Monday's Not Coming

The racism-driven gentrification of the Ed Borough neighborhood underlies the entire novel. Entire families face displacement and homelessness, affecting individuals like Mrs. Charles and the community as a whole. In the last chapter, Monday’s neighbor summarizes the community’s collapse for Claudia:

I ain’t making excuses […] but that’s what it’s like nowadays. You used to see your family, at least for Sunday dinner. This here used to be a pretty tight community. But now everybody so caught up in this and that, that you don’t notice what’s right in front of you (434).

Projects like Ed Borough were first created by the U.S. government, but when outsiders start to invade and dismantle them, the government does little to nothing to help the residents who are losing their homes. CFSA’s justified intervention into the Charles home fuels Mrs. Charles’s paranoia about the government being out to get her. A feeling of being let down and even targeted by a government that’s supposed to work on their behalf increases community stress, making people feel even more vulnerable.

As the fabric of community unravels, individuals and families experience more stress. Minds under stress often have difficulty seeing all available options. The anxiety April and Monday feel about losing their home to white developers, for instance, keeps them from seeking the help they need to get out of a deeply abusive situation with their mother. Mrs. Charles responds to those stressors by seeking comfort in drugs, which contributes to the mental breakdown that leads her to murder her children.

Claudia and Monday have two distinctly different coming-of-age experiences. Claudia comes from a healthy, mostly well-adjusted family while Monday comes from an abusive, neglectful broken home. If Monday and April had grown up in the Coleman household, and Claudia had grown up in the Charles household, each would likely have had different outcomes.

Monday’s development is tainted by severe poverty and abuse. She acts out sexually, and her sister, April, prostitutes herself to help care for her family. Mrs. Charles’s lack of supervision, and Tip’s absence and lack of financial support, enables their daughters’ sexual exploitation. Yet the community dismisses them as “hos,” deciding that Monday’s and April’s sexual acting out disqualifies them for empathy and help.

In contrast, Claudia’s growing sexual awareness takes a different path. She enjoys Michael’s company and becomes involved with him romantically. She attempts to imitate Monday by trying to perform oral sex on him, but Michael, who is a healthy, self-adjusted young man from a functional family, stops her from doing something she’s not ready to do. Surrounded by people who take care of her and look out for her, Claudia doesn’t experience the exploitation suffered by Monday and April. 

Because society sometimes judges female sexual behavior as evidence of a character flaw, it assumes that women who have sex deserve any harm that comes to them—i.e., “yes, but what were you wearing?”—and this judgment is particularly harsh for women who engage in sex work, like April did. Churchgoing girls like Claudia from “respectable” families are looked after. Girls like Monday and April tend to be discarded, even though their sexual acting out often results from the failure of adults and a lack of interest from society at large.

When harm comes to them, young women of color experience the dual cruelties of misogyny and racism. When Detective Carson shows Claudia the raft of missing girls his department is searching for, he dismisses the girls as drama-seeking runaways rather than as girls attempting to flee untenable situations—or girls possibly kidnapped or murdered by their loved ones.