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Part 1, Chapter 5: Sweetness
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in God Help the Child, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inherited Trauma
Racism and Colorism
Child Abuse and Healing
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love
Summary
Analysis
Bride meets Brooklyn at a restaurant called Pirate. She admits to lying to Brooklyn about the rape: in fact, a woman beat her up. Bride explains that in second grade, Sofia Huxley was a kindergarten teacher in a building next door who got caught “playing dirty” with her students. Bride says she testified against Sofia to send her to jail. She tells Brooklyn she doesn’t know exactly why she wanted to see Sofia. She says she felt bad for Sofia and wanted to do something nice for her. Bride tells Brooklyn she has thought about Sofia for all of these years but has only seen her twice before: the day of the trial and then when she showed up at Sofia’s hotel room. Brooklyn says, “But what about seeing her diddling kids?” Bride says, irritably, “Okay […] three times.
Even when Bride is talking to Brooklyn—the person she considers her closest friend—she is too ashamed of herself to say why she feels like she owes Sofia something. Notably, Bride does not include witnessing Sofia molest children as one of the times she has seen Sofia until Brooklyn points out the discrepancy in her story. Bride then irritably amends her story, suggesting again that Bride is not telling the whole truth about her testimony against Sofia. The novel implies that as long as Bride feels ashamed of herself and her past actions, she won’t be able to find the kind of love or friendship that she is looking for.
Themes
Two weeks later, Brooklyn throws a launch party for YOU, GIRL at a museum where Bride is the center of attention. While preparing for the party, Bride noticed that the holes for her ear piercings have closed up. At the party, Bride meets a man and brings him back to her apartment. In the morning, she is relieved to learn he's not an employee at Sylvia, Inc. She thinks back on her relationship with Booker and how she told him everything about herself, no matter how big or small it might be.
Bride is so tortured by past failings and childhood trauma that her body physically reverts to the age when she made those mistakes and was traumatized. While Bride recalls telling Booker everything about herself, no matter how big or small, she notably didn’t tell him the full story about Sofia or why she wanted to visit her. That inability to be vulnerable and accept herself ultimately proved to be the fault line in their relationship that led to their split.
Themes
Bride recalls telling Booker about a childhood memory. At age six, she saw her mother’s landlord, Mr. Leigh, molesting a boy in the alley behind their apartment. Bride wonders she was pointing at the idea of him in the courtroom instead of Sofia. When Bride told Sweetness what had happened, her mother was mad not at the landlord—she was mad at Bride for telling the story. Bride later understood that if they had upset the landlord, they would have had to look for another apartment, and it would have been hard to find another one in a safe—“meaning mixed”—neighborhood. When she told Booker the story, she sobbed. “You’re not responsible for other folks’ evil,” Booker told her. Bride also recalls the racism she experienced as a child and thinks now she sells her “elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts, and now they pay [her] for it.”
Bride continues trying to understand her unresolved feelings regarding her testimony against Sofia. She wonders if she had not been pointing to Sofia in the courtroom but to the idea of her landlord, someone she had witnessed molest a child. That kind of question points to Bride’s doubt regarding her own testimony. Bride’s story also exemplifies the differences between how two of the most important people in her life care for her. When Bride experienced something traumatic, her mother became angry at her and shifted the blame from Mr. Leigh onto Bride. When Bride tells Booker about the same event, he reacts with sympathy and gives Bride space to feel her emotions. The difference in the two responses highlights the differences between the kind of love Bride received as a child and the kind she is looking for as an adult. Booker’s reaction to that story also foreshadows how he will react when Bride tells him exactly what happened in her testimony against Sofia.
Themes
