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Part 4, Chapter 1: Brooklyn
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
As a city person, Bride is skeptical when she pulls into the small town of Whiskey, California. She doesn’t understand why Booker would have chosen to come to a place like this. Her body hasn’t undergone any more changes, but Bride is worried that she hasn’t had a menstrual period for two or three months. Bride tries and fails to put out of her mind the idea that she’s turning “back into a scared little black girl.” She pulls into a mobile home at the address for Booker that she got from Sally. After steeling herself, Bride knocks on the door. When a woman answers, Bride says she’s looking for Booker. The woman isn’t surprised—she says she gets a lot of Booker’s mail—but also says that Booker doesn’t live there. He does live nearby, though, the woman tells Bride. Then she invites Bride inside.
Bride explicitly connects her bodily transformations to turning back into a scared young girl. In a sense, Bride is doing that as she moves closer to Booker: she is becoming that scared child again, the child who reached out into the world looking for love. When she did that as a child, though, she was met by Sweetness’s abuse and neglect, and her past experiences have conditioned her to expect the same might happen when she reaches out to Booker. If Booker were to meet her bid for vulnerability with neglect or hostility, the novel implies that she might transform further into that little girl.
Themes
The woman says her name is Queen. She says that Bride looks hungry, and she proceeds to feed her thick soup. While they’re eating, Bride tells Queen she’s looking for Booker because he left her one day with no warning. Queen tells Bride that Booker leaves everyone. Queen says, “Left his own family. All except me.” She then explains that Booker left his family after his family moved on from grieving Booker’s brother (Adam), who was murdered when they were both kids. Bride is surprised that she doesn’t know any of this information about Booker and his life. Queen shows Bride some of the writings that Booker has sent her. She then tells Bride that she should go see Booker, who lives in the last house by the stream. Bride is concerned about going because she is convinced, after her physical transformations, that she is no longer beautiful.
Booker’s estrangement from his family—and his relationship with Queen—put his relationship with Bride in a different light. It’s clear that Booker does not necessarily want to eschew all relationships, but he is willing to leave those relationships if he is hurt or does not find what he is looking for. Notably, this is the first Bride hears about the difficulties of Booker’s past, including Adam’s murder. With that in mind, it’s clear that they have both been withholding information and shielding themselves from the risks of vulnerability. The novel implies, then, that both Booker and Bride will have to embrace that vulnerability not only if they are going to restart their relationship but also if they are going to heal from their childhood traumas.
Themes
When Bride arrives at Booker’s house, Booker yells, “You? Get out!” Bride runs at Booker and slaps him. He hits her hard enough to knock her down. Bride then smashes a beer bottle over Booker’s head. When Booker regains consciousness, Bride says, “You walked out on me […] without a word!” Booker asks why Bride wanted to bring presents to a monster—a child molester. Bride tells Booker that she lied in court. Sofia was innocent, she claims. She explains that she went to the motel to make amends, but Sofia beat her up. “And I deserved it,” Bride says. Bride tells Booker that she lied because she wanted her mother to be proud of her and to hold her hand. Booker explains that his brother, Adam, was killed by a “freak, a predator.” The two sit in silence. When Booker starts to speak again, he sees that Bride has fallen asleep.
Bride finally tells Booker what she is most ashamed of: falsely testifying against Sofia. This confession also confirms the reader’s suspicions about why Bride felt guilty regarding her testimony against Sofia. It also clarifies that Bride initially wanted to visit Sofia to assuage that guilt. After Bride’s confession, Booker also embraces vulnerability and tells Bride about the murder of Adam. That foundation of vulnerability provides Booker and Bride with the connection both might need to help overcome childhood trauma. In a novel concerned with the impacts of abuse and violence, it also seems notable that this scene of intimate partner violence (in which Booker knocks Bride down and Bride breaks a bottle over his head) is brushed off.
Themes
Queen comes to Booker’s house and sees Bride asleep. She helps Booker move Bride from the chair and into bed. Queen takes her time walking back to her house. “They will blow it,” Queen thinks. She thinks Booker and Bride will both cling to stories of their own sorrow and let those stories get in the way of love. At his house, Booker sits on his doorstep and thinks through his relationship with Bride. He then writes in his notebook about Adam and how Adam’s death has impacted him. He writes that he doesn’t miss Adam at this point—it’s more that he misses the feeling that Adam’s death caused, a feeling so strong that it defined Booker but didn’t leave room for Adam.
