49 pages • 1 hour read
Frank J. WebbThe Garies and Their Friends
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1857A 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 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Garies”
Content Warning: This section refers to enslavement, racism, racist violence, discrimination, offensive terms for Black people, murder and death, suicide, and alcohol addiction. The n-word is quoted and obscured.
The Garies and Their Friends opens with Mr. and Mrs. Garie eating lunch at their home in Savannah, Georgia, with their two small children, a boy and a girl. They are listening to their visitor, Mr. Winston, tell them about his travels. Although Mr. Winston is Black, he had been assumed to be white and spent time with the daughter of Mr. Priestly, who is a virulent racist. Mr. Winston then describes a dinner he attended at the Mortons’ home in Philadelphia where a Black waiter had corrected the Belgian minister about the mention of salad in Chaucer. Mr. Garie finds these stories very funny. When Mrs. Garie takes the children to bed, Mr. Garie remarks to Mr. Winston that she has seemed sad lately. It is then revealed that Mr. Winston is a freed, formerly enslaved man. His travels in the North have shown him how segregated it still is, and so he is considering leaving the United States altogether.
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Glance at the Ellis Family”
Chapter 2 opens with a domestic scene at the home of the Ellis family, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis and their three children: Caroline, Esther, and Charlie. The Ellis family is a Black family who lives freely in Philadelphia. Caroline, or “Caddy,” drags Charlie in from outside, where he had been playing marbles instead of bringing home the tea he had been sent to purchase. Charlie is initially sent to his room without any supper, but Mrs. Ellis and Esther feel bad about the punishment, so he is called down to eat. Then, Mrs. Ellis and Caddy bring some finished sewing to an old white woman, Mrs. Thomas. They are shown in by the mean cook, Aunt Rachel. Mrs. Ellis brings the work to Mrs. Thomas, who advises Mrs. Ellis that she should send her son Charlie to come work for her as a servant because he doesn’t need an education. Though Charlie enjoys and excels at school, the next day, he is informed that he will soon be going to work for Mrs. Thomas. Charlie is upset about this news.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Charlie’s Trials”
Charlie goes to school the next day. On the way, he meets up with his best friend, Kinch De Younge. When Charlie tells Kinch about his fate, Kinch advises Charlie to be deliberately bad at the job so that he gets fired quickly. At lunch, Kinch gives him several suggestions for how to sabotage the work. When Charlie gets home from school, Mrs. Thomas’s footman, Robberts, is there because Mrs. Thomas wants Charlie to begin work the next day. Charlie cries when he leaves for work. He goes to the Thomas residence and begins working in the kitchen. At the dinner party that night, he is clumsy and commits the faux pas of correcting the Belgian minister on the subject of Chaucer. One of the guests at the party, Mr. Winston, asks Charlie how he can get in touch with Charlie’s father, Charles Ellis.
