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Marcus was getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford. It was something he would never have been able to imagine doing back when he was splitting a mattress with his father, and yet, there he was. Sonny had been so proud when he told him he’d been accepted to Stanford that he cried.

Marcus becomes the first member of the American side of the family to reach postsecondary education, highlighting how the family has managed to succeed and thrive despite the considerable pain, discrimination, and suffering they have faced throughout their history. Stanford is an elite private school, a marker of intelligence and status. However, Marcus is very aware that reaching this milestone was far from guaranteed. His hyperawareness of his family’s proximity to poverty shadows his intellectual achievements because he understands the precarity of his success.

Marcus thought about that day often. He was still amazed by it. Not by the fear he’d felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he’d felt later, when his family had finally found him.

The cumulative years of struggle on the American side of the family have made the love Marcus experiences as a child possible. In previous generations, sometimes the greatest show of parental love is letting a child go, as Ness does with Kojo. In others, no amount of love can protect a child, as Kojo learns with H. Because of the historical moment and Sonny’s determination to be a present father, Marcus is not so easily torn from the family. The loving family support he experiences allows him to become the high-achieving student he grows into.

How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance.

Throughout his chapter, Marcus is haunted by the family history he can’t know, by those who were swallowed up by the cruelty of Black American history. His understanding of history has given him the terrifying knowledge that overcoming the sheer amount of hatred and systemic oppression Black Americans face involves luck in some form, and maintaining safety and success is always precarious. Even as a PhD student at Stanford, he knows that acting the wrong way could get the police called on him. He never feels entirely secure.

It’s not just because I’m scared of drowning. Though I guess I am. It’s because of all that space. It’s because everywhere I look, I see blue, and I have no idea where it begins. When I’m out there, I stay as close as I can to the sand, because at least then I know where it ends.

In this quotation, Marcus describes the reason for his fear of drowning to Marjorie. The vast, empty expanse of blue echoes how Marcus sees his own history, as intimidatingly large, something he has no way to follow to its end. In other words, for Marcus, water is a symbol of being cut off from his origins and a symbol of how he has no path to trace. Slavery has left Marcus’s line of the family literally adrift, not knowing where across the sea their roots are.

She walked to where he stood, where the fire met the water. He took her hand and they both looked out into the abyss of it. The fear that Marcus had felt inside the Castle was still there, but he knew it was like the fire, a wild thing that could still be controlled, contained.

At the very end of the novel, Marjorie helps Marcus contain his fear of water, and he helps her with her fear of fire. This moment symbolizes the healing of their respective intergenerational traumas. Marjorie guides Marcus into the water and brings him closer to his roots. The water is no longer an abyss to get lost in but a site of homecoming. Marjorie, helping Marcus feel rooted, at last finally controls the fire of hurt that started when Maame lit it centuries before.

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