This instant this revelation hits Laurel is at the end of
the story. This "meanness" of which she speaks is something that causes human beings to
seek deliberate cruelty against another. This might be due to some sadistic desire, but
given the experience of the Brownies in Laurel's troop, it might be the response to
cruelty done to human beings. In this, there is an infinitely regressive cycle of
cruelty as part of payback and retribution, whereby individuals might feel a temporary
good. However, the cycle of hatred and exclusion continues with no end in sight. It is
this pattern of which Laurel speaks that represents the "mean" element in the world that
she cannot stop.
If we consider the Mennonite story for a
moment. Laurel's father tells her that the asking of the Mennonites to paint his porch
would represent "the only time he would be able to see a white man on his knees doing
something for a black man for free," this does not reflect direct sadism. Rather, it is
a representation of the hurt that Laurel's father has suffered as a Black man in
America. The very idea that he would take happiness in seeing "a white man on his
knees" is a reference to the fact that he, himself, has been on his knees for white
people. This sense of hurt is what causes him to take advantage of the Mennonite
faith. It is this same "meanness" that Laurel recognizes is present in her Brownie
troop in how they planned out and wished to take advantage of the white girls' troop.
Even after the recognized the utter meanness in their actions, the girls are still
imitating and mocking them on the bus back. No doubt the hatred of the white girls
stems from the abuse they have suffered at the hands of other white people. Laurel
recognizes this and her father's story as one in the same, as representative of a mean
streak in human interactions, whereby the desire to exclude and intimidate is motivated
by a retributive desire to do to others what has been done to
them.
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