39 pages • 1 hour read
Another Brooklyn
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
August remembers her early days in Brooklyn: her father hid the family’s poverty from his children, making sure they were fed and taking them to Coney Island for fun. However, without a maternal presence in her life, her loneliness persisted. When another woman, Jennie, moved into their Brooklyn building, she and her brother took it as a sign that their mother would return. However, their father warned them to stay away from Jennie. Meanwhile, August had to go to a salon to have her hair cornrowed. She wrapped her hair in her mother’s silk slip at night, listening to Jennie entertain men through the building’s thin floorboards.
August thinks back to SweetGrove. She and her brother had grown up in a house that was deteriorating, yet joyful: it had been in her mother’s family for generations. Clyde and her father had lacked an instinct for farming, so the bulk of the work had fallen to her mother. However, property taxes and failed crops resulted in the requisitioning of the land, and when Clyde was drafted and killed, her mother had lost much of her family’s legacy and history.
Chapter 5 Summary
August discusses her friends’ relationships with their parents, noting that each one was expected to follow their parents’ failed dreams. Gigi’s mother tried to show her beauty and encourage her acting, all while telling her to stay out of the sun and avoid letting her skin grow darker. She is confused by the stigma against her dark skin, believing it is beautiful, and her friends affirm and encourage her. Then, at 12, a veteran living under her building assaults her, and her friends try to comfort her, offering to kill him and secretly hiding razor blades in their hair. However, heroin kills him first.
Angela was a beautifully talented dancer and tells her friends that her mother was a dancer, too. When they ask her for further information, she bursts into tears. Her friends offer to hurt anyone who has hurt her, but this does not get her to open up. Sylvia is the star of the group: each girl longs to be emotionally and physically close to her. August in particular wants to “be Sylvia […] to watch the world through her eyes” (62). The child of an intellectual father from Martinique, she is an advanced reader, encouraged by her parents to study law.
Chapter 6 Summary
August reflects on the suffering of children in the African diaspora. She remembers being admonished by her mother about how “there are children starving in Biafra” (65) and reflects on her own good fortune. Jennie’s children remind her of the starving Biafrans. When a boy and girl arrived accompanied by a woman in a blue suit, Jennie asked August and her brother to watch them. They fed them and waited for hours for Jennie to return. When she did, she seemed unkempt and sleepy, and later, August heard the children crying. She turned up the radio to drown their sounds.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters reflect on the relationships between parents and children. Without her mother, August feels her family is unmoored: although her father cares for his children, he seems unsure in his actions. In particular, he does not know how to care for his young daughter’s hair. She mourns the memory of her mother’s femininity and dancing.
Her friends are shaped by their mother’s dreams, but their mothers do not necessarily protect them. Gigi and Angela follow their mothers’ leads in pursuing lives in the arts, where their beauty is a kind of capital. The girls all have ambivalence about their looks. Although they know they are beautiful, they also receive cultural messaging devaluing their dark skin. Furthermore, that beauty seems to come with a price: by 12, they are subject to sexual harassment and even assault. However, they are reluctant to confide in anyone but each other for fear of punishment. Sylvia stands apart from her friends in this regard: she is encouraged not to nurture her beauty, but her mind. This gives her a sense of confidence that the other girls admire and try to stay close to.
These chapters imply that parents are responsible for giving their children a sense of who and how to be in the world: both in their present as children, and in their future as adults. When parents fail in this task, as does Jennie, children are left to care for each other. This care, although well meaning, may not nourish properly. In particular, Gigi’s friends fail to truly help her cope with the trauma of an assault (likely a sexual assault), and August and her brother can only feed Jennie’s children chips and Jell-O.
Unlock all 39 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Jacqueline Woodson