Chapter 4 Summary: “In Which Mr. Winston Finds an Old Friend”
Mr. Winston had known Charles Ellis in Savannah when Mr. Winston was enslaved and Mr. Ellis was a carpenter. The next day, Mr. Winston goes to Mr. Ellis’s home. They are happy to see each other. Mr. Winston tells Mr. Ellis that Mr. Winston’s cousin Emily had been purchased by the son of Colonel Garie and was living as his wife. Mr. Ellis warns Mr. Winston that he will have to choose whether to be part of white or Black society in the North. That afternoon, Mr. Ellis tells his family that Mr. Winston will be returning for supper. Caddy gets the house ready and is infuriated when a “beggar” leaves coal marks on the newly cleaned steps. She gets the broom with which to beat the “beggar” but ends up hitting the just-arrived Mr. Winston with it instead by accident. After supper, Esther and Caddy go to the Black-run library for a lecture. Mr. Winston is impressed with the social opportunities for Black people in the North. Mr. Ellis says that he will introduce Mr. Winston to a friend of his, a wealthy Black real-estate dealer named Mr. Walters, who can show him around town.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Garies Decide on a Change”
Back in Savannah, the day after Mr. Winston left them, Mr. and Mrs. Garie are talking in their arbor. Mrs. Garie tells Mr. Garie that she worries about what would happen to herself and the children if Mr. Garie died because they could be sold as enslaved people and separated. She asks her husband if they could move to the North, especially because she is pregnant with a third child whom she wants to be born into freedom. Mr. Garie considers it. He warns Mrs. Garie that there is prejudice in the North as well. However, over the next few weeks, they decide that they will move to the North. Mr. Garie writes to Mr. Walters in Philadelphia to find them a home and to have the Ellis family prepare it for his family. Then, Mr. Garie finds an overseer to manage his Georgia property.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Pleasant News”
Mr. Walters goes to the Ellis residence and says that he has a surprise for the family. Before he gives the news, however, he asks where Charlie is. When Mr. Walters finds out that Charlie is working as a servant, he chastises the family for having him work instead of being in school. Then, Mr. Walters tells them that he needs their help furnishing a house for the Garies. The next day, the Ellis family walks to the house chosen by Mr. Walters and begins to make plans. When they return to their home, Robberts is there with a message from Mrs. Thomas about Charlie’s poor performance. Kinch has been meeting with Charlie in secret and helping him plan and execute harmless misbehavior like playing marbles in his coach livery, ruining it, and taunting the cook’s cat, Tom, into a fight with the Ellises’ own cat, Jerry.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The first section of The Garies and Their Friends gives insight into the lives of the two families that act as the protagonists in the narrative: the Garies and the Ellises. It also establishes the perspective used throughout the text: third-person omniscient narration with selective focus. In this first section, Chapters 1 and 5 are focused on the Garie family, while Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 focus on the Ellis family. In keeping with the conventions of 19th-century novels, there are occasional moments of first-person asides where the narrator addresses the audience directly; for example, “And now, my reader, whilst they are finishing their meal, I will relate to you who Mr. Winston is” (8). These asides create intimacy with the reader and draw attention to the framing at work in the novel.
The two first chapters of the novel open on domestic scenes at mealtime. This emphasizes the symbolic importance of food as a source of community, strength, and joy. In his introduction to the 1994 edition of The Garies and Their Friends, Dr. Robert Reid-Pharr argues that in this text, author Frank Webb
refused to recognize a clear distinction […] between the domestic and the political. […] for the African American, the domestic sphere represented a sort of ground zero in the struggle for both liberation of the enslaved people and the just treatment of free black populations (ix).
The immediate focus on domestic scenes shows just how important family and friends, brought together by food, were to survival amidst the racial prejudice and discrimination in the antebellum United States.
While these domestic scenes are a point of similarity in these opening chapters, they also highlight key differences between the Garie and Ellis families. The Garie table is “covered with all those delicacies that, in the household of a rich Southern planter, are regarded as almost necessaries of life” (1). What follows is a long list of the different dishes, thoroughly described. The Ellis family, alternatively, sits down to a simple meal of cornbread and tea.
Charlie Ellis disrupts the domestic harmony of the Ellis family tea with his boyish dedication to fun and play, exemplified by the motif of marbles, a sign of his liberation from conventional expectations for Black men at the time. In Chapters 3 and 6, Charlie is taken out of school to work as a servant in the Thomas home. Mrs. Ellis is partially convinced of the wisdom of this when Mrs. Thomas states that Charlie will “have to be a common mechanic, or, perhaps, a servant, or barber, or something of that kind, and what use would all his fine education be to him?” (25). In response, Charlie revolts against this presumed status through boyish pranks and lack of respect for authority, assisted by his best friend, Kinch, an example of Solidarity and Resistance Within Black Communities. In a world working against Black families and Black children, Charlie remains fun-loving and ornery, refusing to accept his new role under Mrs. Thomas.
