The Little Friend

Allison is Harriet’s 16-year-old sister. Allison is mostly quiet, subdued, and insular, keeping to herself and sleeping a lot while remaining friendly with her family and a few acquaintances. Although she struggles to earn satisfactory grades, adults usually prefer Allison to Harriet because she causes fewer arguments. Allison is sensitive and emotional, but she lacks the energy or commitment to come up with schemes like Harriet’s. In her own way, Allison develops the theme of Maturation as Loss, but she seems resigned to this almost from the novel’s beginning, claiming that she’ll never get over her cat’s death. Allison exists almost in a state between the living and the dead. Longing for those she’s lost such as Robin and the cat, she spends so much time sleeping and dreaming that she struggles to differentiate between reality and dreams. Consequently, she seems not to care as much about reality because she’s not convinced it’s real. She cries but never enacts any plans to change things. At first, this is infuriating to Harriet because Allison is no help when Harriet wants to discover Robin’s killer.

As a young woman, Allison is experiencing the same gendered loss that comes with maturation that Harriet is just beginning to experience. Allison’s strategy seems to be to do whatever is easiest at the time. She ignores her family’s advice to study harder and try to become popular because this would take a lot of effort. However, when Pem shows up at her house and asks her to go riding, it’s easier to agree than to argue. Possible sexual assault is implied but not confirmed, which is just one type of loss that can occur with maturity. The other type of loss has already happened to Allison: People put her in a box based on her gender, and unlike Harriet, Allison finds it easier to stay in the box and wait until it’s time to sleep. This strategy is what Charlotte has modeled for them.

Robin was Harriet’s older brother who died when he was nine and Harriet was a baby. If still alive, he would have been in his early twenties during the novel’s main narrative, around the same age as Danny Ratliff and Hely’s older brother, Pemberton, with whom Robin used to play. Robin’s character and Harriet’s relationship with him help develop the themes of Maturation as Loss, The Dangers of Revisionist History, and The Pain of Truth and Mystery.

Although she was just a baby when he died, Harriet claims to remember Robin and develops a singular obsession with him. Harriet’s mother and sister are physically present in the house but emotionally vacant, and Ida’s not always there. Harriet craves meaningful companionship and clings to the idea of Robin, who has become magical and immortalized to her thanks to the stories her family tells about him and the stained-glass window the church has created of Robin and placed next to one of Jesus. More than anything, Harriet wants Robin, whom she associates with lost happiness and prosperity, back. Knowing this is “impossible,” she develops an interest in “the impossible” such as Harry Houdini’s magic tricks and Jesus’s resurrection. In general, she wants to solve mysteries to get closer to Robin. Giving up on the idea of raising Robin from the dead, Harriet settles for the more possible-seeming goals of discovering Robin’s killer and avenging her brother’s death by ending the killer’s life.

Adults constantly tell Harriet that some things are mysteries, and some things can’t be helped or changed even though they’re unfortunate. Harriet interprets this attitude as a weakness of spirit and fights hard against it. She follows a false trail, injures an innocent person, and is nearly murdered. The family’s revisionist impulses are applied to Robin in a way that erases anything painful and emphasizes details that celebrate his character without highlighting his death. This muddied history confuses Harriet and leaves her vulnerable to false trails and drastic actions. The painful truth is that Harriet can neither resurrect Robin nor solve his murder. What Harriet longs for (symbolized through Robin, Tribulation, Ida, Libby, and more) is not just “the past”—she wants to not have to experience loss. She equates this to wanting to travel back into the past because she imagines a very young child would not have experienced loss yet. For example, Robin seems immortalized in a childlike, privileged, blissful state. However, even if time machines were real and she could become a baby once more, she still wouldn’t be impervious to loss because she experienced loss before she could even realize what was going on. Robin alone seems to escape this problem of maturation as loss. Harriet discovers that she can’t even evade loss in her imagination. The only way to evade loss is to, ironically, lose herself while holding her breath underwater and enter a trance between life and death.

Charlotte is Harriet, Allison, and Robin’s mother. Having lost a young child unexpectedly and never processing this or obtaining closure, Charlotte remains incapacitated by grief, unable to function properly, care for her children, or bond with them during the fleeting moments when she has the strength to exit her bedroom. Charlotte, ironically, helps illustrate The Dangers of Revisionist History. Robin’s death was more painful than other deaths the family has experienced, and nobody knows how to create a palatable or even logical story about his death, so they just avoid the topic. They think this is helpful to Charlotte because she’s so devastated. The family seems to think they have not applied their revisionist impulses to Robin, but erasing his death to highlight his life is just a different type of revision, one that allows the past and its mysteries to fester.

