SOURCE: "Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family," in MELUS, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 105-17.

In the following essay, Ellerby examines McMillan's depiction of the African-American family in Mama, Disappearing Acts, and Waiting to Exhale. In contrast to other mainstream white, middle-class models, Ellerby asserts that "McMillan's polemical novels reject the dominant patriarchal family values reinforced by the Waltons and the Cosbys and propounded by the Christian right."

In Terry McMillan's first novel, Mama, Mildred's husband is holding fiercely to his notion of being the "man of the house" within the nuclear family:

Crook … found his thick brown leather belt…. Then he made her drop her coat next to it, then her cream knit dress, and then her girdle. When all she had on was her brassiere and panties, he shoved her into the bedroom where she crawled to a corner of the bed...