49 pages • 1 hour read
God Help The Child
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Part 2, Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Part 2 Opening
Bride takes a taxi to the pawn shop listed on Booker’s mail. Booker has left a pinky ring and a mouth piece from an instrument. While there, she discovers that Booker left a secondary address in Whiskey, a rural town in Northern California. The name listed on the address is “Q. Olive.”
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Sofia”
Sofia receives word that her mother died. When Sofia was growing up, her parents were strict disciplinarians who punished Sofia for even minor infractions. Sofia married as soon as possible to escape their rule, but her husband turned out to be a controlling man. The iron discipline she learned in these relationships turned out to be key to her survival. The last time she lost control was the day she assaulted Bride. When she bathes her patients, Sofia imagines that she is taking care of and healing the young woman of her wounds, a welcome release.
Meanwhile, Bride drives north toward Whiskey, well aware that hurt rather than love is the motivation for her journey. Being with Booker had made her feel “safe, colonized somehow” (77). She had felt that way in her mother’s house despite the lack of touch and love. Bride remembers that Sweetness had slapped her when her first menstrual blood stained the bed sheets, but the blow and her mother’s rough touch as Sweetness pushed Bride in the tub had been almost welcome because Bride longed to be touched.
Bride thinks her flippant response to Booker’s last words and Sofia’s assault showed how little Bride had changed from the helpless and cowardly girl she had been. Chasing Booker would at last allow her to stand up for herself. She was going to force Booker to explain his words and actions.
At a stop in a country diner, Bride realizes that she is rapidly losing weight, but just as she did when she recognized that her ear piercings had closed and her pubic hair had disappeared, she refuses to confront the frightening changes in her body. On the abandoned road to Whiskey, Bride crashes her Jaguar into a tree. Trapped without cell service and unable to free her foot from the wreckage, Bride is not extricated until the next day when a little girl, Rain, comes across the accident and returns later with help. The girl’s father, Steve, frees Bride and takes her back to the ramshackle, primitive house where he lives with Rain and Evelyn, his wife. Bride is sure the odd, hippie couple mean her harm, but they secure medical care for her ankle, which is broken, and help her to recuperate.
Bride, stuck in the town because of her injury and drawn-out repairs to the Jaguar, stays with the family for six weeks. Over the six weeks, Bride watches in horror as her breasts disappear. During this time, she also learns about Rain. Rain is actually the daughter of a drug addict who sexually trafficked the little girl for drugs. Steve and Evelyn discovered the little girl hiding on a city street and decided simply to take her because she seemed abandoned. Raisin has lived with them ever since, and she shares in a matter of fact way the terrible abuse she suffered. Bride also decides to write Brooklyn a note to explain where she is.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Rain”
Rain narrates this monologue. She describes her time with Bride, her “black lady” (104). Unlike Steve and Evelyn, Bride does not prevent Rain from telling stories about her time with her mother. Bride is pretty and tough, too, as shown by the way she stuck out her arm to block the birdshot aimed at the little girl by two racist boys who taunted Rain as they drove by in a truck. Rain misses her “black lady,” who is gone now that her car is fixed, but Rain hopes she will come back again.
Part 2, Chapters 10-11 Analysis
Although this section is short, significant elements of the plot, character development, and thematic developments take place. The narrative in this section most particularly focuses on the impact of Bride’s journey on her identity but also on demythologizing childhood.
In most Western novels, journeys are important rites of passage that allow the protagonist to come of age or fulfill a particular destiny. Bride’s journey reverses that pattern because her journey is one of regression to childhood and dependence. The first evidence of Bride’s journey as a regression to childhood is that Bride’s secondary sex characteristics—breasts, pubic hair—and even her piercings systematically disappear the closer Bride gets to Whiskey. This reversal literalizes Booker’s pronouncement that Bride was not the woman by turning Bride into a girl. Bride wrecks the Jaguar, the most potent symbol of her identity as a woman, and the accident forces her to depend on Steve and Evelyn for the necessities of life.
The burgeoning relationship between Bride and Rain reinforces Bride’s regression because the two are essentially strays adopted by Steve and Evelyn and relate to each other as siblings who share secrets out of earshot of the parental figures. Rather than presenting Rain as a figure of innocence who can help Bride get in touch with her inner child, however, Morrison uses Rain’s brutal monologues about being sold for sex to her mother’s johns to paint a bleak picture of both childhood and motherhood. No child, it seems, escapes damage. Morrison never represents Bride’s reactions to these stories. Indirect characterization of Bride—Rain’s obvious affection for Bride despite Rain’s distrust of adults, Rain’s account of Bride’s willingness to take an apparent bullet for the little girl—point to some shift in Bride. Bride’s blocking of the gunshot (which turns out to be birdshot) is the first self-sacrificial action she commits in the novel.
While Morrison refuses to present a redemptive arc for Bride in this section, she does present such an arc for Sofia. Sofia is one of the few characters who gets a monologue in this section of the novel. Sofia, the reader learns, also grew up in a rigid, not particularly loving home and found little better in her own marriage once she left. Here is another person damaged by the imperfection of her parent. What we do see of Sofia in the aftermath of her assault on Bride is that she is capable of change. Her loving care of her patients in particular shows that she is capable of nurturing others, a capability lacking in most of the other characters. Morrison’s decision to cast Sofia, whose name means “wisdom,” most sympathetically is yet another example of her refusal of the typical conventions of the novel.
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