Katie, the five-year-old in her family's tomb, is one of the most complex characters in Mexican playwright Elena Garro's 1957 short piece A Solid Home (Un Hogar Solido). Katie seems torn between longing for the living world she left so young and being confident that her future "solid home" is the mixing of her elements into other forms – Garro's theory of the afterlife. Although scholar James Mandrell states flatly, "Garro makes obvious the impossibility of escape from the determinants of existence in the time that is history" (233), Katie struggles against her history and future home. Garro may have had similar concerns. In 1937, she went with her new husband, Octavio Paz, to the Spanish Revolution, then returned to Mexico, moved to Berkeley, then San Francisco, New York City, Paris, and Tokyo before returning to Mexico, where the government forced her to undergo naturalization (Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "Elena" 773). Following all these moves, while talking to her cousin at a bar in Mexico City, Garro noted, "What I need is a solid home" (qtd. in Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "A Solid" 774). After so few solid homes, Garro wrote a play exploring that topic for her famous husband in a mere half hour (Greenwald, Schultz, & Pomo, "A Solid" 774). Like Garro, Katie had perhaps more homes than she wanted. Katie's contradictory, childlike character is both sadly angry about missing life by dying young and cynically amused by realities about death that she has learned. Katie's childlike ways are evident when she reminds her sister, Jessie, that "Lady Diptheria brought me" (Garro 778). Katie's fantastical name for the disease that killed her before she could go to school reminds us that she is merely five. But she is also the contemporary, the sister, of Mama Jessie, who died at eighty. Immediately Katie becomes a character with contradictions. Jessie's daughter Gertrude formally addresses her as "Aunt Katherine" (Garro 777). But she then scolds little Katie for taking a femur and using it as a trumpet. Early in the play, Katie seems mostly childlike and mischievous, a girl who calls a femur "my little sugar bugle" (777). As the play goes on, however, Katie reveals her sad and angry side. Having died so young, Katie feels cheated and asks her sister, pointedly, "And was the school of the Misses Simson nice?" (Garro 778). Jessie lived and went to school; Katie did not. Similarly, Katie is angry about being lied to on the day of her burial. She points out that "When they brought me, [Don Hilary] said, 'A little angel flew away!' And it wasn't true. I was here below, alone and very frightened" (Garro 779). Katie is willing to be fantastical and sweet about Lady Diptheria and her "fingers of cotton [that] . . . wouldn't let me breathe" (778), but she tells the painful truth about what it was like to be buried young and alone. Her cousin Vincent, killed in battle under Benito Juárez, admits that when he arrived, presumably about twenty years later, "Katie [was] crying: 'I want to see my mama!' " (Garro 779). While other characters wax poetic about the sounds, textures, and colors of their former homes, sad little Katie does not. Katie's reply to Jessie's description of how she wept when Katie died shows both anger and knowledge that death inevitably takes us from our old home: Dummy! Didn't you know that you were going to come to play with me here? That day, St. Michael sat down beside me and wrote it with his sword of fire on the roof of my house. I didn't know how to read . . . and I read it. (Garro 778)
Without having gone to school, Katie clearly understands that everyone dies. But, even surrounded, inevitably, by her family members, Katie is still angry that her death was so early. When the others list what they want to be on the day they "enter into the celestial order" (780), Katie first says she wants to be "the index finger of God the Father!" (780). She wants to be active, live, give the orders herself for once. The others suppress her with a unison "Child!" (780). Jessie also rejects Katie's next idea: KATIE. And I want to be a window that looks at the world! MAMA JESSIE. There'll no longer be a world, Katie, because we'll be . . . after the Final Judgment. (781)
Katie begins weeping at this news and protests that she has been cheated: "There'll no longer be a world. And when am I going to see it? I didn't see anything" (Garro 779). Katie has gained wisdom in death, but she's also an angry and disappointed little girl. Although she mentions "the celestial order," Garro seems most confident that the "solid home" we have after death is that our elements, once released from our bodies, are incorporated into other forms. Drama critic Jimmy Fowler notes that Garro's proposition is challenging: "Maybe scarier . . . than the notion that there's nothing after death is the idea that life will continue without our precious identity, that we're just fodder for the great cycle" (Fowler 3). Being reduced to free-floating elements is a frightening thought for Lydia, the new arrival in the crypt, but Katie is amused telling Lydia the hard facts. Indeed, she laughs and torments Lydia by telling Jessie, still reeling from being a blind fish, "You were also very frightened when you were the worm that came in and out of your mouth" (Garro 780). Teasing like a child, Katie makes a cynical speech worthy of an old lady who is well-acquainted with, but perhaps still not happy about, what happens after death. She voices competing angry and accepting thoughts about death and the possibility of finding a solid home. Works Cited Fowler, Jimmy. "Undead Heads: Teatro Dallas Sounds Profound When It's Howling at the Moon." dallasobserver.com. 15 October 1998. Dallas Observer. 15 July 2004 . Garro, Elena. A Solid Home (Un Hogar Solido). The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater: A Global Perspective. Compact ed. Eds. Michael L. Greenwald, Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 776-781. Greenwald, Michael L., Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. "Elena Garro." The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater: A Global Perspective. Compact ed. Eds. Michael. L. Greenwald, Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 773-774. ---. "A Solid Home." The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater: A Global Perspective. Compact ed. Eds. Michael L. Greenwald, Roger Schultz, and Roberto D. Pomo. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 774-775. Mandrell, James. "The Prophet Voice in Garro, Morante, and Allende." Comparative Literature Summer 1990: 227-246. ProQuest Research Library. Raynor Memorial Library, Marquette Univ. 15 July 2004 .