P.S. Be Eleven

While out on a Sunday outing with their father and Marva, the Gaither sisters see a billboard announcing that the Jackson Five will come to town in December. Pa refuses the girls’ pleas to buy tickets until Marva intervenes, persuading him to let the girls go with her. Pa agrees, but he insists that the girls will need to earn half the cost of the tickets by doing chores. Marva puts Vonetta in charge of saving and keeping the money.

Delphine, who is accustomed to being in charge and bearing the punishment when her sisters misbehave, argues with Marva that Vonetta is too irresponsible for the task. Marva tells Delphine that her sisters are irresponsible because Delphine never gives them the chance to be responsible. After a day of seeing herself displaced in her father’s affections by Marva, Delphine is upset because she is sure that Marva sees her as one of the oppressors that the Black Panthers talked about in Oakland. The encounter seals Delphine’s dislike of Marva.

When the Gaithers arrive home, Big Ma is crying and holding a letter from the United States Army. Everyone believes that the letter contains the news that Darnell has been killed while fighting in the Vietnam War. However, they learn that Darnell is ill and will be in a hospital in Honolulu for two weeks before returning home. Everyone is relieved. Delphine has complicated feelings about the war. During a discussion of the war at school, she told her classmates that she was a hawk (pro-war), but because she wishes that the war would end, she suspects that she might be a dove (anti-war). The graphic images of Vietnamese people who are hungry, wounded, or dead disturb her whenever she sees them on the news. Her family lets her watch the nightly news about the war despite the anchor’s warning that children should leave the room.

Vonetta and Fern rebel by telling Delphine that she should be responsible for all the chores, but Delphine tells them that they will get no allowance if she tells Pa about their refusal to help. Delphine feels satisfied that she has managed to assert authority over her sisters again. However, her sense of being in charge slips away when she discovers that Vonetta has set up a savings jar—the “mummy jar”—and a savings ledger all by herself. Delphine realizes that Marva may have been right about Delphine standing in the way of her sisters’ efforts to assume more responsibility.

The first day of school arrives, and Delphine is as excited as her friends Freida Banks and Lucy are. Lucy is friendly that day, and Delphine manages to snag a seat with her friends. The day does not go completely to plan. Instead of Ms. Honeywell, the stern Mr. Mwile is the sixth-grade teacher. Mr. Mwile forces Ellis Carter to sit beside Delphine. (She once punched Ellis when he teased her about her height.) Still, Delphine is glad to be free of her sisters for most of the day.

Mr. Mwile explains that he and Ms. Honeywell are on a teacher exchange program between the United States and Zambia, an African country that was formerly a British colony. The country became Zambia after a revolution that ended colonial rule. Mr. Mali describes Zambian culture, business, and history, and the students receive an unpleasant surprise when he tells them that they must write about one of the subtopics that he discussed. He splits the class into teams of boys and girls in a contest to brainstorm the most topics. Delphine believes that splitting up the boys and girls is an example of dividing and conquering, a strategy she learned about during the Black Panther-run camp that she attended in Oakland over the summer.

Eager to impress Mr. Mwile, Delphine approaches him after class and tells him about Cecile’s poetic African name, Nzila. She is shocked when he tells her that the name is a Southern African one that means a person who was born on the road rather than one who blows away dust to reveal the truth—her mother’s explanation of the name’s meaning. Delphine is embarrassed. She writes Cecile a letter in which she accuses her mother of lying about the meaning of her African name. She is glad that Cecile gave Delphine and her sisters more mainstream names in addition to their African names. (She refers to the African name using a disrespectful term.)

Cecile responds to Delphine. The letter is a poem in which Cecile defends her right to reinterpret “Nzila” to reflect her attempts to define herself as a Black woman and a poet. She advises Delphine that she is “not grown. Be who you are. Eleven” (108).

Darnell’s service in the war is now over. The military transfers him from Honolulu to New York, and the family picks him up at the nearby military base. Darnell was a young football player just out of high school when he left just over a year ago to fight in the Vietnam War. When they finally see him among his fellow soldiers, Delphine is relieved to see that he does not bear the physical injuries that the other soldiers have. Everyone is emotional, Big Ma most of all. Delphine tastes tears on her uncle’s cheeks when she kisses him. She is glad that Big Ma forced Pa to leave Marva out of the homecoming. Although her family is falling apart, today she relishes the fact that her family—both the Gaithers and her mother—are connected to one another despite their differences and the distance between them. Cecile often encouraged Delphine to be more selfish, and Delphine feels just that as she bonds with her family. Delphine misses the family unity that once existed at home.

Darnell is no longer his old carefree, playful self. His body and face are different, although there are flashes of the old him. His big duffel bag contains boring army gear, but he has also brought silk robes for the sisters. That night, he dreams that he is back in Vietnam fighting. The noise and yelling wake the girls, leading Fern to say, “Vietnam’s shooting him” (118).

Mr. Mwile returns the essays on Zambia. He has heavily marked them and tells the students that these are drafts and that their papers provide a wonderful opportunity to improve their writing. No one is happy about his perspective, and Delphine is disgruntled by the fact that she is the only student he asks to stay after class. In her paper, Delphine references “Miss” Merriam-Webster, whom she wrongly believes to be the author of the standard school dictionary that bears that name, reasoning that “Merriam” sounds like a woman’s name. She is mortified when Mr. Mwile scolds her for believing this, and she feels as if she has hit a “glass wall” (125). Mr. Mwile asks her to go to the library and write a sourced essay on the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. She discovers that three men are the editors of the dictionary.