Queen’s prediction regarding Booker and Bride’s relationship—that they will cling to personal stories of sorrow to the point where they can’t connect—encapsulates one of the novel’s main themes: up to now, Booker and Bride have both been so consumed by their childhood traumas that they have been unable to form relationships built on mutual trust, love, and vulnerability. Booker also now understands that clinging to Adam’s death has become self-serving. It’s not something Booker does to keep Adam’s memory alive so much as something that Booker does to find meaning in his own life.
Themes
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Bride wakes up in Booker’s bed following a long, dreamless sleep. After confessing the sins of her childhood, she feels “newly born.” She tells Booker that she saw the writings he sent Queen. Booker says maybe he sent them because he liked them too much to throw away and knew Queen would hold onto them. Bride says she got the address in Whiskey from the pawn shop where his trumpet got fixed. She says she brought the trumpet too, and it’s in the trunk of her Jaguar. Booker is overjoyed. “I love you! Love you!” he yells and then runs down the road to Bride’s car.
After Bride confesses what she did as a child, she feels “newly born,” meaning that, for the first time in a long time, she feels innocent, unmarred by the psychological bruises and scars the world has thrust on her. This feeling of innocence is especially notable, as it comes after Bride returns to one of the sources of her childhood trauma and guilt—falsely testifying against Sofia. When she opens up about that false testimony, instead of finding Sweetness’s capricious affection, she finds Booker’s unconditional love, a love that helps Bride embrace and accept herself despite her faults.
Themes
By the time Booker and Bride get to Queen’s house, a crowd has already gathered. Smoke billows from the windows as flame consumes the wooden house. Bride and Booker crawl in to drag out Queen’s unconscious body. When they get her out, an ember in Queen’s hair lights. Bride takes off her shirt to smother the fire, though not before it has consumed Queen’s hair. Sirens of ambulances and fire trucks whine in the distance. Queen starts coughing and spitting. The crowd seems transfixed by Bride’s “lovely, plump breasts.” Bride is full of glee that the transformation of her body seems to have been reversed. Bride and Booker follow the ambulance with Queen in it to the hospital.
Bride’s physical transformation into a younger version of herself is reversed after Bride opens up to Booker about the shame she has felt because of her childhood trauma. That reversal highlights the novel’s contention that meaningful connection and unconditional love are antidotes to the damaging impacts of childhood trauma.
Themes
Booker and Bride regularly visit and care for Queen in the hospital. In the cafeteria at breakfast, Booker asks Bride about her job. “I don’t know about my job and I don’t care. I’ll get another one,” Bride says. Booker takes Queen’s earrings, which hospital staff removed in order to bandage her head, from his pocket. He gives them to Bride. She feels her earlobes and realizes that the holes are there again. Booker says everything in Queen’s house is gone except for the earrings. He says he called his family to ask them to try and get a hold of Queen’s children. When they go back to Queen’s room, Queen says, “Hannah? Hannah?” Booker explains that Hannah is Queen’s daughter who is in medical school. He says that Hannah had said her father “fondled her,” and Queen didn’t believe her. “The ice between them never melted,” Booker says.
Bride has fully reassessed her values and priorities at this point. Instead of valuing her job above all else, she recognizes that there are more important things in life than status or wealth, including her relationship with Booker and the love they have found together. The novel makes a point to show that Queen is not perfect; while she supported Booker, she let down her own daughter in a way similar to how Sweetness let Bride down and how Booker’s parents didn’t meet his emotional needs. Queen’s faults highlight one of the novel’s main contentions: that there is no way to protect children from the problems of the world.
Themes
Queen seems to be making a steady recovery, but then her blood count drops, and her temperature rises. She is attacked by a hospital-borne virus, as “sneaky and evil” as the fire that destroyed her house. Twelve hours later, Queen is dead. Booker and Bride decide to spread Queen’s ashes in the river. At the impromptu ceremony, Booker tries to play “Kind of Blue,” but it is off-key. In a fit of sadness he hasn’t felt since Adam’s death, Booker throws his trumpet into the water. In Bride’s car after Booker has scattered Queen’s ashes, Bride says, “I’m pregnant.” Booker offers her his hand—the hand Bride “had craved all her life.”
After Queen dies, Booker is tempted to seek refuge in the isolation that has defined him since Adam’s death. In a fit of sadness, he throws his trumpet—his lifeline to joy and happiness—into the river. Instead of wallowing in despair, though, when Bride tells Booker that she’s pregnant, he is happy and offers her his hands, cementing their relationship as well as the kind of connection that will help them both move past their trauma.
Themes
