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Part 2, Chapter 2: Sofia
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 packs the shaving brush and razor in the trumpet case as she drives in her Jaguar to try and find Booker, the one person she once trusted and who made her feel safe. With Booker gone, the world feels suddenly hostile. Bride aims to find Booker and ask him why he left and what he meant by saying she was “not the woman” he wanted. Bride stops at a diner and sees a framed confederate flag when she goes inside. After she eats, she goes into the bathroom and sees that her dress, which fit her at the beginning of the trip, is now slipping off her shoulder as if she had bought a size four instead of a size two. She tries not to connect the dress not fitting to the other changes her body has undergone lately.
The closer Bride gets to Booker, the closer her body gets to its eight-year-old form. When Bride finds Booker, she plans to ask him why he left and seems to think finding out might halt her physical transformation. She doesn’t realize, though, that the reason for her body’s transformation lies not in her relationship with Booker but with herself. The specter of racism also looms, highlighting that Sweetness wasn’t wrong to be worried about the racism Bride would face in the world, even if she was misguided in her attempts to prepare Bride for that racism.
Themes
Bride pulls back onto the highway. When it’s already dark, she sees an exit sign for Whiskey Road and turns off. She misses a curve in the road and crashes her Jaguar into a large tree. She lies in the driver’s seat, unable to get out of the car. Her phone says “no service.” A young girl with a white face and green eyes holding a black kitten peers into the window. Bride asks the girl to help her. The girl watches Bride and then disappears. A man then appears but leaves without talking to Bride. He comes back with a saw and crowbar and gets Bride out of the car. He carries her down a dirt path toward a building that looks like a warehouse. “Please don’t hurt me,” Bride says.
Bride’s car, a Jaguar, serves as a symbol of how she has used wealth and status to insulate herself from feeling intense emotions like embarrassment, anger, or love. In order to feel love, then, Bride must dismantle her defense mechanisms and open herself up to vulnerability. Bride crashing her car is a metaphor for the danger that Bride faces when embracing vulnerability. It is not a simple decision but one that means she must take a risk and go through intense, potentially painful change.
Themes
In the warehouse-like building, a woman named Evelyn cares for Bride—Evelyn is the wife of Steve, the man who rescued Bride. They say the child’s name is Rain because that’s where they found her, though she prefers to be called Raisin. The house seems like a converted machine shop, and Bride smells something that could be chicken cooking. She says thank you to Raisin and tells her she saved her life. She drifts off to sleep, and when she wakes up, a doctor, Walter Muskie, is there. Steve drives Bride to the clinic, where she gets a splint and painkillers. Dr. Muskie says that she’ll need at least a month to heal. Back at Steve and Evelyn’s house, Bride washes her face and armpits using a basin of cold water since the house doesn’t have a bathroom.
Bride begins a weeks-long recovery process after her car crash. While Steve and Evelyn take care of her, Bride makes a point to thank Rain. Bride tells Rain she saved her life, foreshadowing how Bride will later intervene in a moment of danger to protect Rain. The relationship also provides a counterpoint to the novel’s central theme of inherited trauma. In this instance, instead of trauma being passed from one person to another, it seems that benevolence is the thing that gets passed along, as Steve and Evelyn taking in Rain leads to Rain saving Bride, which in turn causes Bride to return the favor to Rain.
Themes
Bride stays with Steve and Evelyn for six weeks as she recovers and waits for her car to be repaired. At first, she can’t comprehend the kind of care she receives from people who are living the “barest life.” Steve and Evelyn help her without judgment or any seeming interest in who she is or where she’s going. Steve and Evelyn tell Bride they first met in India and then again in Mexico before deciding to settle down and live a “real” life. Bride asks, “By ‘real’ you mean poor?” Steve responds, “Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”
During her recovery, Bride questions her priorities and values as she grows closer to Steve, Evelyn, and Rain. She can’t help but envy Steve and Evelyn’s happiness, and that happiness seems to be based on a foundation of love, not on money or material comfort. The repair of Bride’s Jaguar symbolizes this reprioritization of values. While the Jaguar—a symbol of the wealth and status that Bride previously valued—is not destroyed, it must undergo a significant change to get on the road again.
