Annie John

Annie’s mother’s hands perform many activities that signify her love. They cook, bathe, launder, and embrace. In short, they nurture Annie and are a source of comfort until Annie watches these same hands care for people other than herself. This shift first occurs when she realizes that her mother’s hands have bathed and dressed little Nalda in preparation for her funeral. This is Annie’s earliest memory of having to share her mother and of knowing that her mother’s hands do for others what they do for her. As a result, she “[can]not bear to have [her] mother caress [her] or touch [her] food or help [her] with [her] bath. [She] especially [can’t] bear the sight of her [mother’s] hands lying still in her lap” (6). This occurs during the “paradise” era of Annie’s childhood, when she feels herself to be the center of her mother’s world, and her mother’s care of Nalda subtly signals that while Annie may be very important, she is not the only person of importance in her mother’s life. Seeing her mother’s hands still in her lap is an indication that her mother cannot and will not always physically care for Annie in the same way she does now, something Annie is loath to consider.

A few years later, after Annie’s mother has adopted more overt methods to prepare her daughter for adulthood, Annie is especially disturbed by the sight of her mother’s hand as it caresses her father. She runs home from Sunday school to show her mother an award that she believes will compel her mother to behave affectionately toward her again. However, as she finds her parents in bed and watches her mother’s hand make circular motions on her father’s back, she describes the hand as being “white and bony, as if it had long been dead and had been left out in the elements” (30). Seeing her mother caressing another is so upsetting that Annie once again associates her mother’s hand with images of death. In a sense, the mother of Annie’s childhood is indeed dead in the sense that Annie’s mother now has a new responsibility to prepare this child who is almost a “young lady” to embody a more mature role in society. When Annie’s mother allows Annie to watch her absorption with her husband, she sends the message that her husband is the most important person to her. When she uses her hands to care for anyone else, Annie finds it upsetting because she longs to be the center of her mother’s world as she once was. Thus, her mother’s hands are a symbol of comfort to Annie, and when they are used to comfort someone else, Annie begins to associate them with betrayal.