God Help The Child

Chapter 1 is a monologue in which Sweetness explains that it is not her fault that her daughter Lula Ann was born with skin that was “[m]idnight black, Sudanese black” (3) because she and Louis, her husband, were both very fair-skinned African Americans and Sweetness’s grandmother was light enough to pass for white. Sweetness says that she knows people may think that African Americans self-segregating among each other by skin tone was bad, but Sweetness feels this segregation was necessary for African Americans to avoid racist indignities from whites.

From the moment of Lula Ann’s birth, Sweetness was embarrassed by her child’s skin color. She even went as far as to almost smother Lula Ann once and even thought about giving her up for adoption. She kept the baby but weaned her from breast to bottle as soon as possible to avoid feeling like she had “a pickaninny sucking [her] teat” (5). The baby also caused trouble in her marriage. Louis assumed that Sweetness had cheated on him because of the darkness of the baby’s skin. He refused to touch Lula Ann and even left after Sweetness argued that the dark skin must have come from his side of the family.