Piatt's 'A Child's Party': Childhood, Slavery, and Moral Complexity

Autobiographical Context and Publication. Although published relatively late in Piatt’s career (1883), “A Child’s Party” is Piatt’s most detailed study of her own childhood and as such is one of the few intimate self-portraits she left behind. The portrait is by no means flattering. Set on the Spier plantation just after Piatt’s mother died, the poem tells how as a child she inveigled a “dusky playmate”—that is, a slave child—into joining her in a “tea party” on the plantation’s front lawn. When the two girls purloin props for the party from the house—silverware, china, clothing—they draw the wrath of the adult house slaves down upon their heads. In a letter to an admiring reader, Piatt vouches for the story’s authenticity, citing it as one she told her own children about her “slave-playmates . . . when I was, as they seem to imagine, ‘a little negro myself’” (March 4, 1886).

Resistance to Sentimentalization and Dual Perspective. One would expect from this letter that “A Child’s Party” would be awash in the same sentimentalization of “happy” slaves and “kind” masters that characterizes most post-Reconstruction literature on the Old South, whether Northern or Southern. As in “Mock Diamonds,” however, Piatt resists romanticizing the past. Instead, she manipulates point of view in order to tell her story from two perspectives at once, separating her adult self (the poem’s speaker) from the child she was. This distinction between what she knew as a child and what she knows as an adult carries with it very different moral understandings of the narrative itself.

For example, when the child self speaks cruel words to her playmate, the adult self says she recalls the words “with shame.” Or again, when the child self dresses up her playmate in “grandmamma’s most sacred shawl,” the adult self says she did it to “set off [her] own transcendent bloom and grace,” not to be generous, and so on. Readers must tackle the interpretive challenge of figuring out both adult and child perspectives at once.

The Two Children and Inverted Power Dynamics. As if the relationship between the adult speaker and her child self were not complex enough, Piatt also greatly complicates the relationship between the two children. For all her “Caucasian scorn,” the speaker’s child self is actually in a very weak position in relation to the slaves, even her playmate, since she knows very little about them, but they know a great deal about her. When she tries to assert her superiority over her playmate, she repeatedly stumbles as a result. The child self, for instance, thinks by dressing the slave child in grandmamma’s shawl, she will establish the superiority of her own beauty, but the slave child knows that the shawl is worth far more than beauty since it is a badge of power, and she immediately starts ordering the other slave children around: “Call me Old Mistress! Do you hear?”

Similarly, when the child self dismisses “brother Blair” as no “gentleman,” the playmate immediately retorts that since brother Blair has been freed because of age, he’s “quit a-plowing corn.” That is, he is now a gentleman because he no longer does manual labor, the mark of subservient classes. More than that, he reads, even if he cannot spell (that is, write), and is widely respected in the slave community as their spiritual leader. When the child self boasts of her own (white) beauty, the slave child tells her that the plantation’s black folk say she would be beautiful “if your hair just wasn’t red.”

The Slave Child's Advantage and the Limits of Rescue. Effectively, the speaker’s child self cannot win. The slave child has community as well as candor on her side, while the child self has nothing but an unjust and undeserved high opinion of herself, the fruit of white privilege. When in the penultimate stanza, her mother’s nurse (and hers) intervenes to rescue “[her] child” from the adult slaves’ wrath, the rescue is at best partial. However genuine the love that runs between child and nurse, slavery taints it, making them both victims of the same institution. Like the poem itself, which ends in tears, Piatt’s adult feelings for her nurse can never (and never did) achieve closure, scarred as they were by guilt that not even the passage of decades could assuage.

For Discussion or Writing.
1.Piatt ends the poem with two kinds of tears—the tears she cried in the past and the “after-tears” she cries as she remembers the party. What are the similarities and differences between these two kinds of tears?

2. Consider words Piatt uses to describe the characters in the poem, such as gentleman, imp, mistress, and priestess. Look up these words in a substantial dictionary. Explain what they mean in the context of the poem. Are some of them ironic?

3. Why does the nurse call Piatt’s child self “my child”? What is their relationship? How does this phrase point to the complex social relationships we find at this “party”? And how would your reading of the poem change if, instead of calling the nurse a nurse, Piatt’s speaker had referred to this woman as “Mammy” instead? How would it change if Piatt had used the slave’s given name instead of “nurse”? Why might Piatt have chosen always to speak of her nurse this way and not by her given name?

4. Piatt repeats the concluding image of “the sky” from the first stanza in the final stanza. What effect does this repetition have? Explain.