The family’s erasure of Robin’s death and their celebration of his (partially imagined) life are confusing for Charlotte and help develop The Pain of Truth and Mystery. Clearly, the family understands the potential for the truth to cause pain, which is why they avoid the topic of Robin’s death and collectively revise other memories and history. Harder to grasp is the potential for mystery to cause pain. The silence surrounding Robin’s death leaves Charlotte isolated, lonely, and stuck in a past moment that’s so mysterious that she can’t move past it. With her husband gone and the rest of her family avoiding the topic, Charlotte concludes that the death was her fault. This again illustrates The Dangers of Revisionist History—Charlotte can’t avoid the topic in her own mind, so she’s created a false narrative that’s probably worse than whatever the real narrative is since it is more painful to believe she’s responsible for Robin’s death than to believe that someone else was responsible, even if their reasons were incomprehensible or unfair. Learning the murderer’s identity would indeed provide only limited comfort, but at least discussing the death with her family could provide Charlotte an opportunity to stop blaming herself.

Ida Rhew is a Black woman who has been doing domestic work at Charlotte’s house since before Harriet was born. Ida works during the day on weekdays and returns to her own house and husband in the evenings and, typically, on weekends. She has a daughter of her own who is now grown up. Harriet and Allison love Ida and are strongly attached to her. Ida seems to interact with them more than their father, who lives in Tennessee, or their mother, who sleeps a lot and is sick with grief. Part of Ida’s duties, in addition to cooking and cleaning, is childcare, so she often tells them stories or entertains them when Charlotte is doing something else. Ida is friendly and kind toward the girls, yet firm and principled, trying to raise them properly and teach them certain rules. Ida also has a strong disgust toward the Ratliff family and other working-class white families, which Harriet enthusiastically adopts when she’s searching for Robin’s murderer and decides it’s probably Danny Ratliff.

Other adults fail to recognize the importance of Ida’s relationship with Harriet and Allison, and they also fail to understand the depth of Libby and Odean’s relationship. Seeing Ida as “just” a Black housekeeper, Edie, the aunts, Charlotte, and other white people try to downplay her importance, holding the racist belief that the children couldn’t possibly bond to her the way they would bond to their white parents, who have been mostly absent. Ida essentially raises the children and is abruptly fired when Harriet complains there’s nothing to eat one night, and Charlotte decides the girls no longer need childcare. The adults do not see this as tantamount to wrenching away an actual parent, but Harriet and Allison do.

Harriet’s relationship with Ida helps develop the theme of Maturation as Loss—in part because she is now older and entering puberty, Harriet “loses” Ida, who was a parental figure to her. Harriet realizes from her own experience that maturation and loss are both gendered, but although she is close with Ida, she still doesn’t understand Ida’s experience or realize that maturation and loss are both racialized as well. As a Black woman who does domestic work in a white woman’s house all day, then goes home to work at her own house each night, Ida has been experiencing loss daily all along—unbeknownst to Harriet. The time she spends caring for Harriet may be dear to her, but it is also a loss of time that could have been spent with her own child and husband, at her own house. Ida has also experienced the loss of fair wages because Charlotte pays her less than others. The loss of Harriet and Allison may be difficult for Ida, but she’s going to stay with her grown daughter. This itself is probably bittersweet because being with her grown daughter is likely to remind her of the moments she had to spend with the Cleves/Dufresneses instead of her family when her daughter was younger. Now that Ida has spent decades making deep sacrifices for Harriet’s family, she is abruptly fired, a new type of loss that renders even the good times spent with Harriet’s family less meaningful and more insulting.

Edie Cleve is Harriet’s grandmother and Charlotte’s mother. Her personality is similar in many ways to Harriet’s: She’s smart, strong-willed, argumentative, and seemingly fearless. However, also like Harriet, Edie is full of contradictions and liable to make serious mistakes. She has enough energy to accomplish tasks, and because of this, the children often turn to her for assistance when Charlotte is too tired or absent. For example, Edie brings Harriet to church camp, tends to Harriet in the hospital, and attempts to redirect Allison’s attention toward her grades. She is a very involved maternal figure, although she doesn’t enjoy them much and is often cold to them. Her coldness perhaps stems from frustration at not being able to “revise” the children as easily as she can revise history and memory.

