39 pages • 1 hour read
Susan Carol McCarthyLay That Trumpet in Our Hands
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A 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 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Early one morning before sunrise, Reesa is awakened by the sound of the family’s neighbor, Luther Cully, who is Black, giving his distinctive knock on the door. Sensing something is wrong, Reesa’s mother and father, Elizabeth, or Lizbeth, and Warren, leap from their bed. Reesa learns that Luther’s son, her close friend Marvin, has not yet come home from seeing a girl the night before.
Luther informs Warren that the Ku Klux Klan has been seen cruising the “Trail” around Joe’s jook joint, a nightclub popular with the Black community. Luther suggests they take a look at the Valencia grove; while doing so, they take a look around the lake, near the Klan headquarters. They worry that Marvin has been taken to the Casbah Groves that belong to Emmett Casselton who is known as an “ignorant damn cracker.” The Casbah is where Klan members take Black people to torture or kill them.
Worried about Marvin, Reesa is directed by her mother to make up the bed of her grandmother, who is visiting from Chicago. Later, Reesa’s father and Luther arrive home and call for blankets and towels for the hurt and bleeding Marvin lying in the back of Luther’s truck.
Chapter 2 Summary
Before heading out for Marvin’s funeral, Reesa watches her father Warren play the piano, commenting on how the instrument had been his lifesaver after he contracted polio. They discuss Marvin’s death and the fact that the Klan was responsible. Warren clearly wants to help his friend Luther seek justice for the murder of his son.
After Reesa’s parents leave for Marvin’s funeral, their grandmother, nicknamed Doto, tries to cheer up Reesa and her brothers. Reesa and her brothers pile into the luxurious leather seats of Doto’s DeSoto, and the foursome head to Lakeview Inn in Mount Laura for clam chowder and giant chocolate sundaes. On the way, Reesa reminisces about Marvin, remembering the nickname he gave her, his tips on how to tell when it’s spring, and his “wide-as-the-world” grin. It is difficult for her to imagine that he is gone forever.
While Doto and the children are enjoying their meals in the restaurant, they overhear a group of men discussing Marvin’s murder. The men are the Klansmen who had killed Marvin. In crude terms, the main speaker, who turns out to be a Lake County sheriff, explains that, when they beat the boy, he looked up and spoke to one of the perpetrators, Reed Garnet, telling him he had the wrong person. Garnet got angry, and another of the men, who had just returned from Korea, took out his pistol and shot Marvin. After the men leave, Reesa and her family refuse dessert and leave the restaurant.
Chapter 3 Summary
After Doto shares the conversation she and the children had overheard with Warren and Lizbeth, the three adults come up with a plan: They will write to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. They wonder how they will get the letter past the postmistress, who reads the mail and listens in on party-line telephones. They decide to mail the letter from Orlando inside Doto’s weekly packet of business correspondence.
Chapter 4 Summary
Reesa goes to school the next day, but only because her grandmother pushes her and she can ride in the big DeSoto. At school, she sees May Carol Garnet who is usually cared for by Marvin’s mother. She is unkempt with dark circles under her eyes, and Reesa wonders what she knows.
As class begins, Reesa thinks back in time to when Marvin told her the story about how the bee got its stripes and wings. Tiny angels had caught a fire ant giving the bee lashes (causing the stripes) and claiming to be its "Massa." The angels drove the fire ant back underground, and one angel gave her wings to the bee. That’s why the bees return every year to the orange grove; they come in memory of the angel.
Reesa’s teacher, Mrs. Beacham, forces Reesa back to reality by giving her a worksheet and requesting that she and May Carol stay after class.
Chapter 5 Summary
On Palm Sunday, Reesa and her family attend the local Baptist church that they have joined despite not being Baptist themselves. Tradition holds that each Palm Sunday, the church hosts a dinner on the grounds of the church. The church ladies fuss over the tablecloths and whose dish is most popular.
A contest is held for the children—a Bible verse search. Reesa does well because Marvin had taught her to divide the parts of the Bible into colors, but Billy Roy wins by finding the verse about Palm Sunday.
Then a conversation begins that reveals the “excuse” for Marvin’s murder. A woman had taken a ride to get gas with four young Black men, and later, the boys had implied that they had raped her. A law official deputized a posse to find the young men, and one had been shot for running away. The young men had been pronounced guilty by an all-White jury, but when Thurgood Marshall became involved, taking the case to the Supreme Court.
The women at the church picnic express their approval of the Klan. As the men take up the subject and Reesa begins to feel angry and excited, her daddy removes her from their presence.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In these opening chapters, the theme of racism and segregation in the American south is established when Marvin, a Black teenager, is murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. This racist incident drives the action of the entire book. As well, important characters are introduced in these early chapters. The book is narrated by a thirteen-year-old girl named Reesa McMahon, who is White; Marvin was her very close friend. The close relationship between Marvin’s father, Luther, and Warren McMahon, Reesa’s father, is also established. Warren’s hand is crippled by polio, which Warren insists he caught while swimming in a Florida lake. Warren’s hand, diseased by a waterborne illness, symbolizes the disease of racism that blights the Florida landscape.
In this section, Reesa flashes back to a memory of Marvin that functions as a parable and communicates the importance of Christian beliefs to several characters in the novel. Marvin’s story of the bee’s stripes and wings echoes the stories in the Bible of the beatings of Jesus Christ at the hands of his persecutors, echoing the spiritual theme reflected in the title of the novel and indeed the entire book. The angels of mercy saved the bee from the fire ant, who calls itself the bee’s master, by threatening to tell God about the fire ant’s behavior; the fire ant runs away, demonstrating a lack of integrity and fundamental weakness in its temperament. The theme of racism is present in Marvin’s story: the bee stands for the downtrodden, while the ant represents the evil master whose minions are fooled into thinking he has strength, much like the leader of the Klan holds power over his followers. It is also significant that Marvin’s story takes place in an orange grove, a symbolic place that has two meanings; the orange groves bear fruit and possesses a natural beauty for all to enjoy, but it is also a place of darkness where the most evil of acts can take place. Reesa experiences many dreams and memories like the one of the bee that represent, to Reesa and to the reader, the victimization and martyrdom of Marvin.
