IIn her novel titled “You are Free”, Danzy Senna chooses her characters carefully to address the issues of today’s women about race, motherhood, class, relationship, and gender roles, especially women of color. Senna, in her texts, offers a distinction in expression that paint an image of anxiety of Black women throughout the characters that she presents. Her approach gives a commanding view of each of the characters in her short stories.
In the land of Beulah, Senna talks about the life of a young professional girl named Jackie, a biracial female who is without a mate and children. She is lost trying to find where she belongs after a bad break up with her boyfriend, Kip, who claims she is not Black enough. Looking for a way to cope with her…show more content… One day, while jogging, she finds that stray dog on a rainy day that is abandoned by its owner. Senna, on this story centers on a woman who tries to find her identity, relationship status; but underneath it all lies deeper questioning about the character, Jackie, who no man feels a need or desire for. When she meets that woman in the park with that dog “She reminded Jackie of a high school guidance counselor, somebody settled and sexless”(p.50). This is to say that Jackie sees her image of what she may become, as a woman, in the near future. The woman tries to advice Jackie about how to handle a stray dog, but in her mind she is thinking about herself in a strange world that reminds her of the movie “Nirna” where as a little girl she dreams of living in that world to escape away life from her mother, who was a drunkard. The frustration of being single and living that kind of life and the thought of Jackie from deviating from the correct course of having a relationship, to be a wife, a mother and having children, as required by the norms of society, leads her to forcefully abuse “Beulah”, the dog. Her loneliness and