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Part 2, Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in God Help the Child, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inherited Trauma
Racism and Colorism
Child Abuse and Healing
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love
Summary
Analysis
After Bride recovers and leaves Steve and Evelyn’s house, Rain misses her. Before Bride left, she gave Rain a shaving brush. Rain uses it to brush her cat. With Bride gone, Rain feels like she has no one to talk to. Rain recalls that when they were walking home after she told Bride about her life, a group of boys drove by in a truck. One of the boys shouted a racial slur from the window. The truck then turned around, and one of the boys aimed a shotgun at them. Bride covered Rain’s face, and birdshot got lodged in Bride’s hand and arm. Back home, Steve picked the pellets out of Bride’s arm. Rain thinks that nobody had done something like that for her before—no one had put themselves in danger to save Rain’s life “without even thinking about it.”
Bride and Rain’s encounter with racist violence again highlights that Sweetness was not wrong to fear that Bride would encounter racism in the world. But Bride’s response to this violence—acting selflessly to protect the defenseless Rain—emphasizes the misguided nature of Sweetness’s supposed protection of Bride. By protecting Rain, Bride acts like a surrogate mother, as she is willing to put herself in danger to protect a defenseless child. The novel argues, then, that Sweetness should have done the same for Bride when Bride was a child. Instead, Sweetness seems to have served as a proxy for the racism she feared, enacting that racism on the defenseless Bride.
Themes
