“Reena,” a short story by Paule Marshall, vividly reveals the hardships Reena and Paule, two black career women, encounter in a white male-dominated environment. The story unfolds through Reena’s eyes, and begins when Paule is reunited with Reena at an aunt’s funeral. Throughout the story, the author emphasizes the struggles these women go through as a result of sexism and racism. In “Reena” the characters actively advocate the need for equality rather than accepting the situation which they find themselves.
Reena’s narrative of the path her life followed after her family moved to Jamaica queens conveys the presence of racism between the 40s and 60s. Reena majored in journalism at a free city college where, to Paule’s surprised, she joined a house plan: “An all Negro-club, since there was a lacit understanding that Negro and White girls didn’t join each other’s house plan.”(Marshall 2173) Paule comes to understand, Reena joins this plan for a reason, to “get those girls up off their complacent rumps and out doing something about social issues.” (Reena 2173) From the start Reena is portrayed to the reader as a passionate activist. Most of the girls Reena housed with grew up in the North and felt safe, because they had escaped the southern-style prejudice. Thus even though segregate house plans had brought these girls together, they were still separated, by the fact that the northern black females felt unaffected by racism. Reena tried to tell them they were unsafe, but her attempts were to no avail and eventually impeded by her first brief and apparently innocent affair with a white boy.
The portrayal of Reena as a representative of a generation of independent African-American women, illustrates her struggle to end the severe racism present in the 40s and 60s. Shortly after Reena’s first relationship, Reena took part in a debate about intellectual freedom in the colleges, “and aside from a Jewish boy from city college, Reena was the most effective--sharp,...