Family, Community, and Responsibility Theme Analysis

Within weeks of starting school and not being able to locate her best friend, Monday, Claudia knows that something is wrong. But though Claudia throws herself into her project of finding Monday and asks teachers, counselors, her parents, and even the police for help, most people seem unconcerned about and uninterested in Monday’s disappearance. Several adults, including Claudia’s Daddy, even tell Claudia she shouldn’t be so curious or worried—whatever’s going on with Monday is “private family business.” And the local detective Claudia speaks to, Detective Carson, informs her that only a parent can report Monday as missing, if she even is missing to begin with. Through this widespread indifference—and the eventual revelation that Monday’s mother murdered her—the novel raises a key question: whose responsibility is it to speak up and help someone who’s experiencing abuse and neglect, especially when a person’s abuser is a family member? Monday’s Not Coming suggests that the idea that families should be a person’s only line of defense is misguided at best and, at worst, dangerous. Rather, it suggests that keeping children safe and healthy is a community responsibility, but one that can be extremely hard to navigate in an increasingly individualized society.

That Claudia seeks out help from so many different community resources suggests that she’s been led to believe that it’s the community’s responsibility to worry about a child’s welfare. Claudia seeks help first from her parents and then from Monday’s mom, Mrs. Charles, and Monday’s sister, April. Her family or Monday’s family, she reasons, should be able to quickly solve the mystery of what happened to Monday. But Daddy refuses to check in on Monday, insisting that her whereabouts and wellbeing aren’t his responsibility. And Mrs. Charles and April give unhelpful, cryptic answers—and scold or yell at Claudia for expressing her concern. Through their responses, they suggest that Claudia that Monday isn’t their responsibility or Claudia’s, either. When family fails, Claudia turns to the school system and, ultimately, the police. But every time Claudia asks for help, she gets unclear or incomplete answers, or she’s told that the inner workings of Monday’s family aren’t any of her business. These responses suggest that it’s inappropriate to worry about someone the way that Claudia worries about Monday, something that goes counter to how Claudia has been raised to see parents, schools, and the police.

While both the school and the police insist to Claudia that it’s inappropriate to get involved, the novel reveals that these institutions aren’t properly equipped to follow through with kids in trouble, even when they want to. For instance, the novel implies that Claudia’s school works directly with Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) in cases of suspected neglect or abuse. But through the school has passed along several reports of suspected neglect over the years, CFSA consistently fails to appropriately investigate those concerns. Claudia and one of the teachers who’s raised concerns, Ms. Valente, seem to believe that had the CFSA caseworkers properly investigated Mrs. Charles, she would’ve lost custody of her children immediately—and perhaps, Monday and August’s murders could have been prevented.

Claudia also discovers that the police and child protection services aren’t set up to effectively respond to more complicated child abuse situations. When Claudia goes to the police to ask an officer to check in on Monday, she discovers that she has no standing to report Monday as missing—only a parent can do that. This suggests, too, that even if the school had expressed more concern about Monday’s whereabouts, they, too, may have been stymied by protocol and bureaucracy. The detective Claudia speaks to, Detective Carson, also suggests that it’s not uncommon for girls like Monday (by which he means poor, young Black girls with difficult home lives) to run away rather than ask for help—and unless parents report their children as missing, Detective Carson doesn’t see it as his responsibility to pursue them. In this way, Detective Carson and the law enforcement system he represents effectively absolve themselves of any responsibility to care about Monday and other kids in similar situations—unless their parents are willing to come forward.

Monday’s Not Coming offers no neat answers to these structural issues that prevented the police or the school stepping in when it was clear that Monday and her family were experiencing problems. In a news clip covering Monday’s daddy, Tip’s, multimillion-dollar wrongful death lawsuit against the city for not preventing Monday and August’s murders, a city official encapsulates one of the case’s (and the novel’s) primary questions. He says, “I think it boils down to one question: who’s really responsible for your well-being—your family, the government, or your community?” Claudia’s initial hope that families, the government, and the community would be able to work together to protect Monday and her family may represent an ideal that, the novel suggests, doesn’t always exist in reality, but is one that’s worth working towards for the good of society’s most vulnerable members.