Lyddie

“The bear had been their undoing, though at the time they had all laughed. No, Mama had never laughed, but Lyddie and Charles and the babies had laughed until their bellies ached. Lyddie still thought of them as the babies. She probably always would.”

The invasion of the bear into the Worthens’ cabin is the reader’s first introduction to the family dynamic. It is Lyddie who takes charge to protect her mother and siblings, reacting calmly and rationally and leading them away from danger. For Lyddie, her act of courage becomes a testament to the challenges she is capable of conquering. Her mother, however, is convinced that the incident is a symbol of the end times, and her perseveration on this idea becomes the catalyst for the breakup of the family and the subsequent loss of their farm.

“‘She’s letting out the fields and the horse and cow. She’s sending you to be a miller’s boy and me to housemaid. She’s got us body and soul. We got no call to give her the calf.’ […] ‘No.’ Her voice was sharper than she meant, ground as it was on three years of unspoken anger. ‘We always done that and look where it got us.’”

Lyddie has worked tirelessly to keep her family afloat, without her mother’s help, since the departure of her father. She is tremendously resentful of her mother’s presumptuousness in sending her and Charlie to work so that Mattie might benefit from the income they will generate. Lyddie’s resistance to surrendering the proceeds from the calf’s sale indicates her awareness of the injustice of her circumstances and her insistence on asserting her autonomy where she can.

“Once I walk in that gate, I ain’t free anymore, she thought. No matter how handsome the house, once I enter I’m a servant girl—no more than a black slave. She had been queen of the cabin and the straggly fields and sugar bush up there on the hill, but now someone else would call the tune. How could her mother have done such a thing? She was sure her father would be horrified—she and Charlie drudges on someone else’s place. It didn’t matter that plenty of poor people put out their children for hire to save having to feed them. She and Charlie could have fed themselves—just one good harvest—that was all they needed. And they could have stayed together.”

Lyddie has a strong sense of pride and an enduring faith in her ability to achieve whatever she sets out to through hard work. Being forced into the service of others for her mother’s benefit is an affront to her dignity.