42 pages • 1 hour read
Lois LenskiStrawberry Girl
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Hogses”
Mr. Slater’s hogs get through the Boyers’ fence and trample their strawberries. Birdie’s father’s shouts awaken her in the middle of the night. Birdie helps drive the hogs out. Later, she hears a squeal that she fears means her father slaughtered one of the hogs. Birdie worries about a feud with Mr. Slater.
Birdie and her family attend church for the first time since moving to this part of Florida. The service is an “all-day sing.” Birdie loves the organ music at service and is captivated by the name of the organist: Annie Laurie Dunnaway. Birdie enjoys spending time with the other kids and meeting new people. Birdie gets nervous when she sees her father talking to Mr. Slater. Mr. Boyer keeps up a polite tone while he suggests to Mr. Slater that feeding his hogs will keep them from roaming onto his neighbors’ land. Mr. Slater jokes that there is no law, and only a shotgun can keep the peace. Mr. Slater and Mr. Boyer laugh, reassuring Birdie that her father knows how to handle conflict with other people. Shoestring plays with a snake and throws it on top of Birdie’s hat. Although the snake isn’t poisonous, Birdie is angry with Shoestring.
The next day, Birdie finds a note on the family’s porch saying, “Will git you jest you wate” (49). She sees Shoestring walk by with a raccoon and confronts him about the note. Birdie accuses his father of writing it. Shoestring accuses Birdie’s father of cutting the ears off one of their hogs. Shoestring and Birdie argue, but Shoestring offers to lasso the hogs away from Birdie’s land. Even though the core issue is still that the Slaters don’t feed or herd their hogs, Birdie can tell that Shoestring wants to get along. She forgives him quickly for the snake and his father’s threat.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Overalls”
Birdie and her mother go shopping in town. The milliner, Miss Liddy Evans, is a friendly woman who knows and cares about everybody. While Birdie tries on hats, Mrs. Slater stops by and leaves the baby in the backroom with Miss Evans, who loans Mrs. Slater some money so she can shop. Mrs. Slater plans to pay Miss Liddy back after Mr. Slater gives her some of the money he was recently paid. Birdie helps take care of the baby when it cries. Then, Birdie helps Miss Evans’s employee, Azuloy, make wax roses for the church. Birdie goes to the general store and sees Shoestring arrive to pick up a pair of new overalls, but he has no money to pay for it. Birdie tells him about her new hat and how her mother is shopping for a stove, which shocks Shoestring, who has never seen his mother wear a hat. Outside the milliner’s, Shoestring’s dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Miss Evans stops by dousing them with water.
Birdie and her family have a picnic lunch. Birdie sees a traveling salesman who paints brilliant and vibrant pictures in just a few minutes.
As the Boyers oversee the merchant loading their stove, they run into Mrs. Slater and some of her children, including Shoestring. Mrs. Slater cries and accuses the Boyers of ruining everything with their fancy stove and the barbed wire they added to their fence. Mrs. Boyer asks Mrs. Slater what’s wrong and learns Mr. Slater drank and gambled away all their money. Gus and Joe took the horse, wagon, and their father away. The Boyers offer to give the Slaters a ride home. Birdie walks with Shoestring as he returns the money to Miss Liddy Evans. She “looked at the holes in the knees of the boy’s old ones and understood how fierce was his pride” (65).
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Storm”
One day, while Dan and Shoestring are racing newly captured turtles, a stranger appears. He introduces himself to Birdie as Doc Dayton, a tooth-puller. Doc Dayton pulls out Dan’s sore tooth and files down Semina’s teeth. He stays the night and attends church with the Boyers the next day. During church service, a mighty storm arrives. The congregation all rush home. The storm is so intense that Birdie needs to get down and hold onto the wagon to avoid the wind. The storm significantly damages the Boyer property.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Cane Grinding”
Birdie helps her father grind cane, which is difficult manual labor. The community pitches in to boil the cane and make candy. They all have a party, and even Mr. Slater joins them to play the fiddle while Shoestring plays the mouth harp. Birdie helps the little Slater girls and her siblings get started at the candy pull, then sees that all the other boys and girls have already paired up when she gets back. Shoestring is the only boy left, and he brings a plate of sticky cooked and condensed cane juice to pull with her, even though she’s getting tired of him and wants to spend more time with the other kids. Shoestring warns Birdie that his father knows her father added barbed wire to his fence. Mr. Slater can no longer water his cows at the lake on the Boyer property. Shoestring warns Birdie that despite his father’s jovial attitude at the party, he wants to cause trouble and has a set of pliers in his pocket.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Cattle”
Mr. Boyer discovers someone cut every section of his fence between his land and the Slaters’ property. Animals trespass on and destroy crops yet again. Certain that it was Mr. Slater’s doing, Mr. Boyer confronts him in the town saloon. Mr. Slater explains that he inherited his land from his grandfather, that his family is from Florida, and they understand the land to be open range. Mr. Boyer insists that because he paid for his land, Mr. Slater doesn’t have the right to access the Boyers’ land at all. Mr. Boyer says the next time he sees one of Mr. Slater’s animals on his property, he’ll shoot it.
