Essay Questions

Explore deceit as brought out in “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?”

Myrna has a profound love for literature and becoming a writer. However, her husband Ruel is not supportive of her ambitions. When Myrna meets Mordecai, also another writer with his own set of interests, she confides in him and the two become more than friends. Later after Mordecai passes away, she realizes that she had used her by publishing one of her stories using his name and therefore had taken all the credit for her hard work. Mordecai’s utilization of this dishonest scheme to publish work that was not his paints him out as a rather deceitful and dishonest person. In this short story, deceit is in this way explored.

How is the idea of dysfunctional marriage brought out in Alice Walker’s In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women?

Dysfunctional marriages and marital relations are very well explored in this anthology. For instance, in the short story “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?” the protagonist Myrna is a wannabe writer even though her husband wants nothing of the embarrassment that he feels will follow her being a writer. When she finds Mordecai who outwardly appears to care about her and her work, the magic begins: “Under Mordecai’s fingers my body opened like a flower and carefully bloomed. And it was strange as well as wonderful. Myrna becomes entangled in Mordecai’s wraps only to realize after his death that he had been using her. This is the height of deceit, an unfaithful wife and epitome of a dysfunctional marriage as well as a deceitful extra-marital lover. In “Her Sweet Jerome,” the marriage between the protagonist and her husband also suffers, all thanks to her jealousy.

Roselily gives off her fourth child to his father yet she feels bothered by it. Why is this so?

The love of a mother for their child is a bond so strong and almost unbreakable, a bond that begins at conception. Even though Roselily gives off her son to her father and his people, the love for her son is still alive within her. She often wonders whether doing that was the best decision for her son. Even though her son’s father is quite well off with some money and a Harvard alumnus. Roselily still wonders whether the New England climate would be good for her son and whether the people and the family members of the boy’s father would treat him nicely as well. She wonders whether her son would be stronger than his father who had at one point tried to commit suicide. As a result of Roselily’s constantly worried nature about the wellbeing of her son, she becomes constantly bothered.