The Child Who Favored Daughter

The Child Who Favored Daughter Summary | The Child Who Favored Daughter Summary

The story begins with a young girl who is dropped off by a school bus and is walking the rest of the way home. She sees her father on the front porch and instantly knows that he has read the letter she has written to her white lover. She is terrified of her father's reaction but forces herself to appear calm. She briefly wonders who could have given her father the letter: her lover's mother in an attempt to "preserve the race?" the wife of her lover, perhaps discovering it among her husband things? perhaps her lover himself? The last idea, thought, she refuses to entertain, because she loves him.

The father sits on the porch with a shotgun nearby and the letter. He watches his daughter walking home and he knows that she knows he has the letter. As he is waiting, he reminisces about when he was a boy.

He had a sister they called "Daughter." She was beautiful and he loved her intensely. She was loving and giving to everyone. She would give anybody anything she had and was bad at keeping anything, even her own health. He would beg her not to go out but to stay with him. She laughed at him and told him she went where she was needed and would sleep here and there. This finally culminated when she left for months with someone else's husband. This devastated him and he cried and grieved a long time, for she had given her love to the same white man in whose fields he worked, the white man who treated him more like an animal than a human. To her family, this was a major betrayal; when she came back months, later they punished her for it.

When Daughter did come back, she was a broken woman. Her long hair was gone, her teeth were loose, and she did not recognize anyone. She would have fits of screaming and singing and would tell them she was on fire. Her family tied her down to her bed so that she was at their mercy. As punishment for her betrayal, they ostracized her until she could no longer feel her own pain. After time passed and she still didn't die, the family would throw food to her as if they were feeding scraps to the dogs. At night when she howled like an animal, her father would beat her with his belt until she stopped.

Despite this, Daughter continued to exploit her brother's love for her, and finally, when she was almost her old self again, she begged him to free her. He was afraid she would run away again and leave him. His love for her turned into loathing and a need to seek revenge on his white master, her lover. Daughter climbed out of the bed and knocked her brother out. She was later found dead, impaled on a fence post.

He had never recovered from the pain and shock of Daughter giving her love to the white man who held him in bondage. He felt he could not forgive her for this. His mind became poisoned and his perspective changed to expect evil and deception to come to him.

Due to his past, he hated the women in his life and was very distrustful of them. He treated the worst the women who loved him the most. He beat his own wife until she was crippled, in order to keep her from returning advances from the white landlord (advanced that he was only imagining). His wife was able to escape his cruelty by killing herself, but not before she had his daughter. He believed his daughter had the same looks and character as his sister "Daughter," and the letter he now held seemed to prove this to him.

When his daughter finally comes up to him at the porch, he calls her a "white man's slut!" She leads the way to the shed where he throws her on the ground and beats her with a harness. She does not resist even as the buckles of the harness make her bleed. He leaves her in the shed and returns to the front porch. It has started to rain. He picks up his gun and rocks it like a baby and looks at the now rain-soaked letter. He can still make out where she has written "I love you," and he is enraged. He thinks that the lover has has probably left his daughter to marry one of his own race. He feels jealousy and again feels that, like Daughter, his own daughter won't ever belong to him.

The next morning he stares at a picture of Daughter, turns it over and in resignation picks up a pocket knife and takes it to the shed with him. He finds his child awake and waiting for him on the ground. He realizes that she is his daughter and not the "Daughter" of his past. It is then that he begs her to deny ever writing the letter. His daughter, however, will not deny the letter; she stands up and tells him she is leaving. He strikes her down. She gazes up at her father, her blouse having fallen off and leaving her chest bare. He gathers her breasts and fondles them. As the dogs start barking he is suddenly filled with desire. In his anguish, he pulls himself away from her, then cuts off her breasts with his pocketknife. He flings the breasts at the dogs to eat.

The day finds him sitting on his front porch again with his eyes closed. He hears the yellow school bus approach and imagines what he would see if he opens his eyes, his sister or his own daughter. He has the gun on the porch beside him and knows that if he wants he can pick the unloaded gun up and rock it like a baby.