Shorty: Bessie Head's Small (Wonder) Boy

We’ve all heard the story of the mother who lifted a car to save her child’s life -- many people have used this anecdote to highlight a mother’s strength and her ability to do the impossible when her offspring are threatened. How would the telling of the story be different if the child had thrown himself under the car to force his mother to show her potential?

In our discussions of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, the role of “the small boy,” or “Shorty,” is completely overlooked. Much of the credit of the protagonist’s, that is Elizabeth’s, recovery is given to the healing powers of the co-op garden where she spends most of her time, and even more credit is rewarded to Tom‘s persistence and generosity. Not to detract from these influences, which were surely necessary to show Elizabeth her self-worth, but how can we pass over her son: the young boy who was nearly sacrificed but, in the most dangerous moment of tension, succeeded in turning the mirror on the monster, his mother?

The small boy, or “Shorty” as he is eventually dubbed, makes few cameos in the “hell” period of Elizabeth’s story. The introduction to him in the first pages in the novel is so minimal that the reader is unaware he may be a current presence in the narrator’s life. We are only told that after a year of her marriage, “she picked up the small boy and walked out of the house, never to return” (19). After this vague setup, the reader is taken over by Elizabeth’s nightmare world. The next we see of the small boy, he is on school holiday, Elizabeth is getting ready for a day of errands in the village, and they are having an exchange typical of a mother irritated with her child. As she dresses, he accuses her of wanting to “go away and leave” him; when she snaps back at him, “a wicked gleam [shoots] into his eyes,” and he mimics everything she says. This is a typical morning in many households, but Elizabeth can’t handle it. When she bursts into tears, the behavior of the small boy completely changes, and he even temporarily takes over the narrative: “How often had something not been wrong over the past months? There were only stormy seas in his house, and he was frequently tossed this way and that in the storm. His mother’s concentration was riveted elsewhere…People who had mothers like he had were lost if they did not know how to care for themselves” (49-50). At this point, the narrative voice becomes Elizabeth’s again, but the boy carries on his survival strategy. When she panics in public and her madness seeps through, causing her to scream at a clerk, it is “such an impossible situation” for her son that he “ignored it completely and went on circling his car on the floor where he was seated” (51).

While the small boy takes care of himself and simply tries to stay out of the way during the day, at night he can’t help but hear his mother’s tormented cries. One night, after Elizabeth wakes herself with a “piercing scream,” she hears her son whimpering in his room. When she goes to investigate, he asks her what is wrong, and he is shaking. She asks him “Don’t bogey-men frighten you? I saw an awful one just now” (130). After he is soothed back to sleep, Elizabeth pleads, “Oh God, help me” (131). This is the first instance we see of Elizabeth’s maternal side - she suddenly realizes the effect her “journey into hell” (12) is having on her son. His fit is fleeting, though, and Head assures the reader that “The small boy had learned to ignore the high drama of the household” (134).

Up to this point, Elizabeth’s son has been able to successfully dismiss his mother’s fit. Unfortunately, Dan -- Elizabeth’s personal “bogey-man” -- is not done with them yet, and as her downward spiral continues, Elizabeth admits that she has “[lost] track of the small boy…he was so cunning about his own survival that she only saw him at sunset when he came home to bed” (172). She appears to regain “track” of him, though, when after she attacks Mrs. Jones, Elizabeth decides to kill her son before killing herself. As she is contemplating their ends, he gets out of his own bed and “walked with quiet determined footsteps to her bed…He looked up at her with the manly air of one who is about to settle all the nonsense in the household.” He tells her, “You talk all the time, then you shout…I get frightened. I cover my head.” As she stares back at him in “appalled silence,” she realizes once again that her “silent soliloquies” are no longer silent. She tells him, “Some people are bothering me. I’ll chase them away.” Before he returned to his bed, “He looked up at her trustingly. For all her haphazard ways and unpredictable temperament, she was the only authority he had in his life,” and for Elizabeth, “The trust he showed, the way he quietly walked back to his own bed, feverishly swerved her mind away from killing him” (174).

While she still had a long road of recovery ahead of her, and while her work in the garden and Tom’s nearly constant presence would ultimately heal her, the courage of Elizabeth’s six-year-old son to stand up to her, his own “bogey-man,” was really the starting point of her trip back to normalcy. After this touching scene between her and her son, something inside Elizabeth wakes up. Something inside her is determined to get help. She scrawls an incriminating note about the real Sello, the Motabeng resident, that gets her sent away to the hospital where her recovery begins (175).

Elizabeth’s “journey into hell” was a long and excruciating one, but, as it has been attested many times, suffering such as this is what leads to knowledge and growth. She has just been confronted with the ugliest of evils; she can rest knowing that nothing she can face later in her life could be worse than what she has just gone through. She will never have to find her way out of that hell again, and she can be there for others when they come to her with their own private hell.