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 2, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
The second part of the novel includes both a change in narrator and a jump in time, as the narrator becomes a teenaged Bird. Bird, like her “aunt” Mia, wants to be a journalist. She compares Mia and Aunt Viv, determining that they’re both intelligent, but that Mia is more educational, whereas Vivian is “all curled up at the edges, like […] a piece of old bread” (154). Both Mia and Vivian are still single; Vivian had been engaged through Part 1, but her fiancé broke off the engagement when Bird was born, revealing Vivian’s ancestry.
Bird recognizes Olivia’s coldness toward her and believes that there’s more to Vivian’s story. Olivia frequently comments on the darkness of Bird’s skin and generally avoids talking to her or acknowledging her presence. Regardless, Bird doesn’t feel bad about revealing their heritage because she “accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do” (156).
Bird, like her mother, has trouble with mirrors: she sometimes doesn’t appear in them. According to Agnes, this is because she has an enemy trying to get rid of her. She says that mirrors can’t find her, and that it typically happens when she’s alone, but sometimes with others there, and she believes that people are perhaps just too polite to mention that she has no reflection. The first time she noticed it, she tells us, she was so scared that she shattered the mirror, which “kept showing [her] bits of faces that weren’t” hers, including faces of her relatives, and sometimes “even a man or two” (164).
Mrs. Fletcher is now “living in sin” with a bookbinder, Mr. Murphy, and this prompts Bird to consider the way adults “interfere” with one another, as her parents do. Bird seems simultaneously disgusted and fascinated with displays of affection.
We learn that Agnes’s husband returned to the South following Julia’s death, and that Agnes and her husband hadn’t married for love. Olivia claims that Agnes’s husband is weak, but Agnes tells Bird that he’s just choosing to live in the world to which he is accustomed, “not so different from those prisoners who get to feeling at home behind bars” (162).
Bird notes that her mother rarely asks her questions, considering momentarily that her mother may be her enemy. She notes that they get along, but in a silent way. Mrs. Fletcher tells Boy that Bird is at a dangerous age, and that she should talk to her more often. Bird thinks of her mother as being very graceful, and considers her sparse jewelry, in particular the snake bracelet, which she believes is “resting until she has instructions for it” (165). She wonders, “If she ever told that snake to come after [her], who could stop it?” (165). She doesn’t need much from her mother, but notes that when she does ask for something, her mother takes care of it for her immediately.
Bird believes there are several possibilities for why she sometimes doesn’t appear in mirrors, but believes she needs an objective perspective to understand it. Bird is thirteen but wants to be two years older in order to catch up to her best friend and boyfriend, Louis Chen. She tells her friends that her middle name is Novak. She is taller than her friends but refuses to grow taller than 5’6” (Louis Chen’s height).
She believes that Louis’s family is happier than hers is; she doesn’t think that her family is unhappy, but that they are quieter and more separated from one another. Louis likes to tease her that they’ll remain in Flax Hill forever, but Bird wants to move to either New York or Los Angeles when they’re older.
Bird hears a lot about Snow but knows very little about her and has never met her. The rest of her family members talk about Snow constantly, and Bird gets tired of it; she notes that her mother, however, never discusses Snow. Arturo goes to visit Snow twice a month, but Bird “never knows what to say when she looks at the photographs of her father with another daughter who was there first, had him first” (172-73). He always brings things from Snow back for Bird, but the items are never quite right for her.
Bird, Boy, and Arturo went to visit Snow once when Bird was very young, but Boy made Arturo turn around before they got to the house. Once, while Agnes was out listening to a lecture on mystic poetry delivered by Kazim, Bird, realizing that Olivia believed Agnes to be home and that she is able to imitate others’ voices, asks Olivia about why Boy made Arturo turn around before getting to Snow. Olivia was only able to reply that “[s]he knows what she’s doing to that child, that’s why she can’t face her” (176), before Agnes returned and spoiled the charade. Bird notes that the only voice she can’t mimic is her mother’s.
Bird also notes that her room used to be Snow’s room and wonders if this has to do with her mirror troubles, as the mirror issue only occurs in certain places, her bedroom being one of them. She wonders if Snow is the person causing trouble for Bird in the mirror. Bird doesn’t like cleaning the room, and imagines that great battles between spiders and other, weaker insects have been fought on the walls, with those specks being their memorials. She also has a music box, sent by Snow as a gift. She likes to keep her eye on the music box and thinks that it isn’t “like the things people make around [Flax Hill], which are just so pretty they make you smile”; rather, the “music box was closer to the snake on [Boy’s] arm” (181).
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
Bird, like her mother, is not particularly concerned with getting good grades in school, which frustrates Arturo, but is reinforced by Mia. Bird often must stay late and do homework in detention; Louis always waits for her, even though he always tells her it’s the last time he’ll do so.
One day, during recess, Bird is practicing a poem with her friend, Connie, for Spanish class, when she sees another girl in Louis’s class whisper something in his ear. Feeling pangs of jealousy, Bird asks Louis what the other girl told him; at first, he doesn’t want to tell Bird, but eventually reveals that someone wrote “Louis Chen is a Vietcong” in chalk elsewhere at the school. At first, Louis isn’t bothered by it, but when the head teacher makes an announcement about the graffiti, requiring two random boys to clean it, it becomes the talk of the school. Shortly after, word gets around that Louis is inviting whoever wrote the phrase to fight him on the corner of Ivory down and Pierce after school.
Bird tries to talk Louis out of fighting, but Louis tells her to stay out of it. Bird begins to hear people talking about the taunt and, to a lesser extent, Bird, claiming that Louis “probably is a Vietcong” and that “Vietcong just love coloreds. And coloreds love them right back” (186). One student brings up Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam as evidence. Bird points out that Ali didn’t say he was siding with the Vietcong, only that he wouldn’t fight them, but some of the other students claim that’s the same thing.
