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Summary
Chapters 7-8
Chapter 7
Leonie and Misty are miserable because of the smell of vomit that lingers in the car. The group returns to Al's house, where Al is surprised to see them so soon. He invites them in, telling them to wash up and asking Misty to accompany him to the store. Michael thanks him and Al tells him that taking care of Michael’s family is his job. Leonie frustratedly starts to wash Kayla in the bath, scrubbing hard to remove the vomit. She thinks about how her mother used to handle situations where she was angry with her children, and feels frustrated and hurt that by comparison she's unable to control her temper. She looks at Jojo’s adolescent body and thinks about how he will eventually grow up into a man, the baby fat on his body dissolving. She leaves the bathroom abruptly, telling Jojo to take care of Kayla. Leoni enters the living room, and she and Michael smoke crack and then have passionate sex. When she returns, because she's high, she can see the ghost of her brother Given. She tries to ignore him, and she and Michael have sex again, Given’s ghost looking on disapprovingly. When Leonie goes upstairs to wake her children up, she sees the two are sleeping, curled together. She feels jealous of their closeness and wakes them up briskly. The group prepares to leave Al’s house, although Kayla still looks very ill. Al gives them some food to take with them, and they drive away. Leonie gazes at Michael as he drives, enjoying seeing him again. She remembers how her mother criticized her intense love for him but was sympathetic when she learned Leonie was pregnant. She offered to help her abort the fetus, but Leonie decided to keep it. She dozes off, but Michael wakes her up and the two scramble to switch seats when he warns her that a police car is following them. They don’t have time to hide the bag of drugs, so Leonie swallows it.
The officer briefly questions them, but as soon as Leonie admits they have come from Parchman, he handcuffs her and Michael. Jojo tries to help, but the officer points a gun at him. He tells Leonie he’s going to search the car, and as he does so the ghost of Given appears to Leonie. Kayla vomits all over the officer, who is disgusted and tells the group to go home. As they drive away, Leonie starts to feel the effects of the drugs she swallowed.
Chapter 8
Richie's presence disturbs Jojo, and he can't look at him straight-on. He thinks about how emaciated Richie looks and how strange it is that he’s in the car. When the police officer pulls them over, Jojo is frightened that he will shoot Kayla. When he reaches into his pocket to touch the bag of protective magic Pop made him, the officer points his gun at him, kicking Jojo's legs apart. Kayla jumps on Jojo's back in an attempt to protect him. The cop is furious but gives up on arresting the group when Kayla vomits all over him.
As they drive away, Jojo can still feel the presence of the officer’s gun. Leonie is sick and bent over in the front seat, and Michael is trying to take care of her. Michael tells Jojo to buy milk and charcoal from a gas station they stop at. Jojo agrees but is confused about why they need charcoal. When he gets back into the car, Michael makes him grind up a briquette of coal, which he then pours into the milk and tries to feed it to Leonie. The concoction is supposed to make her vomit, which she begins to do explosively. As she throws up, Richie begins to talk to Jojo about Parchman and the friendship he had with River, Jojo’s Pop. He describes how River protected him, and he begins to tell an unfriendly Jojo about why he’s trying to go home with them. He talks about what “home” means to him, and dismissively tells Jojo that he doesn’t know anything about either home or love.
Analysis
The return journey is even less pleasant than the trip out, and the car's lingering odor of vomit is more than a mere inconvenience. The stench remains no matter how much they scrub, mirroring the characters' inability to rid themselves of their past traumas. Like the acrid smell of vomit, their experiences hang over them and taint their present. It’s also a physical representation of Leonie’s disengagement and neglect of her children. Now that Michael is back, she feels frustrated with Jojo and Kayla’s presence. When they get to Al’s house and Leonie begins to scrub Kayla, she’s rougher than she needs to be as a result of her irritation. It doesn’t help that as soon as she’s alone with Michael and the two get high, Given appears. Leonie knows she should be feeling happy, but the complications of her life don’t disappear just because Michael is now back in the picture.
Leonie can’t think about her relationship with Michael without falling into memories about Mam’s response to her teenage pregnancy. Although Mam initially disapproved of Leonie dating Michael, it wasn’t because of prejudice, but out of fear for Leonie’s safety. This doesn’t seem unfounded, especially given that it was Michael’s family who murdered Given and covered it up. Mam loves her and wants to offer support, but her offer to give Leonie herbs to end the pregnancy is immediately rejected. All of Leonie’s memories of Mam are tinged with guilt. This is largely because Leonie knows that she hasn’t been the daughter Mam truly wanted. She isn’t talented at the things Mam cares about, and she’s far less nurturing and kind.
The narrative takes a sharp turn when a police officer pulls the family over. Rather than being absorbed in memories, every member of the family snaps into an intense focus on the present, as danger is clearly near. The officer is immediately suspicious and jumpy, cuffing Leonie and Michael and threatening Jojo with his gun. The questions he asks Leonie are less about protecting his community and more about figuring out why she’s there, and what a mixed-race couple, a white woman, and two children are doing together. As this chapter is told from Leonie’s perspective, we get a very close-up view of Leonie’s roiling anxiety. She’s especially nervous because she’s just swallowed a leaking bag of drugs to hide it from a potential search. That means that it’s unlikely the group would be busted for trafficking, but overwhelmingly likely that she could either suffer organ damage or behave erratically and put them in danger.
Richie’s presence in the car unnerves and distracts Jojo, especially because the way Richie responds to the police officer’s presence invokes the South’s history of enslavement and kidnapping. When Richie sees the cop, he intones, “They going to chain you.” He means that he thinks Richie will be handcuffed, but the way he says it makes it sound as though Jojo is about to be enslaved, drawing a parallel between the way the current American justice system disproportionately arrests and indentures people of color and the way it allowed white people to kidnap, enslave, torture, and kill Black people in the past. Jojo reaches for his gris-gris bag to comfort himself when the officer questions him, but out of prejudice, the cop assumes he is reaching for a weapon and kicks him to the ground, threatening to shoot him. Both Richie and the police officer misinterpret the situation, but Jojo is the one who has to face the consequences. Leonie is so angry that she wants to “kick [the officer’s] skull soft,” but she’s been restrained and can’t do anything to help Jojo. Kayla saves the day by vomiting on the officer, who immediately and disgustedly lets them go. The fact that he leaves as soon as he’s personally inconvenienced shows how flimsy his excuse was for pulling them over.
After the family survives that encounter, attention quickly switches to retrieving the drugs and saving Leonie. Michael resorts to a dangerous home remedy—ground-up charcoal in milk—to make her vomit. Leonie is already beginning to overdose, but when she drinks the grey fluid, she begins to vomit explosively. Her thoughts become messy and difficult to follow after this, as her body processes the huge amount of drugs that are still in her system. Even though it’s dangerous, Leonie can’t help but observe that it’s also wonderful to be so high. She knows how dangerous her habit is, but she also craves and enjoys the feeling too much to stop.
