Patricia Smith, a credible writer who is a renowned poet and who has been nominated for many awards, teaches the main character of Pearl, Upward, Annie, that she should not have taken her old life for granted, that she cannot always run away when she does not like the view of her life, and that she must face the consequences of her choices. Annie Pearl Connor, mother of the storyteller, was a Delta girl from Alabama who was always “running wide, running on purpose, running toward something” (Smith 183) when she was a child. She had a nice life in Alabama but it was not enough; she wanted to live the American dream in Chicago, the foil of Alabama. While residing in Chicago, Annie loses the tenacious young girl she once was and becomes a scorned woman filled with regret. Instead of living the dream, she lives a nightmare. Smith wrote, “She crafts a life that is dimmer than she’d hoped, in a tenement flat with walls pressing hard and fat roaches, sluggish with Raid, dropping into her food, writing on the mattress of her Murphy bed” (181). Chicago’s rejection of Annie causes the reader to both pity and be a little happy that she is getting her just desserts because of the irony of the situation. To “claim her place in the north” (Smith 183), Annie tries to find love and have a baby. She was “driven by that American dream of birthing a colorless colored child with no memories whatsoever of the Delta” (Smith 183) in order to prove to herself that she made the right decision to leave Alabama behind. However, as her lover offers her no promise of a future or support for her child, Annie is left alone in Chicago with a new responsibility that she cannot run away from. It is then that Annie learns the intended lesson of the author and fulfills the bildungsroman purpose. Smith’s target audience, people who run away from their problems and/or those who have left their past behind them but are regretting their actions, have learned their lesson(s) as well.
The Equivalent of Annie's Dreams
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