42 pages • 1 hour read
Deesha PhilyawThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “Dear Sister”
Wallace “Stet” Brown dies of a massive stroke, which is what prompts the writing of a letter from one sister, Nichelle, to another. The story introduces four women who are all Stet’s daughters—all but 2 of them are from different mothers. This makes them all half-sisters. They were raised together, often seeing each other at their grandmother’s house and having sleepovers together. Nichelle decides to reach out to a fifth sister that none of them have met to let her know that their father has died. Her name is Jackie. Nichelle has no idea what Jackie’s relationship with Stet has been throughout her life, but she feels that she has a right to know of his death.
It becomes clear throughout the interactions between the four sisters that even though their father was neglectful and not present in their lives, they have formed a strong bond with each other for the most part. Nichelle introduces each sister in the letter and describes what they’re like.
Kimba is the oldest sister, a quiet peacemaker and a Harvard graduate. Renee is the youngest (Nichelle’s full-blood sister) and “delusional” when it comes to Stet, according to Nichelle. She is very pious and always doted on her father even when he didn’t deserve it. Tasheta is somewhere in the middle, a nurse and an irreverent, loud person with multiple boyfriends, some of them married men. Renee and Tasheta often clash because of their different opinions of their father and also because of their morals and life philosophies.
Stet’s mother–the sisters’ grandmother–is beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s, and Stet’s brother, Uncle Bird, takes care of her. Nichelle tells a story of their grandmother’s dreams–whenever she dreams of fish, she knows when someone in the family is pregnant and is always right. None of the sisters are pregnant, so we are left to wonder if Jackie might be.
The family goes to Stet’s funeral and then to the graveside. An old friend of Stet’s named Chauncey walks over to Nichelle to console her, and quickly she realizes that he’s hitting on her; she tells him to get away from her and then later tells her sisters what happened. At the repast after the funeral, Tasheta chats superficially with Chauncey while Renee places a plate of food and a cup of punch in front of him. He drinks the punch and screams; we can deduce that the sisters set him up and put hot sauce in his drink for acting inappropriately with the sisters.
Story 3 Analysis
While Stet is technically the reason that the sisters gather together in this story, the story is not about him. It is obvious that Stet was a man who didn’t value commitment as a father. He was absent and useless to these girls growing up and left their mothers to raise them alone. He is a classic and timeless example of a misogynist and a player, thinking only of himself. Despite his lack of support and presence, the sisters and their mothers became a family. The mothers support each other and put their differences aside to raise the girls together. This short story upends expectations of patriarchy and patriarchal structures; where traditionally in America, the man of a family provides and supports and leads, the opposite is true in Dear Sister. None of the women (except Renee) rely on men to fill their needs or support them.
Renee, despite Stet’s failures as a father, treats him as “father of the year” (22). She is also the most dogmatically religious person in the story. She seems to equate her father with God in some ways, or possibly overcompensate for her absent father by clinging to God—a father figure of sorts. Tasheta calls Renee out, saying “Do you realize you cling to an imaginary white daddy because your flesh-and-blood daddy wasn’t shit? Well, guess what. Your imaginary white daddy ain’t shit either. If he was, he would’ve given you a real daddy that was worth a damn” (30). Her scathing critique brings forward the complex that Renee seems to have with her father because of her religious background and beliefs.
Nichelle emphasizes the power of sisterhood and family when she says, “we’re not just some deadbeat’s kids. We’re sisters” (32). She explains that while Stet is their connection, they’ve spent their whole lives together, most of it without him. Their relationship with each other is what’s actually valuable. This also explains the reason for reaching out to their unknown sister, Jackie. Rather than feeling resentment toward her (besides Renee), the sisters hope to bring her in and make her feel a part of the sisterhood they’ve created.
This story’s events and setting are radically different from the first two. Rather than showing an intimate scene and considering how the scene plays into the characters’ experience of and thoughts on religion, much of this story takes place at a funeral. While two mothers are on the cusp of death in “Not-Daniel,” in this story, a father has died, and his daughters don’t grieve much for him. In this way, the author plays with themes of grief and parenthood. The characters in “Not-Daniel” grieve for their mothers without upholding their religious zeal, while most of the sisters in “Dear Sister” are indifferent about the death of their father.
The themes in “Dear Sister” are more along the lines of women’s strength and togetherness despite their father and despite their differences of opinion and lifestyle. We see their commitment to each other when the sisters come together to punish Chauncey, a close friend of their father’s; Chauncey is a stand-in for their absent father, and they take their revenge on him collectively.
