39 pages • 1 hour read
Another Brooklyn
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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
August remembers changes in her friend group. Gigi was admitted to a performing arts high school in Manhattan, and Sylvia began to attend a private school, St. Thomas Aquinas. Sylvia’s father suddenly sees her friends as “ghetto girls” (108), and she can now only hang out with them in the park after school. August remembers spending that winter “watching people move” (111). At mosque, her father told the women that “their mother is gone” (111). August recalls repeating a conversation with her father, once again asking him what was in the urn in their apartment. He grew angry at her questioning, and she began to speak to her mother at night.
Chapter 11 Summary
August remembers the girls’ increasing closeness as they became teenagers. Sylvia threatened to run away if her friends couldn’t come over, and her father relented. At her house, they shared pizza and news of their periods. They practiced kissing with each-other and whispered “I love you” (116). Although the girls have long comforted each other, it began to take a different form: they began to kiss and stroke Angela when she cried rather than offering to defend her. She continued to keep her secrets. On the Fourth of July, watching the fireworks in Manhattan, Angela told August that she would eventually leave Brooklyn—and that none of them would join her.
Chapter 12 Summary
August narrates her sexual awakening. She and Jerome began to fool around in the park, and although she had told Sister Loretta that she would treat her body as a temple, she couldn’t resist her closeness with him. All the girls began to experiment with their boyfriends, even though they’d heard the story of a girl from their high school, Charlesetta, getting pregnant and begin sent “back Down South.” August wonders if her father was “as absent as [she] remembers him” (128) since she recalls spending so much of her time unsupervised, smoking weed and fooling around in Bushwick Park.
The revelry of her early teenage-hood ends that winter when Angela’s mother is found dead on the roof of a housing project. Finally, August learns that a woman she’d seen before, a junkie staggering on the street, is her friend’s mother. August tries to assure her friend—“She’s not dead, don’t believe them” (133)—but unlike August, Angela can’t hold out hope for the impossible. August is forced to acknowledge her own reality: her father wakes her in the night to tell her that her mother “won’t be coming back until the resurrection” (135). August then remembers her mother drowning herself.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
These chapters trace August’s loss of innocence, both in regard to her sexuality and her belief that her mother will join her family in Brooklyn. Although there are new divisions between the four girls—they go to different high schools, and Sylvia’s parents are suddenly aware that they don’t want their daughter around “ghetto girls” (108), they find that they need each other more than ever. Sylvia threatens her parents to maintain her closeness with her friends.
The girls’ closeness takes on a new light. As they explore the world of sex with their boyfriends, they practice with each other. Their platonic love and intimacy are suddenly mixed with a sexual love, and their admiration of each other’s beauty takes on a new cast. This complicates their relationships: although they are close in many ways, they still hide secrets from each other. Angela, in particular, remains psychologically distant even if physically close.
As August’s circle of friends drift apart, she begins to see herself in a different light. She understands that others may see her as “ghetto” and disprove of her appearance, language, and family. While Sylvia has two parents who both wish for her and her sisters to succeed, August must confront her mother’s absence. As her father enters a new community, he shares their family’s story of loss and is frustrated with August when she denies knowing whose ashes rest in an urn in their apartment.
Angela’s mother’s death forces the girls to confront the secrets between them, and August in particular must finally confront her mother’s death. Angela’s mother has died, and Angela cannot be made to believe that everyone else is wrong, that she is truly alive. Even as August tries to convince her, her insistence belies that she is actually trying to convince herself. Just as August’s mother spoke to August’s dead uncle Clyde, August believes her mother is alive in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. When her father angrily confronts and corrects her, she comes closer to acknowledging her mother’s death by drowning.
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