Edie’s character develops The Dangers of Revisionist History in extreme ways. Like the rest of the family, she exaggerates their former wealth and the glory of Tribulation, the Confederacy, and the Old South, while erasing or changing parts of the story that implicate the family or other upper-class, white Southerners in any wrongdoing. After Edie’s car crash, this same revisionist impulse rears its head. Although Edie turned into oncoming traffic, she dislikes the narrative that the accident was her fault, that she can’t see well, and that she shouldn’t be driving. The only narrative she’ll accept is Roy Dial’s revisionist one: that the accident was not Edie’s fault but the unsafe intersection’s. This narrative is fueled by Mr. Dial’s desire to flatter Edie and sell her a car, but she doesn’t care. Edie claims she’ll keep driving even if she kills everyone in the state. This illustrates the powerful danger of revisionist narrative: Rather than face the painful truth that she shouldn’t drive, she’d rather change the story to make it seem like it’s not her fault, even if she has to kill everyone to make herself feel less guilty. This is the opposite impulse that her daughter, Charlotte, enacts, yet it illustrates the same theme. Charlotte, unable to process the trauma of Robin’s death, blames herself for it, illogically. Edie, unable to take responsibility for Adelaide’s death or at least her own driving accident, is willing to kill even more people to avoid feeling a sense of culpability. This is ironic because Edie constantly complains about working-class white people who won’t take responsibility for their actions or attempt to improve themselves, yet she embodies this very phenomenon she critiques.

The aunts are Harriet’s great-aunts and Edie’s sisters: Libby is the oldest, and Tat and Adelaide are younger than Edie. None of the aunts have any children, and they’re all unmarried during the novel’s present as well. The aunts act as additional parental figures to Harriet and Allison, who rely on a variety of adults to different degrees. Each sister has her own traits and quirks, but they also work as a team to assist in raising the children that Charlotte and Dix don’t seem to be raising properly. Libby, the oldest, is kind, gentle, and caring toward all: the children, her sisters, their father, and Odean (who does domestic work for her). Tat and Adelaide are less overtly mean than Edie but not as warm or understanding as Libby. Tat is mostly solitary like Edie, but Adelaide is more social and even flirtatious, which bothers Harriet because it means less attention for her. Together, the sisters have a tendency to obsess over petty matters and waste time not accomplishing anything, which infuriates Edie. The sisters are also sensitive, particular, and needy, which irks her because, comparatively, Edie is more practical and less particular.

As a group, the aunts demonstrate Maturation as Loss—it’s the most “mature” of them, Libby, who has to die first, which is tragic because she’s the best-loved out of all the sisters and the one who held the rest of the group together. With Libby gone, the other sisters struggle to get along well enough to even settle Libby’s affairs. She had been the caretaker, and with her gone, the others feel an acute loss, unable to care for her funeral, themselves, or each other. Their mother died when they were young, and Libby acted as a maternal figure toward her younger sisters. Although they’d already experienced tremendous loss and are now elderly, the sisters still feel the pain of maturity as loss at this late stage in life. As Harriet already realizes, this feeling of loss that she’s experiencing as a preteen is not going to stop but will keep getting worse until she dies. The longer she lives, the more there will be to lose, and the worse it will hurt to lose things or people who have been there from the beginning.

Hely Hull is Harriet’s best friend, confidante, and companion in mischief. He’s from an upper-class white family like Harriet, and his older brother, Pemberton, used to play with Robin. Hely has a crush on Harriet and wants to impress her, which he’s willing to do by any means necessary including lying, breaking into houses, stealing, and covering up murders. Hely is one year younger than Harriet and not quite as smart, mature, jaded, or sneaky. This ends up making all the difference in their relationship, which falls apart, demonstrating another aspect of Maturation as Loss. Hely does not have Harriet’s sense of what is possible versus impossible. He does not understand consequences or know how to make plans or consider the future. He hasn’t known real pain or loss in the way Harriet has; for example, he’s never lost a close loved one, and his parents dote on him, sheltering him from certain adult topics as well. Because of Harriet’s ability to think ahead and pull off tricks, Hely thinks she is a genius and wants to marry her. He jumps into most of her plans, making impulsive moves like setting poisonous snakes free in a dark apartment that he gets trapped inside. He miraculously survives all of this unwounded.

Hely does not face any of the same consequences or learn any of the truths that Harriet learns. Distance is created between them when Harriet realizes Hely “live[s] in a busy, companionable, colorful world where everything [is] modern and bright […] what [does] Hely care about chill and loneliness? What [does] he know of her world?” (381). Hely has not yet experienced maturity and doesn’t understand loss, so Harriet experiences yet another loss in the form of their friendship. Although they both survive the summer’s shenanigans, the friendship is no longer the same, and Harriet feels more alone than ever. She learns that not all losses are deaths, but the pain of losing Ida and Hely rivals the pain of losing Robin and Libby.