Themes
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After six weeks, Dr. Muskie takes off Bride’s cast. Drying herself after a bath, Bride notices that “her chest [is] flat. Completely flat, with only nipples to prove it [is] not her back.” Bride thinks she must be ill, maybe even dying. Evelyn brings Bride some clothes, but they don’t fit, so she brings a pair of Rain’s jeans, which fit Bride perfectly. Bride wonders when she got so small. She thinks of Booker, and, for the first time, she understands that her body began changing not just when he left but because he left. Bride thinks if she acts “normal,” that might stop the changes in her body or even reverse them.
Bride’s transformation into a version of her younger self continues as she gets closer to Booker. Bride identifies Booker’s departure as the cause of her bodily transformation, though the reason for that transformation is not as simple as a breakup. Instead, with Booker, Bride had the chance to acknowledge and embrace her most deeply held secrets—the source of her greatest shame—in the presence of another person. If she had been able to confide in Booker, and if he had reacted with empathy and love instead of judgment, the novel suggests that Bride might have become a different person without physically transforming. Since Bride shied away from that possibility when given the chance, though, once Booker left, her body took matters into its own hands, so to speak, and began to transform so that Bride would have no choice but to confront the pain of her past to move forward in the present.
Themes
On a bench in the yard, Evelyn helps Bride dry her hair, and Bride asks Evelyn where Rain came from. Evelyn says they first saw Rain on the way back from some protest or another. Steve tried to talk to Rain, but she ran away. Steve and Evelyn took shelter in a diner, and when they came back out, they saw Rain huddled by a dumpster. Steve went up to her and threw her over his shoulder. Rain shouted, “Kidnap! Kidnap!” They decided to take her and get her dry, clean, and fed before finding out where she belonged. Evelyn says Rain was maybe about six then, but she isn’t totally sure.
Evelyn’s description of how Rain came to live with her and Steve shows that they have a pattern of helping people in need. It’s worth noting that Rain initially did not go with them willingly. Rain will later confide to Bride that she feared Steve might be like the men who used to come to her mother’s house when her mother sexually trafficked her. Her reluctance, though, also points to a potential flaw in Steve and Evelyn’s propensity to help people—namely, that they might be more concerned with their own desire to help than with the genuine needs and desires of others.
Themes
While Bride is still at Steve and Evelyn’s house, she decides to write Brooklyn a note to tell her where she is. She isn’t sure what to write, though, so she asks Rain if she wants to go for a walk. On the walk, Rain tells Bride that Steve and Evelyn “stole” her. Bride asks if Rain ever wishes they hadn’t taken her, and Rain says, “Oh, no. Never. This is the best place. Besides there’s no place else to go.” Rain says her mom kicked her out of their house after she bit “a regular. One of the ones she let do it to me.” Bride asks what Rain means, and Rain says, “He stuck his pee thing in my mouth and I bit it.” She says her mom apologized to the man before giving him his $20 back.
Rain clarifies that while she still thinks that Steve and Evelyn stole her, there isn’t another place she would rather be. Rain’s comment signals that, while she is grateful to Steve and Evelyn, her relationship with them isn’t founded on trust or love. Still, the novel makes it clear that Rain’s current circumstances are incomparably better than the sexual abuse she suffered when she lived with her mother. The novel contends, then, that while Steve and Evelyn might not be flawless, their impulses toward good do help others in significant ways.
Themes
Bride asks Rain what she would say to her mother if she saw her again. Rain says, “Nothing. I’d chop her head off.” Bride tells Rain she must not actually mean it, but Rain says she does. Rain then describes to Bride her life living without a home. She says she deliberately avoided making friends because anyone could turn her in. And she explains that the hardest part of her life was finding a safe place to sleep. She says other sex workers told her about guys who wouldn’t pay, or cops, or men who “hurt them for fun.” Rain tells Bride that when Steve first touched her, she thought of the men who would go to her mother’s house, and she ran.
Rain’s comment about what she would do to her mother if she saw her again—“chop her head off”—harkens back to the liberatory feeling Sofia experienced after she beat up Bride. In these instances, the novel, while primarily concerned with acceptance and forgiveness, hints at some of the motivations that might lead a person to commit acts of violence. Bride, though, pushes back when Rain says that, reorienting the novel around its moral center of acceptance and forgiveness.
Themes