Bird skips detention and meets up with Louis; Louis tries to get her to go away, but she insists that he needs her. They walk together to the stated corner; at first, it looks like no one is going to show up, but then some older boys appear, asking if they’ve missed it. More students show up, and Bird and Louis begin to suspect that the person who wrote it was in the circle. Louis is about to fight the person he believes to be responsible when Olivia shows up to chastise them and take them home. Later, Bird wants to ask Olivia about what happened there, but is worried that she’ll cry, and Olivia claims not to have time for people who cry.
Back at the house, Arturo is waiting for Boy to get ready to go out to eat with the Murrays at a new restaurant. He asks Bird to go check on Boy. As Bird stands behind her mother with two sets of earrings, she feels as if, in the mirror, she looks like her mother’s maid. Bird makes a habit of observing how people act around mirrors; her mother, unlike most other people, locks eyes with her reflection, as if “trying to catch her reflection out, willing it to make one false move” (193).
Bird asks her mother what she thinks of Snow, to which Boy replies that “She’s okay if you like that sort of thing” (193). After Boy and Arturo leave for dinner, Bird reads through letters from snow that Boy keeps on the dresser; she says that she’s been biding her time, but that she had given her mother a chance to just tell her and she had chosen not to. The letters begin while Snow is still young, and the handwriting is “big and wonky and basic” (194). Snow tells Boy that she doesn’t like it there and asks when she can come home. As Snow gets older, she wonders what it is that came between her and Boy; she says that Boy was “like some sort of glorious princess who swept into [her] life and [she] just wanted to sit at [Boy’s] feet all day and amuse [her]” (195). The later letters upset Bird.
The most recent letter is addressed to Bird; Boy had read it, but did not share it. Bird puts the rest of the letters back, but keeps the letter written to her. She drafts numerous replies, in part “apologizing for Mom, in a way” (196). She finally breaks into her father’s studio and, looking at a picture of Snow, writes a letter to her, telling Snow about herself and asking Snow to tell her about herself. She ends the letter with a postscript, asking if Snow understands how beautiful she is, and asking her to “skip any false modesty” in her response (198).
Part 2, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Although the time jumps and the narrator changes, in many ways, the tone of the novel, in this part, remains the same. Bird’s narrative voice is distinct from her mother’s, but this is a distinction that in many ways feels more of a product of age than anything else; Boy is quite young through Part 1, but still about ten years older than Bird is in Part 2. Their cautious observation and cynicism are similar, and they appear to be wary of the same people (specifically, Olivia and Snow). Bird recognizes this when she writes that her mother, for example, was the only person to get that her Halloween costume one year was Alice in Wonderland, not just a maid. This makes it interesting that Bird feels that the only voice she cannot imitate is her mother’s; perhaps the reason for this is because, paradoxically, she is too close to her mother.
Questions of race and racial tension become much more prominent in this section, with several passages overtly dedicated to deconstructing the complicated issue of race among a mixed, passing family in 1960s New England. Bird herself discusses race with an air of detachment; she understands its importance, particularly as it is related to her, yet treats it as just one facet of her life, and usually not even her most important concern. It doesn’t escape her notice that Mia’s wall of her heroes’ photographs is full of African Americans, but both Mia and Bird shrug this off as happenstance, suggesting to the reader that the fact that a white woman finds most of her heroes to be people of color should not be an extraordinary thing. The aforementioned Alice in Wonderland costume is another example; while Boy recognizes it immediately, even her father is confused because the character is white, though no one seems able to say to Bird that Bird’s skin color is the source of their confusion. Much of Chapter 2 is devoted to Louis’s fight over racist graffiti targeting him, questioning how people of color are expected to, or should, react in such situations. Louis himself initially wants to shrug it off, but the teachers and other schoolchildren, in different ways, prevent him from doing so. Only Olivia steps in to prevent the fight, but given her coldness toward Bird, it’s unclear if this is done to protect the children or to save face.
Gender norms are likewise interrogated further in these chapters, which begin with a comparison of Mia and Vivian, both older single women. Mia never seemed particularly interested in settling down through Part 1, and as we jump forward in time, it appears she has chosen her career over a marriage. Her abortion—about which Bird is confused, but which will be clarified in later chapters—demonstrates that she does date and is sexually active, and merely rejects marriage. Ergo, Mia has a successful career and a romantically-active life, yet Bird notes that women appear to feel bad for her, believing that her life has been a waste (men, Bird notes, seem to believe that Mia has everything she wants). Vivian, on the other hand, was engaged, but the engagement was broken once her fiancé discovered she is African American. Vivian is a successful lawyer and insists that she’s happy on her own, but this happiness is a bit less convincing than in Mia’s case, at least to Bird. Both women are successful, neither is married, but their experiences are nevertheless fundamentally different due to differing external forces.
While the tone generally remains the same, it’s worth noting that the style shifts here. Boy was a writer of a kind: she wrote florid, romantic love letters for boys while in high school, and as Mrs. Fletcher’s employee, she took her employer’s curt, unfriendly replies and turned them into something more acceptable. The narration through Part 1 reflects Boy’s style; however, Part 2 reflects the style of Bird, the aspiring journalist. Much of these chapters is more direct and straightforward; even when Bird discusses magical happenings, she does so as if merely describing facts. Likewise, she moves from topic to topic quickly, often asking us to simply accept that the next topic makes sense. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t depart, but the narration does shift in this section to something more like a reporter would offer, and eschews the epistolary nature of the upcoming chapters.
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