Opening
Across Chapters 16–20, responsibility pulls the girls deeper into Oakland’s realities. Cooking breaks open a door into their mother’s private world, a clash at the Center exposes Delphine’s own blind spots, and the Panthers’ lessons—and losses—force her to weigh safety against solidarity.
What Happens
Chapter 16: Big Red S
After spending the night soothing Fern Gaither’s stomach, Delphine Gaither decides enough takeout is enough. She asks Cecile Johnson (Nzila) for money and a key; Cecile, on edge as if bracing for another Panther visit, hands over ten dollars and the house key. Delphine bypasses Ming’s for Safeway, where memories of Big Ma’s thrift guide her cart: chicken, cabbage, potatoes, onions—plus prunes for Fern. Vonetta Gaither and Fern grumble, but Delphine grips the paper bag and imagines the red S as a Superman emblem she has to live up to.
Back at the house, she squares up to Cecile: “I have to cook supper.” Cecile stomps and curses but unlocks the invisible barrier to her sacred space. The kitchen doubles as a print shop dominated by Cecile’s press; she tosses Delphine a peeler and knife, growling instructions and staking out a rule—no pig in her kitchen. While Delphine chops and boils, Cecile works with ritual intensity at the press, hands moving like prayer. Dinner is plain and “not like Big Ma’s,” according to the younger girls. Cecile eats anyway—hers and their leftovers—then orders Delphine to clean the mess she started and adds, “It wouldn’t kill you to be selfish… We’re trying to break yokes. You’re trying to make one for yourself.” The meal marks a breach in Cecile’s boundaries and anchors Delphine more firmly in the mother-role she’s already carrying.
Chapter 17: China Who
At the People’s Center, the class preps T-shirt prints in red, black, and green. Sister Mukumbu sends Delphine, Eunice, and Hirohito Woods to fetch water. Waiting by the spigot, Delphine studies Hirohito’s face and mixed-race features until he catches her staring. Flustered, she lies, then pivots to threats about his “skateboard.”
“It’s a go-kart,” he says, calm. Delphine lashes out: “China boy.” “China who?” he counters. “China you.” Eunice snaps that he’s Black and Japanese, not Chinese. Shame burns, but pride locks Delphine’s mouth. As Hirohito walks away, Eunice drops a warning: “If you knew about Hirohito and Brother Woods, you’d leave him alone.” The moment exposes Delphine’s assumptions and opens a door she’s been reluctant to look through.
Chapter 18: Expert Colored Counting
Homesick and bored, Vonetta and Fern prod Delphine into a “protest” for a television. Delphine barges into Cecile’s work time with a list: cartoons, news, The Mike Douglas Show, and, especially, their family ritual of “expert colored counting”—tallying Black faces on TV and commercials and scoring speaking lines like points in a game. A TV, she argues, would keep them quiet so Cecile can work.
Cecile doesn’t budge. “Television is a liar and a story,” she says. The girls fire back with noise: the theme from The Monkees, loud and looping. The next morning, a small secondhand radio appears in their room—a grudging concession. Not a TV, but a crack in Cecile’s hard shell.
Chapter 19: Civic Pride
The Center shifts to civics: what to do when the police stop you. Sister Mukumbu teaches calmly, but Crazy Kelvin prowls for heat, pushing the kids to say “pigs.” He corners Hirohito: Who arrested your father? “The police,” Hirohito answers, voice low. Kelvin spits the script—“the pigs”—and announces that they busted down the door of a Vietnam war hero and took Brother Woods. Hirohito’s face collapses; Delphine meets his eyes and finally understands Eunice’s warning.
That lesson pulls Delphine back to Alabama: a white state trooper’s flashlight slicing the dark, her father’s yes-sir, the humiliation he later shrugs off to Big Ma as the “same old same old.” The memory fuses with what Hirohito is living now, and with the Panthers’ urgency. The danger becomes specific, familiar, and close.
Chapter 20: Rally for Bobby
Delphine reads in the Panther paper about Bobby Hutton, seventeen, shot dead by police. Suddenly Oakland feels lethal. When Sister Mukumbu announces a rally performance to free Huey Newton and rename a park for Bobby, Delphine’s answer is immediate: No. She decides for herself and for her sisters.
