Similarities Between Helen And Maude Martha

Maud Martha is constantly compared to her sister Helen, who is deemed to be prettier and better liked than Maud in her family and amongst strangers: “For the basic situation had never changed. Helen was still the one they wanted in the wagon, still ‘the pretty one,’ ‘the dainty one.’ The lovely one” (Brooks 50). The comparisons and attitudes towards Helen and Maud Martha are a prime example of colourism. Helen is considered to be high yellow. Maud Martha is considered to be low yellow. HIgh yellow is closer to the white ideal. Helen symbolically acts as a representation of white ideals that have affected the Black community, and that the Black community therefore tries to uphold. Maud Martha wants acceptance from her community, while the Black
community wants acceptance from Whites. Maud Martha’s desire for acceptance and almost to be a high yellow is a driving force of her personality, and her relationships. Colourism negatively affects her relationship with her husband, Paul to the point where they cannot focus on making their relationship about a bond between them. The relationship is not truly their own, just like their apartment.
Colourism creates a rift in the Black community Maud Martha is involved in.The community of Paradise Valley that Hayden depicts seems less divided and more supportive of each other, it is actual outside world forces that are destroying their community.
Gentrification is an actual force while colourism is an abstract concept. Each are just as powerful, but the difference is key. Gentrification is more visible and more overtly forced. In Hayden’s poem even the grifters are protective: “No time of starched/ and ironed innocence. Godfearing/ elders, even godless grifters, tried/ as best they could to shelter/ us” (Hayden
36). When Paul and Maud Martha move into their apartment, Maud Martha is initially very excited about the apartment because she can make it her own: “She made plans for this home.
She would have the janitor move the bed and dresser out, tell Paul to buy a studio couch, a desk chest, a screen, a novelty chair, a white Venetian blind for the first room, and a green one for the kitchen, since the wall paper there was green (with little red fishes swimming about). Perhaps they could even get a rug. A green one. And green drapes for the windows. Why, this might even turn out to be their dream apartment” (Brooks 58). It is telling that Martha calls it her “home”. Maud never got to have her own home in her entire life. Therefore, the concept that she gets to make a space her own is very important to her and like staking a claim on her space in the world as truly hers. However, because tenants move out so much the owner of the building will not allow Maud Martha and her husband to make changes to the apartment or decorate it. The apartment then becomes grey to her, and lifeless. Green is usually associated with life, but she is no longer able to bring green into her apartment so it becomes grey and not a place for her to create a life or create and raise one in the form of a
child. In the same vein as lifelessness, Hayden’s poem part V of Elegies he asks where all of the people went. The point of this poem is to allow those who were affected by gentrification in Detroit and treated as less than human, to be portrayed as humans. Humans that are not stereotypes and have complex existences, and humans that can no longer be thought of a “those poor people over there” like they are not humans but an abstract concept for White people to have an academic discussion about. There are 19 people talked about in V of Elegies. 19 people are recognized with their characteristics and methods of survival, even though the poem is not long. He acknowledges and honours how these people have chosen to survive whether it was dancing, laughter, sex, or drugs. These people Hayden grew up with have essentially been wiped from existence, but Hayden brings them back. He laments all of the lives that were lost regardless of whether or not they were eating from a trashcan or not, they were important, and he gives them a space to be important in a world that did not allow them to find one themselves.