The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

On Sunday morning in Birmingham, Kenny hears Joey getting ready for church. She always goes to Sunday School, but he doesn’t usually join her. As she’s on her way out, he has the urge to say something to her, so he tells her that she looks pretty. Shortly after she leaves, there’s an extremely loud sound, and everything around Kenny shudders. Everyone in the neighborhood rushes outside to see what happened. Wilona, Daniel, and Byron all ask each other what made the sound, and then somebody stops by and tells them that a bomb went off at the church where Joey went to Sunday School.

Kenny is dumbfounded at first, but then he goes into the street and makes his way to the church. He feels as if his ears have stopped working, but he can still see everything around him. He sees Byron and his parents huddled together with a crowd outside the ruined church. Nobody stops Kenny from walking up to the church and standing where the door used to be. He sees a man covered in blood and carrying a little girl’s body out into the open. The girl is wearing a blue dress. Next, Kenny observes the rubble created by the bomb. Among pieces of broken concrete, he finds a shiny shoe that he tries to pick up—but it won’t budge. Suddenly, he thinks the Wool Pooh is holding onto it with big gray fingers.

Terrified, Kenny yanks the shoe free and leaves the church. Outside, he walks by the girl in the blue dress, who has been lain out on the grass next to another girl in a red dress. Since Joey’s dress was white that day, Kenny realizes that if she were lying next to them, their dresses would make up the colors of the American flag: red, white, and blue. Kenny walks all the way back to Grandma Sands’s house, passing people with looks of dismay on their faces. 

Back at the house, Kenny examines the shoe, which he recognizes as Joey’s. There’s a rip in the heel that Kenny thinks developed when he was wrestling it out of the Wool Pooh’s grasp. He thinks about Joey, wishing he’d told her that she helped Byron save him that day in the water, since her image appeared in the form of an angel. But then he hears her voice: she’s asking him what he’s doing. He doesn’t respond, so she asks where everyone else has gone. He refuses to look at her, thinking that she’s dead. Instead, he thanks her for saving his life, but she has no idea what he’s talking about. Still, he tells her that he loves her—at which point she throws the shoe at him, and he looks up.

Joey stands in front of Kenny looking exactly like she did when she left for church that morning. Kenny asks if she went to Sunday School. She says that she did but that it was too hot in there, so she went to stand on the porch. While she was standing on the porch, she saw Kenny come down the street. He was laughing and wouldn’t stop to let her catch up, so she chased him all the way down the street, she says. However, Joey slowly points out that Kenny was wearing different clothes when she ran away from the church with him. Finally, Kenny realizes that the Wool Pooh didn’t get Joey. Overjoyed, he bursts out of the house to go tell his parents and Byron that Joey is perfectly fine.