Drenched in Light

In the story, race and economic class play an important role because they provide context for the social paradigms in which these characters exist. Grandma Potts, as an elder in her community, would have been exposed to the harsh realities of racism, poverty, and the prejudices African Americans experience on a daily basis. As such, Grandma Potts fixates on appearances, and she wants to appear put together and proper to keep prejudice and violence at bay. When Isis goes missing at the carnival, Grandma Potts is concerned that she will “find her in her soiled dress, shoeless, gaping at the crowd,” which would violate the image she is trying to project about her family (51). Overt racial prejudice is not present in the text, but the story takes place in Florida during the Jim Crow era. This implies that Grandma Potts is familiar with segregation and anti-Black violence. Unlike Grandma Potts, Isis’s experience of the outside world is limited, and Isis appears sheltered from these realities because of her confinement within her home. Although Hurston does not explicitly state Grandma Potts’s background, her actions and expectations imply that she is looking to help her granddaughter go through life as easily as possible due to the discrimination against African Americans.