their rocking chairs, and looked at the late afternoon light on the lawn and the emphatic iron of the fence and the poplar tree.” Mama reminds herself of the difficulties related to cooking:  “I’ve been getting tireder and tireder of doing that firing.” She adds that they will be “moving into a flat somewhere ….on South Park, or Michigan, or on Washington Park Court,” all upscale addresses. The narrator adds that all three women knew that these addresses were way beyond their means: “Those flats, as the girls and Mama knew well, were burdens on wages twice the size of Papa’s.” However, no one mentions that. Mama's conscious self-delusion protects her from breaking down at the thought of completely accepting the inevitable degradation of being homeless. The daughters are being kind and even courteous to their mother by not pointing the fact out. Theirs is an old fashioned house where children knew their place as indicated by the fact that they waited to learn the news from their mother on the porch without going in when Papa came home at last. 

Though they anticipated the request to be turned down, there is a faint hope in all three women born out of their love for their home. That is why they are waiting for Papa to come home with baited breath and when they see Papa, they closely observe the way he walked for an early sign of what the answer might be. When he does not give away any outward sign and continues in his usual way, the narrator says that all three women wanted to “hurl themselves over the fence, into the street, and shake the truth out of his collar” indicating the emotional strain they were under. The writer maintains this tension almost till very the end. Papa, a taciturn man by nature, enters the house followed by Mama. The girls have to remain outside on the porch and wait for Mama to give them the news, good or bad. Here, the writer uses one of the most beautiful metaphors in modern literature in describing Mama’s happiness in learning she was not about to lose her home: “Her eyes were lamps turned on.” This marks the climax of the story.

At this point, Helen, who has earlier complained that her social life was suffering because of the location of their house, says that she would like to throw a party so that some of her “friends to just casually see” that they are “home owners.”         

The theme of the story is the deep affection one feels for one’s home and the difficulties one faces when threatened with being uprooted from that most dear place. Out of the three female characters, Maud Martha is more expressive and straight forward in her love for her home:

But she felt that the little line of white, sometimes ridged with smoked purple, and all the cream-shot saffron would never drift across any western sky except in that back of this house. The rain would drum with as sweet a dullness nowhere but here. The birds on South Park were mechanical birds, no better than the poor caught canaries in those “rich” women’s sun parlors.

When her sister and mother were trying to comfort themselves by reminding themselves of the disadvantages of their beloved home, Martha remains silent “trying to keep the front of her eyes dry”. Twice, she makes comments in defence of her beloved home that threaten the hard-won composure of the other two women. First, she reminds them of the little fires they had when “the weather was just right for that” – immediately she realizes from the way they looked at her that her comment was a mistake. This enables her to understand that what her mother and sister were saying was not what they were really feeling. Next, she says that her father loved the house and lived for the house only to be told by her sister that it was them he loved, not the house. Martha’s strongest objection to the possibility of losing her house is expressed when she criticises Mama by saying, “Yes, … that’s what you always say ….that God knows best.” Mama ignores that comment possibly because she understood the reason behind the words.

 In addition to the striking images she uses, Brooks employs adjectives in a unique way. The door to the house is “friendly” and the iron of the fence was “emphatic” – the fence emphasized their ownership and kept the rest of the world from encroaching on their little Eden.