In Bebe Moore Campbell’s, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, there are fictional stories about several people. The stories are set in rural Mississippi where there are clear forms of racial segregation. A good example is the killing of a poor fifteen year old black boy, Armstrong, on racial grounds because he spoke French to a white woman, Lily. Perhaps the most pitiful person in the text is Lily because of how she is treated by her husband. First of all, she is a school dropout. She then goes on to get married to Floyd, a young man who owns a pool hall where colored people frequent. An incident occurs in the pool hall that makes him act disrespectfully against lily. This incident is an indicator of the brutality that she undergoes in the hands of Floyd.
Lily is a young mother who has big dreams for herself and her child. Together with her baby, she always goes to the train station to dream about leaving Mississippi and going to faraway places like Memphis. As a dreamer she does not want to leave anything to chance and one day she woke up her husband and requested him to take her to town with him (2). While in town, Floyd instructed Lily not to get out of the truck but she went on to follow him to the pool hall. She had received instructions not to do that but unfortunately she did and what followed was an embarrassing and humiliating treatment from him.
A day that she thought would turn out good turned out to be the most absurd one. Lily got an embarrassing beating from her husband because she made eye contact with a colored boy (4). They apparently talked in French and this is what led to her slapping. She seems to be lacking in personal strength and hence the ill treatment that she receives from her husband. It is one thing to do a mistake and another for her spouse to beat her up in public. She is more of a child being punished for having done a mistake than a wife who had committed the same mistake.
It is not only embarrassing that she got the slaps from Floyd but it was totally absurd for a white woman to be humiliated in public (6). It is not something that could have been expected to happen between the two knowing very well that they belonged to a race that was superior and which was thought not to be involved in such ills as wife battering. The battering was a clear indicator that she was the kind of woman who was abused back at home. This incident is not only embarrassing but it made her feel ashamed for herself and for having interacted with Armstrong (13).
Lily had a mixed love/hate relationship with her husband and it is the ill treatment that he always gave her that sends her to a tormented world. She is not a happy wife. It is no wonder that she dreams of leaving Mississippi one day and go to faraway places perhaps to run away from her troubles and find happiness away from her husband. She is a troubled girl who is married to a man who makes hasty decisions which at times leave them penniless. She is embroiled in her own thoughts and wants to find out ways of managing her household better than her husband. She is a frightened woman, of her husband and the powers that black women like Ida have.
