How would you describe the dynamic between Sister and Stella-Rondo?Why does the rest of the family seem to side with Stella-Rondo? Why does Sister fight so much with her family?
What will be an ideal response?
- Sister’s series of hostile encounters with the other members of her family is set in motion by the jealousy reawakened in Sister by StellaRondo’s return to her China Grove home with Shirley T. following her separation from her husband, Mr. Whitaker, the taker of “‘Pose Yourself’ photos” from Illinois. (Sister believes that Stella-Rondo stole Mr. Whitaker from her.) The story’s opening paragraphs frame Sister’s narrative by emphasizing the differences between herself and Stella-Rondo. We learn that Stella-Rondo, who had “just separated from her husband and came back home again,” married Mr. Whitaker after having broken up his alleged prior relationship with Sister “through a deliberate calculated falsehood.” She now threatens Sister’s relationship with her family, with whom “she was getting along fine” in Stella-Rondo’s absence. We also immediately witness Sister’s amusingly irrational assertion that Stella-Rondo is “spoiled” because she’s “exactly twelve months to the day younger than” Sister. And we hear a crucial detail about StellaRondo that so incites Sister’s jealousy: “She always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away,” from “this gorgeous Add-a-Pearl necklace” to her husband.
Sister’s implication to her mother that Shirley T.’s silence might be a sign of mental illness is comically overturned when the girl bursts into song and proves to be an adept tap dancer as well. This incident leads Sister to claim that Stella-Rondo has turned more family members against her:
But Mama just turned on her heel and flew out, furious. She ran right upstairs and hugged the baby. She believed it was adopted. Stella-Rondo hadn’t done a thing but turn her against me from upstairs while I stood there helpless over the hot stove. So that made Mama, Papa-Daddy and the baby all on StellaRondo’s side.
If Stella-Rondo’s “calculated falsehood”—telling Mr. Whitaker that Sister “was one sided. Bigger on one side than the other”—resulted in her marriage, escape to the North, and the apparent bearing of a daughter before her return to her family, the “lies” she tells when she does return lead to Sister’s shorter flight to her isolation at the P.O. The first of these lies is to tell her mother that “Shirley-T.’s adopted, I can prove it.”
Whereas the mother is willing to believe Stella-Rondo (“She looks just like Shirley Temple to me”), Sister insists that “She looks just like a cross between Mr. Whitaker and Papa-Daddy.” Sister claims to have told Stella-Rondo that Shirley T. “was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he’d cut his beard, which of course he’d never do in the world.” Stella-Rondo, however, “turns Papa-Daddy against” Sister by reporting to him that “Sister says she fails to understand why you don’t cut off your beard.”
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