Hello! This week I have chosen to write about the story we discussed I class called "Night Women". The basis of this story revolves around a single woman, raising a child, and partaking in certain "late night activities" with her clientele I order to make a living. Right at the start, the story begins talking about how much this woman loves her child. Throughout the story we see her taking precautions in order to prevent him from finding out that she is actually a call-girl, of sorts. If the boy does wake up, (as she and him sleep I the same room due to financial difficulties and limited living space) she would tell him that it was her father who came back to visit but will soon be going away again.
The men, whom she calls her "suitors" are not strangers. She seems to know details about them such as that they are doctors, or if they are married. At least she is not exposing her child to a potentially dangerous situation, so that is good. However, some of these men are married, and that seems to go against the norms and values that we, in America, hold dear. One would think that she would feel guilt, and from certain passages in the text, I think that she might. One line reads "I could see the faces of their wives I the beads of sweat that dripped down their foreheads..." and to me, this implies that she sees the wives' faces out of guilt for sleeping with the husbands.
Other parts of the text refer to times when these men would bring the child gifts, such as sound machines that would block the noise of the adult-themed events that were transpiring just a few feet from him. The mother kept a sheet up between their living spaces, so as not to allow the child to know what she is doing. Do these men bring gifts purely so the child does not know what they are doing, or do they start to actually view him as a child-figure?
One other subject of my contemplation was whether or not this mother could find alternate means of income. Sure, she may make adequate income performing sex acts on rich men, but could she find a more appropriate, non-degrading job that would make her son proud? One passage explains that she does not envy those women that have to sew for hours, and then undo what they have created so as to create more hours of work for themselves. She finds this to be a waste of time. For her, the shame of having to lower herself to prostitution, essentially, is better than spending hours doing tedious hard-labor just to barely scrape by. It is almost as if she has accepted her social role and her status as it has developed and lives her life the only way she knows now. She does understand that she cannot lie to her child forever, but, for now at least, things seem to be working.
The author is from the country of Haiti, where, I understand, this sort of thing is common. Perhaps this is a political statement meant to show the degradation that women go through just to make it through the day for their families. Perhaps it is a personal experience story, or the story of a friend of the author. My personal thoughts, to end my post, are that there are always better ways of helping your family than selling your body, but at the end of the day, you do what you must to get by. It is a sad but harsh truth.
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