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M 'ildred Taylor’s 1987 novella The Gold Cadillac has received scant attention in studies of her fiction. Yet, the text plays a crucial role in the larger body of her work as a manifestation of her vision of the individual subject’s relation to a larger community. More specifically, The Gold Cadillac presents a protagonist—’lois—and a series of events modeled in part on Taylor’s own life experiences that invite her readers to consider how subjectivity (both hers as well as their own) is influenced by forces such as communal ties and kinship and how both individual subject and commu­ nity are shaped by pressures and contingencies of time and place that result in potentially problematic constructions of race and gender. In The Gold Cadillac, Taylor examines the emo­ tional and psychological tensions resulting from life in the segregated South of the 1950s by constructing a narrative style that relies on both a single voice—that of ’lois—and that of community of listeners and speakers. Taylor employs a complex mix of private and public speech to reflect and, at times, challenge the ways in which issues of race become embedded in the consciousness of her African American characters. Moreover, she uses private and public speech to tell a story designed to reach multiple audiences: black as well as white, children as well as adolescents and adults. Before turning to the novella itself, I want to elaborate on my use of the concept of public and private speech and its relation to Taylor’s larger project in The Gold Cadillac. In her article, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” Mae Gwendolyn Henderson argues that African American women writers’ works should be examined for their commen­ taries on the interrelationship between race and gender. She claims that black women’s texts speak from a “multiple and complex social, historical and cultural perspective” which, in effect, constitutes black female subjectivity and that analysis of this multivalent subjectivity must take into account both a dialogic of differences and a dialectic of identity (344). Building on the works of Mikhail Bahktin, Barbara Christian, and Hans-George Gadamer, Henderson asserts that the writings of black women are expres­ sive of four key levels of discourse involving the relation of an individual self to a generalized “other” imagined to exist both outside and within the self. These four levels are: the self in competition with the

the alan review

The Day That Daddy&amp;#8217;s Baby Girl Is Forced to Grow Up: The Development of Adolescent Female Subjectivity in Mildred D. Taylor&amp;#8217;s The Gold Cadillac