39 pages • 1 hour read
Another Brooklyn
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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
August remembers that while the girls snuck off with their boyfriends, they feared stories of black girls murdered in Manhattan. This fear was coupled with their fear of losing Angela. But nonetheless, they persisted in their sexual exploration—to a point. While Sylvia lost her virginity, August refused to have sex with Jerome, to which he said: “Forget you.” Later, August discovered that Sylvia and Jerome had begun to see each other. Her “world collapse[d] in a moment” (150). During this period, August’s father began to see a non-Muslim woman, but took August to see Sister Sonja.
Chapter 14 Summary
August narrates her senior year in high school. Heartbroken by Sylvia, she studied for standardized tests, preparing herself to leave Brooklyn. In her self-imposed isolation, August went three months before seeing Sylvia, and when she saw her again, she found her friend was pregnant. During this period, August came to terms with her mother’s death, looking at the content of her urn and sleeping with it in her bedroom, “one hand pressed against it” (155).
As August and Sylvia feuded and the group of friends fractured, Gigi called August to urge her to get over it—and to attend Gigi’s drama club production of Jesus Christ Superstar. August didn’t show up, and she would later find out that Angela and Sylvia failed to show as well. They missed the performance, during which Gigi’s voice cracked, leading the whole auditorium to laugh at her. Later, Gigi jumped off the roof of the Chelsea Hotel during the cast party: “If the tribes of the Fijis send their living off to join their dead, it should have been me flying” (158).
Chapter 15 Summary
August thinks back to the new identity she embraced as a freshman at Brown University in Providence, RI. There, she went by “Auggie,” and began to sleep “with white boys in photo-less rooms filled with jazz” (161). Jazz music revealed something to her about her own past: “there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell” (160) the stories she and her friends had lived. As she heard that music, she mourned the loss of Gigi. Traveling to the Philippines, Bali, and Korea, August took up a string of lovers, all of them accusing her of being distant, or of sleeping with “fisted hands.”
Chapter 16 Summary
August narrates her family’s return to SweetGrove. When she was 16, her father took her and her brother to Tennessee. They found weeds where their house had been. Later, she would tell Sister Sonja that this was when she realized her mother was dead: “When my father took us back to the water” (166). She then returns to the present-day events after her father’s funeral. Her brother asks why she always said their mother was coming back, and she responds that she believed that to be true. She fast-forwards to her freshman year at Brown, noting that she first saw Angela on television that year, and whispered to herself, “Angela […] you made it” (168). Reflecting back on Tennessee, August remembers realizing, finally, that SweetGrove was no longer their home: “At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory” (170).
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
The final chapters of the book trace the end of August’s friendships and her time in Brooklyn and inspect the consequences of her childhood on her adult life. She reveals the reason she got off the subway to avoid talking to Sylvia: twenty years before, Sylvia had slept with Jerome, resulting in her pregnancy. She also reveals Gigi’s tragic end: after hitting a cracked note at a performance of Jesus Christ, Superstar, she found herself in an auditorium with no support or friends and subsequently, jumped off a roof. This is the second suicide in the book (after August’s mother), and August feels personally responsible for it.
While the girls promised each other love and support, they fail to give it in several ways. August’s mother’s words—her advice to keep other women at arm’s distance—suddenly seems relevant. It seems that Sylvia was indeed untrustworthy, disappointing August. However, August feels that she herself disappointed Gigi. In this case, she wasn’t able to remain close enough to prevent a tragedy. Finally, none of the girls are able to support Angela after her mother’s death or find her after her disappearance.
The final two chapters of the book reflect on the ways Brooklyn shaped August’s adult life. After a childhood filled with loss and death, she believes she must flee Brooklyn and reinvent herself. At Brown, she begins to go by a different name, and she discovers jazz music. This is a mixed consolation: jazz tells her that other African-Americans have experienced the same violence and suffering—that there is a way to tell her story—but at the same time, it leads her to reflect back on her friends’ lack of resources for coping with their lives.
It seems that August, in some sense, never moves on. As a world traveler, she continues to think about her friends, and she can never rebuild the easy intimacy that she shared with them with her male and female romantic partners. She struggles to communicate her love and to fully attach herself to others. In the final pages of the novel, she reflects that her return to SweetGrove made her realize that everything and everyone eventually becomes memory. But these memories do not necessarily seem to provide closure. Although she believes she has learned to cope with death, she continues to struggle with intimacy in a world defined by impermanence.
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