God Help The Child

In this short monologue, Brooklyn sounds off on Bride’s thoughtlessness after Bride finally contacts her by sending a note that is skimpy on details. Brooklyn, who believes she has a nose for ferreting out the truth, intuitively knows that Bride is chasing after Booker. Brooklyn compares her own act of running away when she was 14 to Bride’s current journey; Bride’s running away to “some place where there is no real stationary or even a postcard” (140) seems to be the behavior of a spoiled, thoughtless person to Brooklyn.

In the subsequent part of the chapter, the narration shifts to third person from the perspective of Bride. Bride finds the rural landscapes through which she drives to be boring as she continues her journey to Whiskey. The roads are too rough for her Jaguar, and to make matters worse, she has not had a period in two months, one more sign of her “crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl” (142).

Bride quickly finds the house she is looking for when she arrives in Whiskey. Out front is an older woman burning a bed in her front yard. As Bride sits in the car, her self-consciousness about her skin color—notwithstanding Booker’s argument that race is a construct and racism is a choice—returns as the local children gawk at her.