desiree's baby response

Briana Weems
Desiree’s Baby
“Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin is about a black woman who has a baby but doesn’t know she is black until she has her baby. Desiree was abandoned by her parents when she was a baby and left by a big stone pillar. Valmonde, her adoptive mother, found her there and decided to take her home with her. When she awoke she began to cry for her “Dada.” She was so young that that was all she could do or say. Valmonde didn’t really care how she got there or why she was there, but she believed that she was sent to her to be “the child of her affection” because she wasn’t able to have kids. Desiree grew up to be a beautiful woman that was the idol of Valmonde and she loved everything about her.
Desiree met her husband eighteen years after Valmonde found her lying in the shadow of the pillar. Her husband, Armand Aubigny, drove past her and fell instantly in love with her beauty. It was the way that all the Aubignys fell in love. He too was adopted from Paris and brought to America to live with his new family. He knew exactly what he wanted and went after it. Soon after meeting they got married and not long after that they were married. They got married in France and then moved to L’Abri because Desiree loved her country too much to leave and live somewhere else.
When Valmonde decided to go see Desiree and the baby it had been a month since she had seen them. They had slaves that kept the land up for them and made sure that Desiree and the baby had everything they needed. However Desiree had a white woman as her full time nurse after she gave birth to her baby. When Valmonde walked into the room where they were sleeping, she first kissed Desiree on her forehead. But when she turned to the baby she noticed that it looked differently. She could tell that baby had changed since the last time that she came to visit. She didn’t want to say anything to Desiree but she could tell that the baby was definitely not completely a white baby. She just went along with what Desiree was saying about how big he had gotten and things like that because she didn’t want to worry her.
However the truth about the baby didn’t take long from coming out anyway. When the baby was three months old Armand noticed the difference as well and started acting differently. He didn’t want to be around Desiree and the baby and he made sure he kept his distance from them. But soon after he noticed Desiree noticed too and became instantly worried. She looked at one of the black servants and to her baby and noticed an incredible resemblance and she couldn’t believe it. She ran to her husband to ask him what was going on with the baby and he told her that there was no way the baby was all white, which meant that she was not all white either. After talking to Valmonde she decided the best thing for her to do was just go back to live with her.
The story is truly filled with irony because at the end instead of going home Desiree goes into the fields with the slaves because that’s where she feels she truly belongs and is never seen again. Armand then decides to burn all her clothes because he is so embarrassed and ashamed that he married and had a child with a black woman. He also burns some letters that Desiree wrote him but along with those is one from his mother to his father. At the end of the letter it says that she doesn’t want Armand to know that “he belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” This means that he was the one that was black and not Desiree. He gave the baby his black genetics.