45 pages • 1 hour read
Push
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The Power of Education
One of the ways that Precious’s parents harmed her severely was by impeding her education. Trauma from sexual abuse and pregnancy at 12 caused her to be held back twice, so she is two years older than her peers and unable to read. Once Precious misses her chance to learn at a developmentally normative age, it is impossible for her to catch up in a typical classroom environment. At the start of the book, she is on track to graduate in two years, but the school is merely passing her through classes for the sake of convenience. She receives As in English without ever turning in assignments and is too ashamed to admit that she is illiterate. Precious is the quintessential student who has slipped through the cracks of the public education system. Without intervention, her future would likely hold menial jobs and welfare checks.
Although Precious’s expulsion for her pregnancy is unfair (particularly since no one bothers to investigate the fact that her pregnancy is the result of rape and incest), it turns out to be the best thing that could happen to her. She becomes excited about the word “alternative” when Mrs. Lichenstein tells her about an alternative school. An alternative represents the chance for a different path from the one her mother has traveled and become stuck on. It’s an opportunity that Precious didn’t expect to receive. At Each One Teach One, Precious finally gets the help and attention she needs to learn how to read and write. Unlike traditional school, this program doesn’t expect the students to learn on a predetermined schedule and allows them to stay in the class until they are ready to move on. In this environment, Precious demonstrates that she is intelligent but has simply been left behind by teachers who couldn’t see her potential. Learning to read and write opens up Precious’s world, enabling her to better express herself and reflect on her experiences. The idea of reading books has always been mysterious to Precious, but she finds strength in books like The Color Purple, which gives her a new framework for understanding her father’s sexual abuse and her own blamelessness. Reading also represents agency, enabling Precious to read what others have written about her in case files and thus to challenge the often racist systems that have failed her.
Education ultimately separates Precious from her parents and allows her to break the cycles of generational ignorance and abuse. Education about HIV will likely allow her to live longer than her father, who died quickly, and her mother, who is probably infected but doesn’t believe that she needs to be tested. Precious’s education also influences her development as a parent. After removing Abdul from her abusive home shortly after his birth, she gives him advantages that she didn’t have by teaching him to read from an early age and taking classes on parenting. Even when Precious learns that her life expectancy will be much shorter because of HIV, she fights for her education. She is determined to make it to college, a goal that would have been unthinkable when the novel began.
Motherhood and Black Womanhood
Precious first gives birth at 12, but she doesn’t have the chance to become a mother. The baby is taken to her grandmother and then institutionalized, although Precious dreams frequently about gaining custody of her daughter and raising her herself. Precious has had it instilled in her that abortion and adoption are not options despite the fact that she is a victim of rape and incest (as well as a child herself). When Abdul is born, Ms. Rain reminds her gently that adoption could be the child’s best opportunity for a better life, but Precious is determined to keep the baby. Although she is still too young for motherhood at 17, Precious rises to the challenge. Even Ms. Weiss writes in Precious’s file that she is a good mother (amid other, condescending notations about Precious’s aspirations and potential). Precious loves her two children, despite her complex feelings about their genesis and the difficulties they create for her continued pursuit of her goals.
Precious’s parenting is all the more exceptional considering the lack of positive role models and examples in her life. Her own mother chooses Carl’s desires over Precious’s needs at an early age by switching Precious to bottle-feeding so Carl can suck on her breasts. Then she allows Carl to start raping and assaulting Precious at the age of three, prioritizing Carl by compromising her daughter’s safety and happiness. Mary is an opportunist as a mother, using Precious and her first baby for welfare checks, forcing Precious to act as a servant, and exploiting Precious as bait to keep Carl returning. Mary sees Precious for what she can do for her, whereas Precious is willing to make sacrifices for her baby. She also sees Precious as competition for Carl’s affections, punishing and abusing her brutally for Carl’s actions. Precious sees herself reflected in her mother and it makes her hate herself. At the end of the novel, however, she sees herself reflected in her son, and it allows her to see her own beauty.
Traumatic as the circumstances surrounding her pregnancies are, becoming a mother is therefore part of what helps Precious finally embrace her identity as a Black woman. Although racism’s systemic effects are visible all around Precious—for instance, in her experiences with the educational system—its most visceral impact in Push is the self-hatred Precious has internalized. For much of the novel, she struggles to reconcile her appearance with her claims to basic dignity and respect; as she describes her father’s abuse, the only way she can articulate that she is a “real person” who doesn’t deserve such treatment is by saying she is “like a white girl […] inside” (32). However, when Precious becomes a mother to Abdul, she finds the child’s beauty undeniable, and in loving her “shiny brown boy” (140), she learns to love her own Blackness.
The Widespread Rape and Abuse of Women
The young women in Ms. Rain’s class come from very different backgrounds, but one thing that unites those whose stories we learn is the experience of sexual abuse and trauma. Rhonda, Jermaine, and Rita have all had their lives derailed and their education undermined by abuse. Rhonda’s mother neglects her and forces her into child labor before ousting her from her home when her brother rapes her. Jermaine’s parents are abusive toward her and each other. As a lesbian, she experiences corrective rape and further violence from strangers who attack her. Rita witnesses her father murdering her mother and experiences rape and abuse in the foster system before becoming a sex worker out of necessity. Although she doesn’t detail her experience of incestuous abuse, she is also the one who takes Precious to the incest survivors meeting.
Precious struggles with self-blame when processing the extensive sexual and physical abuse her parents inflicted on her. Both her mother and father gaslit her into believing that she had somehow asked for the rape and abuse. Her father insisted that Precious enjoyed being raped, and her mother blames her, as though Precious were another woman stealing her boyfriend instead of a child victim of assault. Her parents’ attitudes hit harder because of the way Precious’s body has sometimes responded to the assault; she finds it difficult to reconcile the pleasure she unwillingly felt with the knowledge that sexual contact was forced on her. When Mary meets with Precious and the social worker at the end of the book, she still doesn’t recognize her actions or her husband’s actions as abusive, although she states matter-of-factly that Carl began raping Precious at the age of three. She asserts that she didn’t want it to happen, but only because she didn’t want to share Carl.
Precious manages to escape her parents’ household, but she cannot fully escape the ramifications of her abusive childhood. In one of the poems that she includes in the class book, Precious writes, “marY Had a little lamb but I got a kid an HIV that folow me to school one day” (143). Precious is her mother Mary’s little lamb. As the product of Mary’s relationship with Carl, Precious was forced to give of herself and accept abuse and rape from both parents. Precious herself now has a child and a deadly virus that follow her to school. She has stretch marks on her body from her pregnancies. Just as Rita has damaged teeth from drug use resulting from abuse and trauma, and Jermaine has scars from being attacked on the street, Precious bears the permanent effects of her parents’ abuse.
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