37 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline WoodsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Ellie wakes to the sound of her mother, Marion, calling to her from the bottom of the stairs. Ellie was “dreaming of Miah” (1). Marion continues to try to wake her daughter up, while Ellie thinks back to the fall, when Jeremiah was new in her life. At the time, when Marion asked if there was a boy, Ellie lied and said there wasn’t. Now she thinks, “There isn’t a boy,” “not anymore” (2). Ellie finally tells Marion that she dreamed about Jeremiah. Marion tells her, “Remember what you can, Elisha” (2).
Jeremiah, a Black boy in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, feels “warm inside his skin, protected” (5). Yet, when he steps outside his neighborhood, the weight of his skin becomes heavier. He grew up around different ideas of what it was to be Black. The light-skinned and dark-skinned boys in his neighborhood all ragged on each other, but they still felt safe and connected. His grandmother, when she was still alive, would make Jeremiah sit in the shade because she didn’t want him to “get too black” (6). His dad would tell him “Miah, you’re a black man. You’re a warrior” (8). His mother would call for her “beautiful brown-eyed, black baby child” and Jeremiah would come running (10). Jeremiah even felt the weight of his Black skin when he played basketball, and he now hated the thought of what it would mean to basketball for his new private, “white-bright” high school, Percy Academy (9). Everyone else’s thoughts echo through Jeremiah’s head, but he’s still unsure of who he is when he looks in the mirror. Now, on top of that confusion, he has also met a girl.
Ellie remembers the rainy day when she first met Jeremiah.
Ellie walks home slowly from her first day at Percy Academy, and the doorman greets her at her apartment on “Eighty-eighth and Central Park West” (12). Earlier, she was trying to find a classroom when she crashed into a boy and couldn’t stop staring at his smile, hair, and face. When he said his name was Jeremiah, she responded, “Like the bullfrog?” and when they parted she caught him staring at her, puzzled, before they waved goodbye once (14).
In her apartment, she misses having her older siblings around and wonders whom Jeremiah went home to. Since her father is a doctor at the hospital, Marion sets the dinner table for just Ellie and herself, and they chat over their meal, discussing Ellie’s siblings. Ellie is distracted, and Marion wonders if she’s thinking of a boy, but Ellie denies it. Marion warns that Ellie is too young and “has years and years” for boys, but Ellie argues that her mother can’t be sure of that (25).
Marion explains that her children are her whole life, but Ellie brings up Marion’s history of leaving the family throughout Ellie’s childhood, which has created a lack of trust between them. Marion continues to press Ellie about the boy, while Ellie complains about her parents putting her in a fancy private school.
Jeremiah comes home to his mother’s apartment after his first day at Percy, and he has dinner with his mother, Nelia, a successful writer. Jeremiah hates that he has to split his time between his now separated parents, with “two addresses, two phone numbers, two bedrooms” (34). With his father gone, Jeremiah feels the emptiness of their home, which was once filled with his father’s friends and film industry co-workers stopping by or staying the night. Nelia asks Jeremiah about his first day at Percy and is concerned about whether or not the predominantly white students think he is a scholarship student. Even though he’s only at Percy because his dad wanted him to attend, Jeremiah thinks that it’s a good opportunity to “reinvent himself” (42). He misses his old school, Brooklyn Tech, but at Percy no one knows his parents.
They continue to talk, but Jeremiah is distracted thinking about the girl with “thick black hair” and “pretty eyes” he ran into in the hallway (45). When his mother asks why he’s in a good mood and what her name is, Jeremiah denies he’s thinking about a girl. Jeremiah plans to ask that girl her name if he sees her the next day.
In these opening chapters, Ellie and Jeremiah introduce their individual worlds and perspectives through the accounts of their first days at Percy Academy. Using alternating points of view for each chapter, the writer emphasizes their contrasting homes and family lives and underlines how their differing races impact the way they see and walk through the world.
In addition to the alternating points of view, the parallel structures of Ellie and Jeremiah’s plots demonstrate their underlying similarities, despite these differences. Both arcs start with them returning home from the first day of school, chatting with their mothers over dinner about their complicated family lives, and then ultimately denying their mother’s questions about whether or not there might be a boy or girl who has put them in a good, but distracted, mood. Overall, this initial section contrasts the outward layer of Ellie and Jeremiah’s lives, while bringing to light their shared experiences and feelings. Woodson’s message is that, while there is a societal divide between the two characters because of their races, they are basically the same—with supportive mothers; similar educational opportunities; and similar reactions, thoughts, and feelings.
Though in the main narrative, Jeremiah and Ellie haven’t actually had a conversation yet, Woodson hints that they will soon connect through Ellie’s mother’s response to Ellie’s dream in the Prologue. Ellie’s mother, Marion, tells her to “remember what you can,” foreshadowing both Marion’s acceptance of Jeremiah and an impending tragedy that will separate Ellie and Jeremiah.
By Jacqueline Woodson