Little Miss Sophie by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 1895
The magic trick:
Creating a martyr character to make a socio-economic point
Like most great Christmas stories, this one leans hard into the martyr character. Little Miss Sophie is not here for us to analyze or befriend. She simply exists in this story to be pitied. Go elsewhere if you want nuance.
The result is a story that will grip you with its sentimentality, and, more importantly, make you think about race and socio-economics.
And that’s quite a trick on Dunbar-Nelson’s part.
The selection:
The bundle grew larger each day, and Miss Sophie grew smaller. The damp, cold rain and mist closed the white-curtained window, but always there behind the sewing-machine drooped and bobbed the little black-robed figure. Whirr, whirr went the wheels, and the coarse jeans pants piled in great heaps at her side. The Claiborne Street car saw her oftener than before, and the sweet white Virgin in the flowered niche above the gold-domed altar smiled at the little supplicant almost every day.
“Ma foi,” said the slatternly landlady to Madame Laurent and Michel one day, “I no see how she live! Eat? Nothin’, nothin’, almos’, and las’ night when it was so cold and foggy, eh? I hav’ to mek him build fire. She mos’ freeze.”
Whereupon the rumour spread that Miss Sophie was starving herself to death to get some luckless relative out of jail for Christmas; a rumour which enveloped her scraggy little figure with a kind of halo to the neighbours when she appeared on the streets.
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