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Summary
Part One: troubled about my soul
Section 1: Beginning through “…it was just like walking into church.”
The book opens with the first-person narrator, Tish, introducing herself. She describes going to visit Fonny, her boyfriend, in jail and telling him that she is pregnant with his child. She assures him that she is happy about the pregnancy, and soon he is also smiling. He asks what she is going to do, and she assures him that her mother and sister will take care of her and that they will get him out of jail soon. After their visit, Tish reflects on her pride in Fonny and her belief that people should not be ashamed of being in jail or having loved ones in jail.
The narrative shifts to the past as Tish remembers meeting Fonny when she was six years old and he was nine. After school one day, Tish’s friend Geneva gets into a fight with Fonny’s friend Daniel. Tish tries to pull Daniel off Geneva, and Fonny begins pulling on Tish. Tish hits him with a stick she finds in a garbage can, accidentally cutting his cheek with a nail embedded in the stick. After seeing the blood, Tish runs away in fear, but Fonny catches her and spits at her. While Tish cries in humiliation, Geneva yells out that Tish has killed Fonny, saying that he will get tetanus from the nail. This pushes Fonny to cry as well until Geneva and Daniel take him and walk away, leaving Tish alone. A few days later, still afraid that Fonny may die, Tish tries to visit him. She learns from Frank, Fonny’s father, that Fonny’s mother has sent him to the country because he has been getting in too much trouble. When Fonny returns, he and Tish apologize to each other and become friends. Geneva and Tish’s friendship ends, and Daniel and Fonny fight badly. Fonny turns down Tish’s offer to take revenge on Daniel.
Fonny’s mother, Mrs. Hunt, is a devout churchgoer, and Fonny’s sisters take after her, but Fonny and his father are much more lenient about the rules. As an adult, Fonny describes how his parents have sex to Tish. Mrs. Hunt comes home exhausted from church, lies across the bed in her church clothes, and begins to ask Frank when he will give himself to the Lord. Their argument turns into wild lovemaking. In the morning, they seem once again their separate selves, with Mrs. Hunt committed to Jesus and Frank back to his shop. Fonny tells Tish that Frank only stayed with the family for Fonny’s sake.
In their childhood, Tish goes to Fonny’s church with him, Mrs. Hunt, and his sisters one Sunday, an event she thinks of later as their first date. Tish feels on display as they walk down the aisle of the church to the front row. As congregants give testimony and sing, the energy in the room grows. Mrs. Hunt and a dark-skinned woman begin to sing, clapping their hands and crying out to Jesus in a call-and-response that Tish sees as somehow competitive. As the congregation joins them and the church becomes louder and louder, Tish has the sense that she and Fonny are holding each other despite neither looking at nor touching each other. Terrified, Tish grabs Fonny’s hand. Although they never talk about their trip to church again, Tish is reminded of how she felt there when she goes to see Fonny at the jail.
Analysis
The text compares the corridors of the jailhouse that Tish enters when she leaves Fonny after their visit to the Sahara desert. This extended metaphor establishes the sense of exposure and danger Tish feels in the jailhouse and in the criminal justice system as a whole. The narration describes the lawyers, bail bondsmen, and others whose work revolves around the jail as vultures waiting to prey on the poor people who, like Tish, must walk across the wide-open spaces of the corridors. The description of the jail as an ecosystem illustrates how the people there act according to their assigned roles, just as animals in the Sahara are scavengers or prey according to their species. Tish describes these middlemen as vultures waiting for the poor to fall and become their sustenance, never realizing that they are also pawns in a system designed to benefit the rich and powerful. This image sets the stage for the novel’s stark critique of the criminal justice system.
The motif of beauty arises frequently in this section of the book, with conventional American beauty standards being associated with haughtiness and cruelty. Mrs. Hunt is described as having been a great beauty as a young woman, a quality that has left her with a permanent arrogance. While her daughters are not as beautiful as she was, they are light-skinned with relatively straight hair—attributes associated with beauty in a colorist system that values European features above African ones. Like her, they are unkind and consider themselves superior to Fonny and Tish, who have darker skin and kinkier hair. When Mrs. Hunt tells Tish she looks pretty on the day they go to church together, Tish understands that her comment is meant to convey that she ordinarily looks unattractive. Tish does not consider herself beautiful. She notes that even Fonny does not bother telling her she is pretty, but rather complains about the difficult ways of pretty women. In this way, the novel establishes that not only is superficial physical beauty not an admirable quality, it also has negative effects on people’s character. Beauty has contributed to the unkindness of Mrs. Hunt and her daughters, while Tish’s love for Fonny allows her to transcend superficial prettiness.
Tish’s visit to Mrs. Hunt’s church illustrates how she and Fonny naturally seek each other’s support in environments that frighten them and make them feel unloved. The Sanctified church is Mrs. Hunt’s territory, and she defines herself principally in terms of her moral rectitude and Christian righteousness. However, while her daughters take after her, Fonny is more allied with his father, a jovial man with a willingness to break the rules and no particular religious fervor. Mrs. Hunt does not regularly get Fonny to church, and he does not feel he belongs there. Tish experiences the church as a place of menace, as illustrated by the violent description of the piano player. His hands are “made for strangling” and his playing is compared to beating someone’s brains out. When Mrs. Hunt and the other churchgoers get louder, Fonny and Tish cling to each other, vulnerable and frightened that no one who loves them is there in church. This scene reveals how, even as children, they instinctively turn to each other for comfort. Throughout their lives and the events of the novel, they continue to support each other in the face of a hostile world.
