How did Suzella change during her stay with the Logans, and was it for the better in Let the Circle Be Unbroken?

Suzella enters the Logan family's lives to spare her the
difficulty of her parents negotiating a divorce. She exits as sharply after her father,
called Cousin Bud by the Logans, is endangered and humiliated by Stuart and his gang of
ruffians. Suzella saw and learned much that had the potential to change her while she
lived with the Logans. One way she was changed is that she discovered that questions of
identity are harder to sort out than through others’ reactions to
appearance.

While with the Logans, the white residents of
the town assume she is white because of her appearance. She is given particular respect
and attention by one very high-profile young man called Stuart. While he is nice to
Suzella, he is not essentially good. This is testified to by his treatment of the black
families: he likes to flirt with the black girls just to taunt them and make them feel
dissatisfied and ashamed.

After it is discovered that
Suzella fits the Southern legal definition of African American, she is scorned and
humiliated more severely because of the way the white population was fooled by her. In
addition, when her father returns to take her home, he is exposed as her father and they
both find themselves in a dangerous confrontation with an angry and scornful
Stuart:

readability="10">

[Stuart] kept his eyes on Suzella a moment
longer, then turned to Cousin Bud. "That's an idea, Pierceson. We'll see jus' how light
the n----r is...All right, n----r, go 'head. Get them clothes
off."

These kinds of
humiliations, shocks, reproaches, dangers do undeniably change a person. Is it a good
change? The author doesn't go any further with Suzella and her father than to
say:

Cousin
Bud got out and went to the outhouse ... when he came back ..., he would not look
directly at anyone. That evening, before dusk, he and Suzella left for New
York.

The reader is therefore
left to draw their own conclusions about whether these are changes for the better. My
opinion is that these changes are not for the better. These changes came from
violence--emotional, psychological and physical violence--these changes came from trauma
to herself and to her father--and to herself again because she was forced to watch the
violence of trauma administered to her father. These changes are damage. These changes
are not for the better. It may be argued that it is better to lose one's naivete and
gullibility. While this is true, the route of violent trauma is not the means through
which to change one’s naivete and gullibility. Plain and simple. It is not the
way.