Vonetta and Fern want the stage. They choose “Dry Your Eyes,” a song about a mother leaving her child, and spin a fantasy where a performance softens Cecile’s heart. Delphine shuts it down—wrong song, wrong place, wrong idea—and confides her fear to Sister Mukumbu, who speaks of unity. Delphine can only think, Wouldn’t Little Bobby rather be alive than remembered? She resolves to keep her sisters home, even if it means crossing friends and the Center.
Character Development
Delphine grows into the space adulthood keeps pushing her to fill, even as the world shows her how dangerous, complicated, and compromising adulthood can be.
- Delphine Gaither: Steps from paying for takeout to cooking a full meal in Cecile’s guarded kitchen; confronts her own prejudice with Hirohito; weighs political ideals against her primary duty to protect her sisters; increasingly leads with resolve.
- Cecile Johnson (Nzila): Cracks appear—she surrenders her key and kitchen, offers curt guidance, and later leaves a radio; her “break yokes” creed reframes her mothering as a refusal of constraints.
- Hirohito Woods: Moves from go-kart kid to a boy carrying public scrutiny and private grief; Kelvin’s reveal about Brother Woods explains Hirohito’s reserve and adds gravity to his story.
- Vonetta and Fern Gaither: Still chasing pleasures and attention—pizza, TV, performance—yet their choice of “Dry Your Eyes” exposes a deep yearning for maternal love beneath the noise.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid private caretaking with public struggle, tightening the tension between home and movement. The kitchen scene asks whether mothering is duty or trap, while the civics lesson and rally plans insist that personal safety is inseparable from political danger.
- Family, Motherhood, and Abandonment centers the kitchen breach, where Delphine assumes a mother’s tasks and Cecile argues against the “yoke” of that role. Their clash reframes abandonment as an act Cecile reads as liberation.
- Coming of Age accelerates as Delphine commands a household, owns mistakes with Hirohito, and makes hard calls about the rally. Each choice pulls her further from childlike wishful thinking.
- Social Justice and Activism runs on parallel tracks: the girls’ playful “protest” for a TV contrasts with Panther civics, Kelvin’s coercive rhetoric, and the deadly real stakes of Bobby Hutton’s killing.
- Identity and Self-Discovery surfaces when Delphine reduces Hirohito to “China boy,” then learns he’s Black and Japanese. Her misstep exposes how limited experience can shape harmful assumptions.
Symbols sharpen these ideas:
- The kitchen: Cecile’s creative-political sanctum; letting Delphine cook cracks both a physical and emotional barrier.
- The Safeway “Big Red S”: Delphine’s self-image as protector-hero, the weight of responsibility she chooses.
- Television and media: The girls’ “expert colored counting” becomes a child’s toolkit for measuring representation—and noticing erasure.
Key Quotes
“I have to cook supper.”
- Delphine claims authority in Cecile’s space. The line crystallizes her shift from child guest to acting caregiver, forcing Cecile to acknowledge her presence and power.
“No pig of any kind in my kitchen.”
- Cecile’s rule doubles as politics and principle. On the surface it’s dietary; underneath it aligns the home with Panther language and values, drawing a line between her work and state power.
“It wouldn’t kill you to be selfish, Delphine… We’re trying to break yokes. You’re trying to make one for yourself.”
- Cecile’s credo reframes motherhood as bondage. It challenges Delphine’s sense of duty and complicates judgments about Cecile’s choices, introducing a feminist lens to their conflict.
“Television is a liar and a story.”
- Cecile rejects the medium the girls trust. The claim underscores media’s distortion, setting their “colored counting” against her insistence on unfiltered truth through print and organizing.
“China who?” / “China you.”
- The quick exchange exposes Delphine’s bias and ignorance. It marks a painful step in her self-education about race, ethnicity, and the harm of casual labeling.
“Wouldn’t Little Bobby rather be alive than be remembered?”
- Delphine articulates the core dilemma of risk and remembrance. The question captures a child’s stark calculus and foreshadows her decision to keep her sisters away from the rally.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This section turns the summer from novelty to necessity. Delphine’s meal changes the balance of power at home, while the Center’s lessons—and Kelvin’s cruelty—show how state violence shapes daily life. Bobby Hutton’s death and the rally plans shatter the illusion of the Center as camp, pushing Delphine into a choice between solidarity and safety. The chapters deepen the novel’s central conflict: how to grow up responsibly when love, freedom, and danger all demand different things at once.