The Girls in the Stilt House

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of racism and gender discrimination.

In the final chapter of the novel, the segregated park and the children playing there constitute a motif that points to The Complexities of Friendship Across Social Divides and the arbitrary nature of those divides. When Ada is inside the dressmaker’s shop inquiring about a job, Matilda goes to the park, and she watches as the children—both Black and white—play. She sees them, “colored children playing on one end and white children on the other. A decrepit set of swings and slides for one group, shiny new models for the other. Two little girls stood facing each other at the border of their separate worlds, chatting across the invisible divide” (362).

Throughout the novel, Matilda maintains an emotional distance between herself and Ada, the result of her understanding that Ada is unlikely to see her as an equal. For a long time, Ada allows herself to be helpless, relying on Matilda for survival; it’s another way of embodying a power dynamic that has roots in the history of slavery and racism: the Black woman waiting on the white woman, helping with her children, taking care of the home, and so on.