Mrs. Boyer is disappointed in her husband for fighting with Mr. Slater. She tells her husband to let her take care of the Slaters the next time they herd their cattle through. Mrs. Boyer sees the Slaters coming with their herd and sprinkles flour on the strawberries. Unsure what the white powder on the strawberries is, and worried that it might be poison, the Slaters herd around the Boyers’ property.
Chapters 4-8 Analysis
In Chapters 4 through 8, the friendship between Shoestring and Birdie becomes more dynamic. Shoestring and Birdie relate to the world and to one another differently, which prevents Shoestring getting closer to Birdie. Birdie is empathetic toward Shoestring, even though he irritates her. Birdie notices that “he was trying to fix things up. All at once her black hate melted away and she liked him again. She was able to forgive him for the snake on her hat. She decided not to fight him for the snake. He only did it in fun anyhow. He had not meant to hurt or frighten her” (51-52). Birdie recognizes Shoestring’s intentions, and their friendship progresses. This emphasizes the theme of The Importance of Being Kind. But Shoestring and Birdie also contend with external conflicts that influence their friendship. Shoestring represents a force of antagonism because of who his father is; Birdie often dreads seeing Shoestring because he often bears bad, foreboding news about his father and hers. Shoestring is forced to be the representative of his father and carry the negative reputation of the Slater family, even though Shoestring is nothing like his father. Shoestring and Birdie’s friendship is, however, steadfast despite their fathers’ problems with one another. This highlights the value of innocent childhood friendships and foreshadows that the Boyers and the Slaters can also get along.
Tension builds up between Mr. Slater and Mr. Boyer. Slater alludes to the possibility of violence when he refers to Florida as an lawless land: “‘Wal—round here, a shotgun’s more useful than the law, and handier, too!’ Slater laughed” (44). Mr. Slater blithely brings up weapons, highlighting not only his comfort with using guns to solve his problems but also that casually threatening a neighbor with a gun is easy for him. Part of Mr. Slater’s aura of danger is his false appearance of amiability. He may laugh off his idea of bringing in a gun to deal with Mr. Boyer, but the laugh masks how serious he is about resorting to violence.
Even though the Boyer family wants peace with Mr. Slater, they refuse to let him bully them and destroy their land. A major component of rural life is protecting and defending yourself. But while Mr. Slater is characterized as being purposefully antagonistic, Mr. Boyer’s way of fighting back is to be on the defensive. Mr. Boyer builds a fence because he wants to protect his crops, but Mr. Slater sees the fence as yet another example of the Boyer family being “uppity.” The Slater family’s backstory provides context for their offense at the Boyers. For Mr. Slater, the land is unownable, shareable, and free. He is averse to the changes going on in society, which Mr. Boyer represents through his land ownership, agricultural methods, and pride in the ability to afford material comforts for his family. The Boyers have some disposable income, as is evidenced when Birdie buys a new hat. The Slaters’ poverty is exacerbated by Mr. Slater's drinking. It is a destitution antithetical to the Boyers and their success. Therefore, Mr. Slater acts defensively around Mr. Boyer because Mr. Boyer is an outsider who has proven to Mr. Slater that the land Mr. Slater believed was useless and inherently poor his entire life is full of potential. What’s more, in Mr. Slater’s view, Mr. Boyer has stolen what is rightfully his.
Characters in this novel are characterized by how they handle conflict. The Boyers believe that “when there’s trouble waitin’ for you, you jest as good go out to meet it” (90). The setting of a rural community and scarcity of resources sets up neighbor against neighbor conflicts, as well as people and environment conflicts. The setting also implies these fragile relationships are essential to maintain during hard times. Therefore, confronting conflict rather than waiting for conflict to get worse is a better solution. Mr. Boyer deals with conflict directly, confronting Mr. Slater about his animals while maintaining a jovial tone. Mr. Boyer is characterized as someone who doesn’t want trouble but will also stand up for himself. Mrs. Boyer uses her intelligence to handle conflict, rather than the more male-oriented aggression seen by the fathers in this novel. Mrs. Boyer’s use of flour to trick Mr. Slater into avoiding her crops characterizes her as smart and suggests that there are more peaceful ways out of conflict.
Living in harmony is an important goal for these early settlers of Florida and emphasizes the theme of The Importance of Community and Hard Work. As the state develops further and laws are established, people can rely on institutionalized codes to guide behavior. Until then, they must make and enforce social codes themselves. In these isolated rural communities, no one wants to be left out, even when there is tension. After her father cuts the ears off one of Mr. Slater’s hogs, it occurs to Birdie that “It seemed strange that the Slaters, who were the Boyers’ worst enemies, should act like good friends and come to the cane grinding. But quarrels did not keep people away from frolics, she knew that. It was an unwritten law of the backwoods” (82). These customs are the bedrock of how the community interacts with one another. People can still come together even when there is conflict because people need each other.
