Mrs. Wiggins

Mrs. Wiggins is a fiction novel written by acclaimed African American author Mary Monroe. In this first book in a series set in Lexington, Alabama during the Great Depression, Maggie Wiggins finds her life improved when she marries a preacher’s son, Hubert Wiggins, a closeted gay man, and pursues unconventional means to have a baby. As Claude grows into a handsome young man and becomes involved with a woman of whom his parents disapprove, Maggie turns to increasingly desperate means to protect her son, keep her job, and preserve her way of life, making perilous choices that end in unforeseen tragedy for her entire family.

Monroe is the author of over 30 novels and novellas and has received several accolades recognizing her career. Her second novel, God Don’t Like Ugly (2000), won the PEN Oakland Award for Best Fiction, and later books in this series hit the New York Times bestseller list. She won the Best Southern Author Award, the J. California Cooper Memorial Award, and received the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Monroe’s writing is praised for its themes of female friendship, the resilience of her protagonists, her frank, down-to-earth narrative voice, and compelling narratives built around intimacy, secrets, and tragedy.

This guide refers to the hardcover edition of Mrs. Wiggins published in 2021 by Kensington.

Content Warning: The source material depicts sexual assault, anti-gay bias, anti-Black racism, lynching, intimate partner violence, graphic violence, murder, termination of a pregnancy, and death by suicide. The text uses the period-specific term “colored” to refer to Black characters and employs period-specific language to describe sexual orientation, mental health, and intellectual disability.

Plot Summary

Maggie, the first-person narrator of the novel, is 17, and her new husband, Hubert Wiggins, is 20. Having married that afternoon, Maggie and Hubert begin their life together by discussing how they plan to have a child. Hubert is only sexually interested in men, and Maggie would prefer not to have sex at all, so she and Hubert have married on the agreement that they will not have sexual relations. However, since they both want a child, they decide that Maggie will sleep with a man who resembles Hubert and hopefully become pregnant by him. Maggie is the daughter of a couple held in low esteem in their town of Lexington—her father abuses alcohol and her mother was formerly a sex worker—but their community respects Hubert’s parents, a Baptist preacher and an in-demand hairdresser. The young couple decides they will visit towns outside of Lexington to locate a father for their child.

Early forays are unsuccessful, and it makes Maggie uncomfortable to evade her in-laws and go to bars by herself. After one demoralizing encounter in the backseat of a car, Maggie meets Randolph Webb, who is kind to her and already the father of several children. Maggie visits Randolph, telling him her name is Louise until she achieves a confirmed pregnancy. She is overjoyed, as is Hubert. Maggie doesn’t inform Randolph of her pregnancy but simply cuts ties with him. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Maggie gives birth to a son, Claude.

Though her father dies of a heart attack and her mother dies in the influenza epidemic of 1918, Maggie, on the whole, is satisfied with her life. She and Hubert are good partners and get along well. Hubert is discreet about his affairs with men, knowing their community would demonstrate prejudice against him if they knew the truth. Maggie dotes on Claude, who is a bright, active boy. She develops a friendship with another young married woman, Jessie Tucker, who is also trying to get pregnant. Jessie’s husband is unkind to her and her son is diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, which makes Maggie feel she is especially fortunate.

In 1936, after Claude graduates high school, Maggie gets a job doing laundry for an 87-year-old white woman, Mrs. Dowler. Mrs. Dowler, a widow, treats Maggie like a companion and equal, and she pays generously. Maggie learns as much as she can from her employer and loves her job. Conflict enters her life, however, when Jessie, who loves to gossip, informs Maggie that Claude is in a relationship with Daisy Compton, an older woman who has four children and a reputation for having many sexual partners and frequently being abusive toward them.

Maggie is horrified and confides in Mrs. Dowler and Jessie, both of whom caution her to treat Claude as an adult and let him make his own decisions, even if they seem like mistakes to her. On their advice, Maggie tries to make overtures of friendship toward Daisy, who returns her efforts with condescension and avarice. Though Daisy attacks and threatens Claude, he insists he loves and will stand by her. Daisy, however, informs Maggie that she is using Claude for financial support, has manipulated him into proposing marriage, and plans to make him cut ties with his family completely. Determined not to lose her son, Maggie plots to kill Daisy. She invites her to go blackberry picking, strikes Daisy over the head, and hides her body in an abandoned well. Then, she forges a note from Daisy saying she left town to be with her ex. Claude moves back home, relieved to be free of Daisy, and having her family reunited reassures Maggie that she did what was necessary to save her son.

Another torment arises in the form of Oswald, Mrs. Dowler’s younger brother, who moves into her house and sexually assaults Maggie, who fears she will lose her source of income. Maggie survived ongoing sexual abuse from one of her father’s friends when she was a young girl and decides she will not put up with this again. She plans to put the arsenic she sprinkles on Mrs. Dowler’s garden in Oswald’s whiskey, but as it turns out, she can suffocate him while he sleeps. Maggie loses her job anyway when Mrs. Dowler, shaken by her brother’s death, goes to live with her son.

The Great Depression is still causing financial hardship in 1939, and while Maggie searches for a job, she finds other opportunities to use the arsenic hidden in her pantry. She poisons Jessie’s husband, Orville, to free Jessie and her son from his abuse and threats of harm. She poisons her older neighbor, Mason Burris, whose actions are becoming increasingly erratic and aggressive. In both cases, a spoonful of arsenic in her famous and much-admired gumbo effectively removes a problematic person from the lives of her friends.

When Hubert decides, after over 20 years of marriage, that he wishes to leave Maggie, come out to his parents, and live with his lover, Daryl, Maggie is desperate to preserve their life together. Though she pleads, Hubert won’t change his mind, so Maggie leaves a bowl of her special gumbo in the pantry for him. When she returns to find the house in an uproar, Maggie learns that Claude, not Hubert, ate the bowl of gumbo, and it killed him. Maggie is so distressed by the knowledge that she killed her beloved child that she laces another bowl of gumbo with arsenic and eats it. In her last thoughts, she hopes that Claude will forgive her.