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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
On Boy’s 22nd birthday, she sends the money she stole from her father back to him (circuitously, through a friend of Mia’s). At the bookstore, Mrs. Fletcher, in a roundabout way, wishes her a happy birthday, while Sidonie and Phoebe argue about Les Misérables. Phoebe finds the book to be sad, while Sidonie argues that it’s disingenuous to feel sad for French peasants, and that she should instead shed tears for the African Americans who have been, and continue to be, lynched in the South. As the girls fight, Boy wonders where Kazim is, as he usually plays peacekeeper. As he isn’t around, Mrs. Fletcher breaks the girls up instead.
While Mrs. Fletcher discusses the menu for Boy’s dinner party with her, she asks how the Whitmans are treating her. Boy takes a question about her intentions to mean that Mrs. Fletcher believes Boy is after Arturo’s money. Mrs. Fletcher, like the Whitmans, and like Boy, is not originally from Flax Hill, but after her husband died, moved to Flax Hill in order to find him, so to speak. What she found was a different version of her husband than she knew—well liked by the townspeople who remembered him, but different. However, for her, this only means that they have “different pieces of him to put together” (89). Her point, she tells Boy, is that Flax Hill is home to her because she loved her husband, not vice versa.
After work, Boy walks Phoebe and Sidonie, who live in the African-American part of town, “all the way home instead of just three-quarters of the way,” in order to ask Sidonie’s mother for permission for Sidonie to come to her birthday dinner (Phoebe has already declined). She walks on the outside, “taking the position of a gentleman protecting ladies from roadside traffic” (90). As they’re walking, Boy believes she sees Kazim among a group of boys stomping on someone’s garden and trying to teach the owner’s parakeet to say, “Fuck whitey.” When she says something about it to the girls, however, they claim not to understand, and that it wasn’t Kazim that she saw. Phoebe suggests that all African Americans look the same to Boy; Sidonie is more generous, but promises that Kazim wouldn’t do something like that, and that it really wasn’t him.
At Sidonie’s house, her mother, who uses a wheelchair, greets Boy. As it turns out, Sidonie told her mother that Boy is her teacher; Sidonie’s mother declines the invitation but insists that she will have her over for dinner another night instead, then asks Boy about how Sidonie is in school. Boy considers calling Arturo, when she leaves, but reconsiders, instead choosing to walk quickly with her head down until she leaves the neighborhood.
At Arturo’s house, Snow is helping Boy prepare for the dinner party. Snow says that maybe Boy will get a mother for her birthday. Boy replies that perhaps she would prefer a daughter. After sending her away, Boy wonders, with a hint of jealousy, what makes Snow so trusting.
During dinner, there is joy but also tension between the various members. Olivia gives Boy a chinchilla-fur coat that Vivian has been coveting for years. Mrs. Fletcher spends the evening staring at and inspecting Olivia. Arturo finds it rude that Webster, who is dieting for her wedding, hardly eats, but Boy convinces Arturo not to say anything, as Webster’s hunger is making her short-tempered. Agnes sits across the table from Snow and shares private jokes with her, then puts her to bed when she falls asleep.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
At the bookstore the next day, Mrs. Fletcher first feigns apologies for making Olivia uncomfortable at dinner then expresses disappointment at Boy’s pretending to be Sidonie’s teacher the previous evening. As she intends to make them start going to school, she would have preferred that her mother do the forbidding. When the children come in later that day, Kazim has drawn a comic strip for Boy. Boy decides against potentially contradicting Mrs. Fletcher and tells the children to go to school.
A week later, Boy reads the comic strip Kazim had drawn. The strip is about King Mizak and Queen Sidie who must fight two children with the same names each December for the right to the names; they lose, and the children take over, then age rapidly until, the next December, they are old and feeble and must again fight the children, who remind them that they did the same thing.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Arturo, Boy, and Snow go to Florida for Boy’s birthday present. Arturo accuses Boy of not wanting to be alone with him, as they could have left Snow with her grandparents, but Boy insists that she just enjoys Snow’s company.
While walking from the pool back to their hotel room, Boy asks Arturo to tell him about Julia. Arturo says that he and Julia had grown up together and fallen in love as a result. She had to have a Caesarean birth; she developed a fever upon her return home and refused to go to a hospital until it was too late.
The next morning, Boy wakes up to find Arturo kneeling beside her bed, asking her to tell him that she loves him. Boy tries to avoid it but accedes to telling him that she’ll stay with him. He takes a piece of jewelry he made for her out of his suitcase, “a bracelet, a white-gold snake that curled its tail around [her] wrist and pressed its tongue against the veins in the crook of [her] elbow” (109), a version of an engagement ring. Boy accepts the marriage.
When she returns to Flax Hill, she shows Mia the bracelet, and the two of them agree that it looks like something a wicked stepmother would wear; Mia assures Boy, however, that it only looks that way.
Part 1, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Race features more prominently through these chapters, particularly in Chapters 7 and 8. There is, of course, Boy’s ultimately-disastrous walk with Phoebe and Sidonie during which she mistakenly believes she sees Kazim causing trouble. Because the novel is narrated from Boy’s perspective (at least through these chapters), her uncertainty to an extent becomes our uncertainty, and we never get a definitive answer, but it isn’t clear that it actually matters: at a glance, Boy presumed that Kazim, who spends his afternoons playing hooky so that he can hang out in a bookstore and draw comic strips, was the same boy causing mischief. Phoebe and Sidonie are charitable in their response, but we see other aspects of the scene that lead us to question Boy’s own prejudices. For example, she typically only walks the girls to the edge of their neighborhood. Boy tells herself that it’s because she believes they’re protected by a group of African-American boys who hang out there, unlike the white teens, who are scared by those same boys, yet when she leaves Sidonie’s house, she briefly considers calling Arturo for a ride to avoid walking back through the neighborhood alone. Simultaneously, though, her walking position suggests that she views herself as the girls’ protector outside of that neighborhood.
Throughout the novel, we are led to question our understanding of events, particularly as they apply to racial and gendered topics. Another example of this is Olivia’s and Boy’s different interpretations of The Magic Flute. Boy understands it as being “about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her”; Olivia, on the other hand, believes the play is about “two people who walk through fire and water together, unscathed because they are together” (97). However, Olivia’s argument is that both interpretations of the opera are not only valid, but correct. This is an argument that recurs throughout the novel.
The novel deals heavily in folklore and fairytales while frequently subverting those same tropes. The most overt of these is Snow White, although the novel only loosely borrows from it, rather than overtly mapping itself onto it. Characters often digress into folklore-style stories. For example, in these chapters, Kazim draws a comic strip for Boy about rapidly-aging kings and queens doing battle to retain their names; the tale is allegorical, in that it suggests that everything that will happen has happened before—we are bound to repeat history, including our mistakes. The snake bracelet Arturo makes for Boy is doubly symbolic. First, as Boy and Mia discuss, the bracelet feels like something an evil stepmother would wear, foreshadowing Boy’s decision at the end of Part I. Alternatively, however, the snake could be viewed as a callback to the story she and Mia wrote together: if Arturo created the snake, and the snake is the farmer’s wife’s heart, then the bracelet could be understood as Arturo symbolically giving Boy her heart. (This could additionally refer back to Boy’s and Olivia’s differing interpretations of The Magic Flute, as well.)
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