64 pages • 2 hours read
Helen OyeyemiBoy, Snow, Bird
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Charlie responds to Boy’s letter by suggesting that she doesn’t owe him anything; Boy believes this means he must be interested in someone else, so she replies to bid him farewell. He replies that she knows where they stand; she replies that she doesn’t, so he tells her he’ll be whomever she wants him to be, to come home and they’ll square things with her father. This alarms Boy, so she dials back the game, then stops responding to his letters, believing that they were really “meant for the Grace Kelly look-alike in his mind’s eye” (43).
After several months without a response, Charlie writes to her assuming that she’s met someone else; he tells her she has an attitude problem and chastises her for having stolen money from her father when she left. Boy isn’t sure what to make of the letter; she shows it to Mia, who, contrary to Boy’s expectations, doesn’t laugh, and tells her that she believes Charlie might really love her.
Boy finds work as a telephone operator, which she finds lucky except that her route to work coincides with Arturo’s morning runs. One morning, Arturo slows down and asks her when they’re going on another double date; she replies that she never wants to see him again, and he replies with only “Oh,” and continues on his run. From then on, he passes her “without seeming to see” her (46).
Boy isn’t able to hold her job as a telephone operator, although she can’t figure out why she disliked the job so much. She is also hired as a movie usher and fired because she spends too much time watching movies; when she is fired, she is watching a romantic comedy “where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling ways possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love” (46).
The day after getting fired from the theater, Mia comes over to celebrate six months of Boy being rid of her father; the two make “champagne soup”, which is just champagne with chopped fruit tossed in. They make wishes; Boy says that she would like a family, but she doesn’t know how to start things from scratch. She contemplates her reasoning for not loving Charlie and determines that his love would be too uncomplicated, and therefore not for her. She contemplates children, and she wonders why her mother would have left her in the care of someone like her father.
Boy asks Mia how the blonde exposé is coming. She admits she’s struggling with it; her father is becoming frustrated with her attempt to become a journalist, and she feels he is preparing to force her to give up and move to Chicago to run one of his hotels. Mia shows Boy what she has so far, which is an introduction that describes how she became interested in the difference between the sacred and the profane, and how she used her left hand for beautiful things, while her right hand was used only to manipulate other objects. The story then tells of her parents’ divorce, and how her left hand stayed limp through that summer. In order to make them work again, her right hand made her promise to see far, her left hand to remember what is said, and she made a promise to do that and write it all down; that, she believes, is what makes a journalist (53).
However, the piece essentially ends there, so Boy offers to help her continue. She begins writing a folk tale about a magician who has the power to make anything with life do his bidding, so he makes a living by making peoples’ wives more beautiful, if they are homely, or uglier, if their husbands feel they are unruly. One day, a farmer asks him to make his wife, whom he believes to be the most beautiful woman in the world, ugly, as she frightens everyone. The magician goes with the farmer to his farm and finds that she is indeed the most beautiful woman in the world. However, his spells have no effect on her; she merely asks him to leave her alone, telling him that all she’s ever wanted is to make things grow and feed people. Believing her to be a powerful witch, the magician follows her all day, trying to make her do things, but finds that he cannot. Finally, she tells him that the men who can’t make her do things are unable to because they’re addressing her clothing and not her. The magician puts his hand on her shoulder, at which point a snake appears in her mouth, claiming to be her heart. The magician leaves the farm and never returns (58).
Boy has to be up early for a trial run for a job at a bookstore and sends Mia home after dinner. She thinks to herself that her preferred job would be as a “roadside sprite” in a secluded location; she would help lost travelers, send them on their way, and they would forget her immediately (59).
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The next morning, Boy decides to walk to the trial run at the bookstore, as she only has enough change for lunch and one-way bus fare. She senses someone who looks, sounds, and dresses exactly like her through the trees. When they meet, the woman is very bloody; she asks Boy to come with her and help her, but Boy only apologizes and tries to leave. She falls into the road and is chastised by a driver. The woman laughs and continues trying to get Boy to follow her into the woods; Boy tries to ignore her, and shortly thereafter, the woman is gone.
Arturo is sitting on a bench resting from his morning run. He asks if Boy is okay, so she sits next to him and asks him for a bite of his pear in order to alleviate her dizziness. They share the pear and end up kissing on the bench.
As a result, Boy ends up an hour late for her shift; Mrs. Fletcher, the owner, yells at her to get out, but then calls her back as Boy is leaving. Boy follows her throughout the day and discovers that the bookstore is more like a front than a real business, with the real business being the rare and antique books collection in the back.
Three African-American teens come in after lunch. When they remain for four hours without buying anything, Boy is ready to kick them out, but Mrs. Fletcher tells her not to. Boy protests that they should be in school, but Mrs. Fletcher doesn’t seem to care about that, reiterating that she is only not to let the youngest eat apples near the books.
Mrs. Fletcher tells Boy to come back for work the next day. On the bus ride home, Boy takes a magazine quiz meant to tell her whether or not she’s in love with Arturo, although she already knows the answer. She thinks about the difference between how she feels when Charlie held her so long ago and how it feels when Arturo holds her, concluding that Arturo’s touch isn’t as nice, but it lasts longer.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Mia and Webster try to give Boy dating advice now that she and Arturo are dating, but Boy pays little attention, as she’s content seeing Arturo privately while continuing to casually double date with Mia and her other friends.
