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Summary
Chapter 2
In Chapter 2, we follow Leonie as she recounts events following the life-changing phone call from Michael at Jojo’s birthday party. After they hang up, she immediately calls the bar where she works and manages to secure an extra shift. She thinks back to how she got this job at the Cold Drink, remembering that she was introduced to the owner, Gloria, by Michael’s unfriendly mother, Maggie. Despite the bar's ramshackle appearance and less-than-savory clientele, Leonie has found a place there. She’s an extremely hard worker, easily outperforming her coworker and best friend Misty, who is usually both drunk and high on a cocktail of drugs. Misty is white, and has a Black boyfriend called Bishop who is also imprisoned at Parchman.
The day before Jojo’s birthday, Leonie had joined Misty at her cottage, where they both snorted cocaine to try and dull the nastiness of their mundane days. During the high, Leonie sees the apparition of her dead brother, Given. She tells the reader that although he’s been dead for fifteen years, Given always manifests to her when she's under the influence. He can’t speak, but he appears to be able to hear her and can communicate with gestures. Misty is confused about why Leonie appears to be staring off into space, and after some prodding Leonie admits that she’s seeing her dead brother. Misty dismisses her, and Leonie’s feelings are hurt. She keeps quiet, however, because she knows if she started a fight with Misty and the cops came, they would arrest her first. Given mocks Misty, and Leonie remembers how he would fight for her when other children were mean to her at school. Misty repeats that Leonie shouldn’t be having hallucinations from the cocaine, and Leonie lets the issue drop.
As Leonie organizes herself to go and pick up Michael from jail, she thinks about how much easier it would be just to bring Kayla and leave Jojo behind. She knows that Michael will be disappointed if Jojo doesn’t come, however, so she resolves to bring them both along. Pop catches her and expresses concern over her plans to drive to the prison. Despite Pop's implied warning, and her mother's rapidly advancing sickness, Leonie is determined to proceed with her plan. The narrative shifts abruptly to Leonie’s memories of Mam’s healing abilities, and her fear that she may have inherited her mother’s gift for the supernatural. Mam told Leonie when she was a girl that it was often passed down through bloodlines, explaining that she was gifted and she suspected Leonie might be too. She explains that she can “hear” people’s illnesses or things that are wrong, and that members of the community come to her for spells and medicines.
Pop interrupts her reverie by repeating her name, and Leonie is annoyed as he pushes her to allow Jojo to stay at home. Leonie refuses, stating that because they’re his family they all must go. She tells Mam she’s leaving, and as they talk, she recalls how Given died. He was shot by Michael’s cousin as revenge for losing a bet during a hunting trip, but because Michael’s father, Big Joseph, was the sheriff of their town the incident was covered up. Leonie started to see her brothers’ ghost soon after, around the time when she started using drugs daily. She recounts how she and Michael met, and that she’s nervous to pass on the news that he’s being released because Big Joseph is such a racist. She drives up to their house to drop a note in their mailbox, but he sees her and chases her in his car. She gets away, but still feels frightened of Big Joseph because of their unpleasant past.
Analysis
In Chapter 2, the narrative switches to Leonie’s perspective, focusing on her ongoing grief and anxiety and the many harmful mechanisms she uses to cope with them. Leonie still works at a job she got out of necessity after Michael was taken away, at a ramshackle country bar called the Cold Drink. She tells the reader that she first came across the place with Michael, and that a connection she got through his mother was the only reason that she was offered a position. The Cold Drink’s physical structure mirrors Leonie’s own life. It’s held together by substance abuse and is sparsely cobbled together with cinder blocks and plywood. Like her life, it’s also saturated with memories of Michael. When she’s there, she feels like she’s closer to him, as is demonstrated by the intense flashbacks to the early days of their relationship in this chapter.
Leonie's most important relationships are with Michael and with the ghost of her brother Given, but she also invests a lot of time and thought in Misty, who is both her best friend and her only friend. Misty, like Michael, doesn’t judge her for her drug use. The two women enable each other, often getting drunk and high at work. Leonie feels a sense of camaraderie with Misty because she’s also an addict, she too has a difficult relationship with her parents, and she’s also in a biracial relationship where one partner is behind bars. However, she also feels resentful and frustrated with her because she has no idea how comparatively easy things are for her, as Misty is white. Misty treats Leonie as though all of their experiences are similar. Some of them are, but the divide that living in a racist society draws between them is far bigger than Misty understands it to be.
Each of these relationships—Michael, Misty, and Given—reveals the same problems in Leonie's life. They show her desperate need for stability, her willingness to put up with poor treatment to get it, and her fear of losing more family members to violence or imprisonment. She’ll try anything to escape the constant cycle of fear and loneliness she’s been in since Michael went to Parchman. However, the scene at Misty’s cottage where she sniffs cocaine in an attempt to feel better actually only makes her problems feel more oppressive. This is because doing drugs has a highly specialized and supernatural effect on Leonie.
Leonie is fundamentally self-destructive. That’s never more clearly described than it is in this chapter, when she explains that almost every time, she gets high, she sees the ghost of Given. Given’s tragic murder was a preventable act of racialized violence, and it was covered up by her own boyfriend’s father. Leonie was traumatized by his death, especially as it was so clearly linked to her relationship with Michael and to Big Joseph, Michael’s father. Big Joseph covered up the fact that Michael’s cousin murdered Given, using his power as Sheriff to manipulate the facts. Given’s story was permanently silenced by a more powerful white voice. Part of the reason Leonie gets high is to punish herself for this. Fittingly, although she often sees Given, he can’t speak to her. Rather, his silent, watchful presence puts a damper on her attempts to escape from her feelings. This emphasizes the paradox of her substance use: no matter what Leonie tries in order to escape or avoid her past, she only ever finds a temporary relief.
Although her boyfriend’s and brother’s absences hurt her, Leonie is ironically herself an absent figure to the two people who love and need her the most. She feels fundamentally disconnected from Jojo and Kayla, which she also tries to cover up through using uppers, narcotics, and alcohol. She feels particularly bad about this because her failure to lovingly nurture them contrasts sharply with her own mother's role as a healer. Leonie can’t be the kind of mother her own mother was, and so she barely mothers her children at all. She’s gone far more than she’s present. Even when she’s with them, she’s irritable and violent or silent and distracted.
This tendency toward silence and stillness is just one of Leonie's internal attempts to assert control over a chaotic life. When Misty accuses her of lying about seeing Given, Leonie's reaction is to become "dead still." She freezes, an outward manifestation of her inner paralysis. She often feels stuck, especially when she has to deal with difficult things both sober and alone. She avoids confrontation whenever she can, as we see when she decides to inform Michael’s parents that he’s being released by leaving a note in their mailbox. When roused to action, however, we also see she can act decisively. When Big Joseph sees her, he runs out of his house and chases her down the street in his truck. She speeds along, filled with urgency and fear, and then plucks up the courage to raise her middle finger at him as she pulls away. Evidently, she cares enough about Michael to assert her right to do the things a partner should do, whether or not his family appreciates her reaching out.
