The narrator describes Mable as immaculately groomed, uncompromising in her individuality, “never subservient” nor “insolent” and always “serious and respectful” in her social relationships.
“Alert” and “a fine physical specimen”, she was once employed at a Chinese-American -owned laundry where she and her female co-workers ironed clothing at a picture window facing the street.
[5] “The Colored Girls of Passenack- Old and New” provides “an autobiographical reminiscences” of five black woman Williams encountered who influenced his early sexual awareness as a boy and his professional development as writer while acting as their employer or personal physician.
[7] Literary critic Robert F. Gish writes: “The Colored Girls of Passenack - Old and New” offers an interesting psychological and social “history” of racial and sexual attitudes during Williams’ and his parents’ times—from about 1895 to the 1920s.
[8]Gish adds that “the story, in its intent, is a testimonial to the beauty of black women, who are some respects set above white women by Williams.”[9] Literary critic James E. B. Breslin, remarks on the “profound physical force”[10] which operates on the narrator-physician in his response to a black female patient in “The Colored Girls of Passenack”: [T]he passage illustrates one of the remarkable effects Williams achieves in this fiction: his ability through external description to create the sense of deep contact with a character…[11]