Boy begins to feel as if she belongs in Flax Hill, between her bridesmaid duties for Webster, her relationship with Arturo, and her job at Mrs. Fletcher’s bookstore, for whom it is notoriously difficult to work. However, she is concerned that she might slip up with Arturo regarding Julia, his deceased wife, and lose all of it. She considers herself to be inferior to Julia Whitman, though she also believes she would dislike the Julia she imagines based on what she knows of her. Nevertheless, she is grateful to her because Arturo doesn’t “expect much from [her]. He’d had his great love. And now he [is] willing, determined even, to be amused” with the little things (72).
Boy begins to think of Arturo as her boyfriend, though Arturo wonders if, to Boy, he’s just Snow’s father. Boy is confused about Snow; sometimes she sees her as any other little girl, but other times it seems to Boy that Snow has an otherworldly understanding of life in a way that makes people bend over backwards for her.
One day, Arturo’s mother, Olivia Whitman, invites Boy over for tea. When she arrives, she discovers that they are joined by Arturo’s sister, Vivian, and Julia’s mother, Agnes, which she feels is unfair. Vivian is twenty-three years old. Boy notices that she shares the style and mannerisms of Olivia and Agnes. Boy believes that she slips up twice during the meeting: once when she says that she’s happy working at the bookstore, and, second, when she tries to defend Arturo, after Olivia expresses her desire for Arturo to return to academia. Agnes, in contrast to Olivia, seems to appreciate Boy’s sentiments, and even supports her latter argument.
After she’s passed all the tests, Olivia asks Boy if she’s met Snow; Boy lies and says no, so Olivia lifts the tablecloth to reveal Snow sleeping under the table. It’s clear that they revere Snow, which annoys Boy, who believes that “acting like that every time they [lay] eyes on her [seems] to me like the fastest way to build an insufferable brat” (81).
Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Boy may appear to enjoy playing games with people at first glance, but it would be better stated that she approaches relationships on the defensive, assuming that others have no real interest in her and making them demonstrate that they do, putting others on the defensive in the process.
With Charlie, she takes a less-than-glowing response as an opportunity to choose a mutual female friend at random and insinuate that this is because he’s interested in her, instead, which succeeds; however, this success is momentary, as her lack of a response prompts the same insinuations from Charlie. Boy does something similar with Arturo, but Arturo’s aloofness makes her remain on the defensive, instead; for example, when Arturo stops acknowledging her on his morning runs, she sabotages her job as a telephone operator, though she claims not to be sure why a job that should be perfect for her doesn’t work out. Later, when she has to decide on which leg of her trip to the bookstore she can spend bus fare on, she chooses to walk to her shift, a walk that takes her back to the route that coincides with Arturo’s morning run. She runs into him, for what we can assume is the first time in several weeks, and they kiss for the first time.
Familial oppression emerges as a theme in the novel through these chapters and will become even more pronounced as the narrative progresses. Boy was, of course, abused by her own father, forcing her escape to Flax Hill; Mia’s father is not abusive, but it is suggested that he has an outsized amount of control over Mia, and that Mia is constantly wrestling to get out from under it. Mia comes from wealth and privilege, but she is rejecting this privilege in order to become a journalist, which her father disapproves of. Mia’s exposé on blondes is meant to be her ticket to independence, but she is struggling, so it is symbolic that Boy helps her on her way. It is even more telling that the story they write together is an allegorical folk tale about a patriarchal system that won’t allow women to simply be happy, instead viewing women who resist societal norms as witches with hearts made of snakes. (It is also notable that the farmer’s wife in the story only wants to feed people.)
Race also emerges as a theme through these chapters, although its depiction is both subtle and complicated, and meant to foreshadow more than serve as a topic of discussion. In arguing with her father, for example, Mia points out that even if things are better for contemporary women, as he claims (which, historically, we as readers know that things were not), African Americans are still suffering under Jim Crow laws in the South, to which he responds that she should then be grateful that she is not African American. It is notable that they are of Italian ancestry; while prejudice toward Italian Americans paled in comparison to prejudice toward AfricanAmericans, the 1950s were not very far removed from an era in which Italian Americans also experienced societal racism and oppression, and were themselves not considered to be white.
More directly, Boy wrestles with her own prejudice when the African-American teenagers hang out in the bookstore on her first day of work. Although she later demonstrates sympathy toward the teens, contrasting what she knows of their lives with Olivia and Gerald Whitman while sitting for tea, she is far less sympathetic, and even goes so far as to argue with Mrs. Fletcher about the matter, claiming first that they haven’t purchased anything, then that they should be in school, and, lastly, leaving Mrs. Fletcher with a warning not to be upset when they steal something. It’s difficult to tell how much of this is prejudice because of the color of their skin and how much of it is because of their age; regardless, Boy’s initial reaction is not sympathetic, and at best makes the reader question her position on race in 1950s America.
Related Titles
By Helen Oyeyemi
