Small Island: Chapter 53: Hortense Summary & Analysis

Downstairs, Queenie makes Hortense lock the door and slide a chair under the handle. Hortense begs her to call a doctor, but Queenie just demands to be helped into the bedroom. Sitting on the bed, she sheds her dress and starts unwrapping a large bandage around her torso. Hortense wonders if Bernard—who seems like a violent man—has been beating her, but she soon realizes Queenie is enormously pregnant, and has just gone into labor.

Hortense knows nothing about giving birth, and she awkwardly pats Queenie’s hand while choking back tears of fear. Queenie isn’t afraid—she tells Hortense it will be just like the scene in Gone With the Wind, when the protagonist gives birth. Hortense is indignant at the comparison; she’s an “educated woman,” not a “fool slave girl […] dancing in panic.” Determined to demonstrate this to Queenie, she strips off her gloves and boils a pot of water. Gilbert and Bernard are banging on the door, but she calmly tells them it’s a little “women’s matter.”

Queenie’s contractions are coming more frequently now, and Hortense reluctantly opens her legs to examine the baby’s progress; she’s pleased to see the head has almost emerged. It’s the “ugliest sight” Hortense has ever seen, and she’s repulsed at the idea that a woman who just a day before was going about her normal chores should be abruptly reduced to such abject and primitive suffering. Still, knowing she has to keep Queenie calm, Hortense tells her the baby is doing well and encourages her to push. Soon, Hortense finds herself holding the newborn baby.

Hortense hands the slimy baby to its mother, quietly pleased that she hasn’t stained her wedding dress. Following Queenie’s instructions, she ties the umbilical cord and cuts it. Lovingly, Queenie inspects the new baby, counting its fingers and toes and fingers and declaring that he’s a “lovely, perfect boy.” Suddenly, Queenie expels her afterbirth, which lands on Hortense, spattering her dress with blood. Hortense looks down at herself in dismay; but when she looks at the baby again, she realizes that his arrival is “a gift from the Lord,” well worth “a little disgust on your best dress.”

Hortense approaches the baby, which Queenie has swaddled in a towel. On closer inspection, she’s astounded to see that the baby, who’d been red just moments ago, is actually darker than she is; she’s even more astounded that Queenie, entranced with the little boy, doesn’t care that her baby isn’t white. Suddenly she hears Gilbert’s voice, demanding to know what’s happening, and Bernard stuffily telling Gilbert not to block the door. Hortense feels that it’s a “vicious cruelty” to look at Queenie and her serene baby and tells her that she has to let the men in.