P.S. Be Eleven

The novel is set in the late 1960s, as is indicated by the author’s allusions to the 1968 presidential election, the popular television shows of the time, and the national debut of the Jackson Five. In the United States, the end of the 1960s was a moment in which the country was grappling with widespread social change, including the women’s liberation movement, the Black Power movement, the impact of popular youth culture, and the pervading worry over the course of the Vietnam War.

In some instances, people at the time reacted to the free-wheeling period of the 1960s by becoming even more conservative than the previous generation of the early 1950s. Characters such as Big Ma and Louis Gaither embody these more conservative values. Big Ma belongs to an older school of Black identity that was based on making an outward show of submission to white people in order to maintain personal safety from widespread anti-Black violence. Louis is a generation younger than Big Ma, but he has held on to old-fashioned ideas about the roles of women. Louis believes that men should have the greater say in how women lead their lives and that women should submit to men. Big Ma and Louis both agree that a woman’s place is in the home and that dignified Black behavior is the path to power.

These two characters’ beliefs about women and racial identity are a rejection of the women’s liberation movement and the Black Power movement of the 1960s. During this tumultuous decade, figures like feminist Bela Abzug demanded that women have a place in the political and social spheres of the United States. Black female activists like Angela Davis and Katherine Cleaver fought for the rights of all Black people, including women. These women were both associated with the Black Panther Party, a Black Power group that subscribed to the idea that resistance—including armed resistance—was the only way to secure true liberation for Black people as a whole. The Black Panther Party also taught that Black people should feel pride in themselves and work in solidarity with one another to achieve the aims of their revolution. Through their presence in the movement and their work, Davis and Cleaver made Black women’s struggle for freedom more central to the broader struggle against racism and the fight for Black empowerment.

The Black Panther Party sought to create their own power structures, but figures like Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to serve in the United States Congress, believed that Black people could work within the political system to secure the rights of all, including Black American women. Marva, the stepmother in the Gaither family, belongs to a younger generation than either Louis or Big Ma, and she makes the Gaither family aware of Black women’s struggle for their rights when she works as a volunteer for Shirley Chisholm’s campaign.

No matter how hard Big Ma and Pa try to shield the three sisters from these movements, they fail because the cultural values that surround the Gaither sisters are too powerful and commonplace to resist. The television, billboards, and magazines from the corner store bring pop culture figures from a thriving young culture directly into the neighborhood. During the late 1960s, that popular culture shifted the more assertive stance of Black people and Black women into mainstream awareness and taught girls like the Gaither sisters that their voices and tastes mattered, no matter how older people disparaged the rebellious young people’s culture. When Delphine comments that the “hippies were right. You can’t trust anyone over thirty” (37), her assertion reflects this stance.

The Vietnam War (1955-1975) is another important factor in the complex historical context of the novel. The United States officially entered the war against Soviet-backed forces in 1964 as part of a larger effort to contain communism abroad. The Vietnam War was therefore one of the major events of the Cold War—the ongoing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia) and Soviet allies after World War II. United States soldiers like Darnell fought in the jungles of Vietnam, a Southeast Asian country far removed from the United States geographically. Darnell brings the Vietnam War home to the Gaithers when he proves to be profoundly changed by his experience of war. His struggles with trauma and substance abuse reflect the widespread struggles of returning soldiers and the uncertain attitude of the entire country toward a war that increasingly seemed unwinnable. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, an outcome shaped in part by the impact of the war on people like Darnell.

One of the big questions of the novel is whether people like Big Ma and Louis will prevent the Gaither sisters from embracing these social changes or whether the girls will win the day and carve out their own path to becoming strong, assertive women, Black people, and patriots. In the novel, the outcome remains uncertain, as Richard Nixon, a political figure who historically rejected the cultural shifts of the 1960s, wins the election of 1968, leading Big Ma to celebrate what she believes will be the restoration of order after the disorder of the 1960s. Nonetheless, the future belongs to people like Marva, Delphine, Fern, and Vonetta, and they have learned the lessons of revolution well.