Quote 1

We’d seen the pictures of a bunch of really mad white people with twisted-up faces screaming and giving dirty finger signs to some little Negro kids who were trying to go to school. I’d seen the pictures, but I didn’t really know how these white people could hate some kids so much.

In Chapter 9, Kenny’s perspective on Dad’s explanation as to why the family will leave Byron in Birmingham highlights the theme of racism that’s interwoven throughout the novel. Dad’s explanation is intended to help both his sons internalize why Byron needs to understand that the world is particularly complicated for a young Black man. He wants Byron to learn that he can’t keep playing around and getting in trouble and that he needs to be prepared for the discrimination and racist attitudes that will make his life more challenging. Although the story at this point has been about the family’s day-to-day life in Flint, Michigan, and race has not played a large role, it is set in 1963, a time of deep racial division and unrest in the United States and particularly in some parts of the South. These lines demonstrate that Kenny is vaguely aware that something is going on and foreshadows that the family will soon have more direct dealings with racism.

Quote 2

That’s when he came swimming real slow out of the deep, and even though my head was underneath the dark water I could see him coming right at me. . . Where he should have had a face there was nothing but dark gray. Where he should have had eyes there was nothing but a darker colder-looking color. He grabbed my leg and started pulling me down.

Kenny’s narration during his near-death experience in Chapter 13 underscores the theme of life and death and introduces the “Wool Pooh” as a recurring symbol of death in the novel. Although the “Wool Pooh” is just a product of Byron’s imagination that he made up based on Mr. Roberts’s warning to stay away from Collier’s Landing because of the whirlpool, Kenny’s near-death experience is all too real. As he struggles in the water and loses control of his body, he comes face-to-face with his own mortality. The dark, cold, faceless personification of death that Kenny fights in the water makes another appearance in Chapter 14, when Kenny enters the church to look for Joey after it has been bombed. In both cases, the Wool Pooh is a concrete stand-in for a concept too big and abstract for ten-year-old Kenny to completely understand.

Quote 3

I don’t think they’re sick at all, I think they just let hate eat them up and turn them into monsters.

In Chapter 15, Byron and Kenny’s conversation about what happened in Birmingham highlights the struggles of children to understand race-based violence. Kenny is desperate, as many people are, to understand the motivation behind such violent racism that harms innocent people for no reason. Byron here demonstrates his own maturity as he explains that he disagrees with Momma’s and Dad’s explanation that the men who did it were sick and couldn’t help themselves. Instead, he believes, they are people whose hate has turned them into monsters. Byron’s explanation is remarkably insightful, as it acknowledges the toxic and destructive results of hatred. Byron’s insight here is significant for what it says about the corrosive power of hatred, but it also demonstrates how much he has grown and changed from the self-absorbed “cool” bully he was at the beginning of the book to the perceptive and compassionate young man he is at the end.

Quote 4

And I’m sure there was an angel in Birmingham when Grandma Sands wrapped her little arms around all of the Weird Watsons and said, ‘My fambly, my beautiful, beautiful fambly.’

Kenny’s words near the end of the novel represent his epiphany about the importance of family, the novel’s most central theme. After Kenny’s cathartic conversation with Byron about what happened in Birmingham, Kenny is finally able to process the experience and let go of the enormous sense of sadness, guilt, and shame he has been holding onto. Since returning home from Birmingham he has been hiding behind the couch waiting for some kind of magical healing, but now he can see that the magic and the healing can come from the loving acts of his family. At the end of the novel, Kenny is able to recognize magic in the way his father smiles at him after he messes up, in the way his mom embarrasses him in front of his friends, in the way his sister throws him a tea party, in the way Byron made other kids play basketball with him, and, as the quote indicates, when his grandmother wrapped them all in her arms. All of these details speak to Kenny’s understanding of the magical healing power of a family’s love.

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