27 pages • 54 minutes read
So What Are You, Anyway?
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Themes
Loss of Innocence
The author explores the socio-political implications of his protagonist Carole’s Loss of Innocence by limiting the third person narrator’s access to Carole’s consciousness. In this way, the narrative present is filtered through Carole’s innocent, youthful, and childlike perspective. Prior to the introduction of Henry and Betty Norton, Carole’s world is peaceful. She is content with her doll, her purse, and her mirror in her seat “beside the window” (Paragraph 1). She feels no discomfort about what she is doing and where she is going; she feels no shame over how she looks or who she is. Her character, therefore, is still lodged in the uninhibited innocence of childhood.
Once the Nortons enter the narrative stage, Carole experiences an involuntary awakening into adulthood. The couple’s appearance beside Carole on the plane serves as the story’s inciting incident, and their introduction into Carole’s otherwise safe, insular world catalyzes Carole’s loss of innocence. Hill primarily conveys their negative influence on the child through dialogue. For example, when Henry sees that Carole’s doll is Black, he exclaims, “I never saw such a thing” (Paragraph 4). This is the first of Henry’s many remarks against Carole. He later refers to Carole’s doll as “a Negro doll,” insisting that the doll’s appearance is evidence of Carole’s father’s physical appearance (Paragraph 52). The preexisting tension in this scene escalates when Henry and his wife deem Carole “a mulatto” and are incensed that her parents have not “taught [her] that word” (Paragraph 77). While the short story is set in 1970, it was published in 2000 and thus in an era in which such racial signifiers are politically incorrect and therefore hostile to Black and biracial bodies. The language that Henry and Betty use in their dialogues with Carole, therefore, actively dismantles her formerly innocent way of seeing the world.
By limiting the narrative setting to the insular confines of the airplane, Hill conveys the impossibility of recapturing one’s innocence. The hostility, bigotry, and racism that Carole suffers during the flight promises to forever change her. Although she does not understand the meaning of race or its implications for her own identity, these notions have tainted her once pure world. Hill’s ambiguous ending emphasizes Carole’s Loss of Innocence, because, after she leaves the plane, it is clear that she will not be returning to the same carefree, unhindered world.
Prejudice as an Attack on Identity and Belonging
True to all of Hill’s work, “So What Are You, Anyway?” examines the social, political, and cultural forces that shape an individual’s identity and belonging. At the start of the short story, the protagonist Carole is unconcerned with intellectualized ideas about the self. The author conveys this facet of her character’s interiority through her personal effects. While traveling, Carole carries a doll, a small purse, and a mirror. The purse and the mirror are extensions of Carole’s imagined self, or the individual she wants to be. She is traveling alone, and she wants to feel like “a young lady” (Paragraph 37). However, Carole’s traveling doll companion, Amy, shatters the image of her would-be adult self. The author uses such images to suggest that Carole has yet to define herself by the socio-historical era in which she lives. Rather, her notions of adulthood are dictated by the accessories she carries and are thus imitations of womanhood. Since her identity has yet to be challenged, she has no inclination that her presence has more complicated implications.
The narrative atmosphere becomes increasingly charged as Carole experiences prejudices at the hands of her seatmates, Henry and Betty Norton. The couple is both condescending and demanding as they insist on an explanation for where she comes from, who she is, and therefore why she has a right to exist. Although Carole’s identity has no qualifiable impact on Betty or Henry, the couple feels affronted by the child’s existence. This is why they badger Carole about her race and her parents’ races. On the story’s penultimate page, Betty says, “So is that it? You’re a mulatto? You know what a mulatto is, don’t you? Haven’t your parents taught you that word” (Paragraph 78)? As conveyed in this passage, Betty and her husband’s prejudiced behavior and speech actively threaten Carole. Although Carole has done nothing to offend the couple, the couple attacks Carole’s burgeoning sense of self, and thus dismantles her sense of belonging on the flight and in the world.
Henry’s and Betty’s characters are symbolic representations of racism and bigotry during the post civil rights era of the 1970s. The way they perceive and treat Carole is thus a result of the socio-political age in which they live. While the Nortons do not represent every white individual—as the comments from the other plane passengers suggest—Hill never excuses their actions. Rather, he is using their characters as micro representations of the racial inequity that defined the 1970s culture at large. In doing so, he is distilling the impact of such prejudicial viewpoints on Black and biracial bodies.
Race as a Social Construct
As is evident across his fictional work, Hill uses his protagonist’s evolving sense of self in “So What Are You, Anyway?” to reveal the social fabrication of race and racism. In the context of Carole’s experience, race is a word that has no meaning at the start of the story. Hill illustrates Carole’s lack of knowledge and understanding of race when she looks at herself in the mirror in the story’s opening paragraph. Although she recognizes “her own dark eyes,” “her handful of freckles,” and “the clear complexion that her father sometimes calls ‘milk milk milk milk chocolate,’” Carole feels no judgment for these facets of her appearance (Paragraph 1). She also does not categorize her facial or physical features under a social umbrella. Instead, she thinks of herself in the way that her father endearingly does. This scene reveals the nonexistence of race to Carole at this early juncture of her life and highlights Race as a Social Construct.
Throughout the story, Henry’s and Betty’s characters symbolize society at large. It is through Carole’s interactions with this couple that she first encounters the concepts of race and racism. In the scene in which Henry and Betty badger Carole with questions, Carole loses her ability to speak. In the preceding pages, she readily responded to them, but in this moment she is rendered speechless because the ideas and words in their questions are senseless to her. Inhabiting Carole’s consciousness in the subsequent paragraph, the narrator says, “Race? What is that? She doesn’t understand” (Paragraph 51). The narrator goes on to say that Carole wishes her parents were there so they “could tell her what ‘race’ meant” (Paragraph 51). Hill has put the word race into quotations in order to underscore its foreign nature to Carole. She has never heard the word before, so its definition, implications, and undercurrents have never impacted her sense of self.
Carole’s confusion over the concept of race captures the socially fabricated nature of race itself. In much the same way that the Nortons construct race and impose it upon Carole, society has done the same to BIPOC individuals for generations prior to and following the temporal setting of the story.
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