because they feel so guilty over the way their people treated us.”Ĭlover makes up her own mind about her stepmother despite her aunt’s reaction and develops a loyalty which she proves through silences. She tells Clover that “all white women give money to the animals if they have it to spare. She resents the white woman who is taking her role in the child’s life and competes with her for Clover’s affection. Her Aunt Everleen, who sells peaches from the family’s orchard at her fruit stand, has prepared Clover for a spelling bee and has encouraged her sketching talent. I keep adding to it until it almost becomes a flower.” She is aware of the ritual of the funeral, a play in which everybody plays a part. The blood makes a round dot on my white dress. Sanders is successful in staying within the immediate language that is accessible to a child, creating a voice that is authentic and clear: “We take the silence outside to waiting shiny black cars.” Dressed in white for her father’s funeral, Clover jabs herself with a thorn: “I turn my finger into a paint brush. His courtship and wedding-told in flashbacks-take on a different dimension: The celebration is tinged with a sense of loss and pain. From the first sentence on, it is evident that Clover’s idealized father, Gaten, is doomed. “Looks like anybody who knows the story about Cinderella should know that nobody in the world would want a stepmother unless they were all the way crazy,” says Clover’s Aunt Everleen, one of Sanders’ most vivid major characters, who refers to Sara Kate as “some fancy woman.”Īn interesting aspect of the novel is Sanders’ treatment of time.
She has unfamiliar rituals and asks obvious questions.Ĭlover has to make major adjustments-accept her father’s marriage and death, as well as the disappointment that the surprise her father promised her is not the purple bicycle she hoped for, but a white stepmother. In the small community of Round Hill, S.C., where people are bonded by history and superstition, Sara Kate looks and acts like a stranger. Hill, when she moves into her dead husband’s house, keeping her promise to take care of his daughter, Clover. Sara Kate hasn’t even been married long enough to get used to her new name, Mrs. Dori Sanders’ first novel has a powerful story line, told in the voice of a 10-year-old black girl, Clover, whose father dies in a car accident only hours after marrying a white woman.
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