The Girls in the Stilt House

Matilda is the novel’s dynamic deuteragonist. She is a 17-year-old girl living in Natchez Trace, Mississippi, the daughter of a sharecropper. Unlike Ada, her father is very loving, but as a young Black woman, she’s been compelled to face challenges that Ada, who is white, has not. Matilda loses her mother when she dies after giving birth to Matilda’s baby sister, Annis, and her father and sister are murdered by Virgil Morgan, who sets fire to their home when Dalton is still weak from influenza. She changes from someone who is somewhat embittered by her circumstances and experiences, mainly because she has little opportunity to alter them, into one who feels empowered and purposeful.

When she first moves in with Ada, their relationship is indicative of Matilda’s emotional state, demonstrating The Complexities of Friendships Across Social Divides. Though there are “brief period[s] of camaraderie between the two of them [,…] for every kindness, there was a coldness. As if the one required the other” (92). Matilda resents Ada’s helplessness and her tendency to rely on others rather than herself, and it irks Matilda when Ada experiences good fortune that Matilda feels she doesn’t quite deserve. She begins to write quite a bit, which empowers her and gives her hope that her future will be brighter than her past. It is only when Matilda begins to feel “seen,” when her work is not only accepted for publication but respected by Mr. Moser, that she lets go of her tendency toward sullenness. Finally, when Ada assumes control over her own life, Matilda’s response shows how much she has changed. After Ada kills Frank, Matilda says, “You did good today […]. It might not seem like it—taking a life. But you can think of it as saving your own” (359).

Earlier in the novel, she couldn’t bring herself to praise Ada, though she could tell Ada craved it. Now that they are on more equal footing, Matilda can offer Ada warmth and admiration. Finally, when she and Ada prepare to part ways at the small town north of Memphis, she thinks, “Things would be easier [this] way. Still, she felt a pang of something she did not try to attach a word to” (362). When she began to feel attached to Ada earlier on, she felt she had to leave Ada and Annis to themselves. She felt like she was betraying herself, her family, and the Black community by attending to this helpless young white woman. Now, however, she accepts her feelings more readily because she is no longer confined either by Ada or the Southern whites who enact such violence against Black people. As Matilda develops the strength and confidence to achieve her own dreams, she can applaud Ada’s good fortune with less animosity.

Virgil is Ada’s abusive father, a fur trapper who struggles with alcoholism and who murdered his wife when he found evidence that she was making plans to escape his house of horror. When he gets home to find Ada returned, his behavior reminds her just how brutal he can be: “Ada had an eerie sense of slipping into her mother’s skin and feeling what her mother had felt for so long, of looking at her father through her mother’s eyes. And now she knew exactly how her mother had felt. She had felt trapped” (43). Although a trapper, like Virgil, is supposed to trap animals and sell their pelts, Virgil’s “trapping” extends to people as well, probably because he sees them as being as disposable as such animals. He emotionally abuses and then murders his wife, Sylvie, when she makes plans to run away with their daughter. He murders Dalton and Annis Patterson out of sheer malice, having nothing to gain from their deaths except whatever sadistic satisfaction he feels in killing an impoverished Black man and a baby.

Virgil is villainous and static, never changing, taking pleasure in harming innocents like Stella Mae and his daughter. He is a small man emotionally and is petty, caring only about himself. He and Frank Bowers are similar in terms of their willingness to be cruel to others, especially those with less privilege than they have. Together, Virgil and Frank seem to represent all that is wrong with their community, one that privileges men over women and white people over Black people, one that is full of corrupt or powerful people who can be bought or blackmailed. Virgil is a lawbreaker who has no defense for breaking the law. While Ada and Matilda sometimes struggle to do what is right and protect their loved ones because they are less empowered by their society, Virgil has the power to make good choices but refuses to do so. He chooses to spend all his money on illegal alcohol; he chooses to steal pelts from other trappers and to trap certain animals illegally because their pelts are worth more; he chooses to treat his wife and daughter cruelly even though they have so much less authority than he does; he chooses to murder them both, though Matilda stops him from killing Ada; he even chooses to murder a sick man and his baby because he envies Dalton’s proximity to Creedle’s bootleg operation.