The Red Shoes

Sheila Black’s “The Red Shoes” begins with the speaker’s discovery of a pair of “red slippers” (Line 1) that have been “buried” (Line 1) beneath the flooring of their home in New York City. The shoes have been there for a while because “mice [have] nested in them” (Line 2). The discovery of the shoes was made because of the speaker’s attempt to refurbish the floor. The speaker and their partner have used “many cans of deck paint” (Line 3), but to no avail. The “floor splinter[s]” (Line 2) regardless. The damaged shoes and flooring echo the damaged and/or damaging people that surround the speaker, and they hint at the changes these people must make in order to survive.

The sense of continuing damage and how it affects the speaker is shown when the speaker breaks a “tooth” (Line 4) while eating at a restaurant called “the Embajada” (Line 4). While the speaker only suffers this small damage, the next day “three teenagers [are] shot dead” (Line 5) as they eat their Puerto Rican dishes of “mofongo” (Line 6). Here, the reader realizes the speaker narrowly missed an arbitrary act of violence. There is a sense throughout the poem that the danger and violence circle nearer and nearer to the speaker.

Besides this event, the speaker notes how violence shapes the people around her. A “neighbor // woman” (Lines 6-7) sings a song from the past about a “woman / with a pistol” (Lines 8-9). This elderly character herself is hurt as her “back ha[s] been broken” (Line 9), which is made obvious in the way “she drag[s] her left foot behind her down the // stairs to the mail room” (Lines 10-11). Breaking one’s back shows that some violence happened to her body by accident or force. Despite bodily trauma, this character has made adjustments and perseveres. Her resilience is admirable.

The speaker’s acquaintances are less so. Junior, a preacher, is also beset by arbitrary and self-inflicted violence. Set adrift when his place of worship closes, he “beg[ins] smoking / crack” (Lines 11-12). He also struggles with his identity and starts going by his “birth name […] Jesus” (Line 13). His love interest is “Irma of the hideous rabbit-fur-and / white-leather jacket” (Lines 14-15). Like the speaker’s own relationship, her relationship with Junior/Jesus cannot be covered up with hopes of romance. It is doomed. Irma is as beautiful and “worn-out” as her coat, her “moon-pale face” (Line 17), and “moth-bitten hair” (Line 16). Her hands are “watery” (Line 16), and she stops traffic by “waving” (Line 15) them. The images suggest she is either ethereal or high.

When she turns up drowned by either “suicide or / murder” (Lines 19-20), her lover says, “there were eels inside her” (Line 20). Due to his loss, Junior/Jesus winds up “preaching again, doped on the corner” (Line 21). The tragedy of Irma and her demise heightens the fact that the speaker lives in a world that is perpetuated by violence as well as dangerous self-medication to forget that violence. Junior/Jesus looks to God, then drugs, for intercession.

The ripple effects of the violence are made clear as Mr. Rodriguez, the older man who runs a business that employs Junior/Jesus, must fire him because of his addiction. This is at a great personal cost to Mr. Rodriguez and his comfort. Now, he must move things himself and bear the weight without Junior/Jesus to assist. Throughout the poem, people who do the right thing wind up alone or suffering as both the “neighbor // woman” (Lines 6-7) and the shopkeeper seem to. This shows that certain people, even when stretched thin, push themselves forward despite the people who have hurt them.

These images do not bode well for the speaker and her partner. The speaker and her partner have, judging from earlier in the poem, been trying to spruce up their home, creating a “nest” (Line 2) or safe space. However, as stated, multiple “cans of deck paint” (Line 3) don’t seem to help the “floors [that] splintered” (Line 2). The same is true of the home’s interior walls. The speaker and the partner make an effort to embrace something comforting. They paint the walls “cinnamon, Aegean blue” (Line 26). However, they then “repainted them eggshell, gris-perle” (Line 26), substituting duller colors for the brighter ones, which suggests the growing hue of their relationship.

Moreover, violence comes home to roost. “We fought” (Line 27), the speaker notes, and “you tore all my letters and diaries and / sprinkled them out the window” (Lines 27-28). This key action by the partner is more than the relationship hitting a rocky patch. The partner has lashed out, personally attacking what is intimate and important to the speaker. That this might be something unforgivable to the speaker is shown by the notation that “it took hours to scrape them off” (Line 30) the “roof of your car” (Line 29), since the scraps were “plastered there by a violent summer storm” (Line 30).

That the aftereffects of the violence of another’s emotional storm is catastrophic to ideas of love or domestic wellbeing is shown in the speaker’s trauma over the destruction. They wept, while Mr. Rodriguez gave [them] a small plastic wrapped / packet of Kleenex” (Lines 31-32) in a gesture of kindness. A month later, the partner is in “lockdown” at “St. / Luke’s” (Lines 32-33) hospital, which has a noted detoxification program for people with drug addictions as well as a psychiatric ward. The potential tragic end of the partner is foreshadowed by the following notation that “Junior caught pneumonia, died that November” (Line 35). The speaker goes to visit the grave in a taxi and notes they “got lost, so many ticking minutes among the / slender white spikes” (Lines 37-38). Violence is no longer distant and arbitrary like what happened to the bystanders eating mofongo. Violence is now destructive and permanent.

It is this thought that reminds the speaker of the red slippers and their wreckage: “[O]nce meant for dancing” (Line 39), they were beautiful like her relationship. But now, they are clearly damaged by time, fire, or being “gnawed” (Line 43) by the “mice” (Lines 2, 43) that “nested” (Line 2) within them. The speaker is reminded of the conversation with their partner when they were discovered. The partner remembered a reference to the 1948 film called The Red Shoes, in which the ballerina is cursed to dance in a pair of crimson ballet shoes until she dies. However, the speaker recalls the original story, “older by far” (Line 45), a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” (1845) features a young girl named Karen who is cursed for her addiction to a pair of flamboyant shoes. Karen begs an executioner to cut her feet off. He obliges and Karen repents. Upon her death, she is given a redemptive entry into heaven after her long suffering. Black’s speaker rewrites the ending of the fairytale, suggesting that along with her feet, the heroine loses her hands. Here, unlike in Andersen or in the movie, the heroine is given “wooden ones” (Line 48) as a redemptive action.

The speaker, too, feels the loss of phantom limbs. Once addicted to the partner, they now must be removed. Like the old woman with the broken back and Mr. Rodriguez, the speaker must learn to make do with an altered life, to move with a broken back or to carry a heavy weight. She must survive, even though it will be a struggle. Although things will be amputated from her—including her partner—she is not dead like her less fortunate neighbors. She is a survivor.