46 pages • 1 hour read
Fire Shut Up in My Bones
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Chester”
During the brutally hot and bug-infested summers, the Blow household hosts frequent visits from extended family. One summer, his cousin Chester—the son of his Uncle Henry who is imprisoned in Fort Leavenworth for crimes committed during his military service—comes for a visit. Henry is a charming rascal, drifting in and out of relationships like a character in a blues song. Chester takes after his father with an “impish smile full of subtlety and mischief […] that made people believe things they shouldn’t” (64). A few years older than Blow, Chester expresses particular interest in his seven-year-old cousin, spending time with him and even sharing a bed.
One day, Chester convinces Blow to steal candy from a local store. He agrees, not realizing that Chester is priming him to break rules and keep secrets. He commits the crime but later, overcome with guilt, returns the candy and apologizes. The proprietress of the store, Mrs. Bertha, reports him to his mother. That night, Blow wakes up to find Chester sexually assaulting him. Afraid and confused, he lies rigid, paralyzed. Throughout, Chester whispers in his ear, “Relax, it’s just a game” (66). Chester never enters Blow, the contact always external, but “to me, in that moment, that seemed a distinction without a difference” (66). As Chester sleeps, Blow broods, convinced the whole thing is his fault. The next morning, when Chester proposes a repeat of the previous night, Blow finds the courage to say no. Rebuffed, Chester never speaks to Blow or plays with him again. This rejection feels like the end of his world, an inner death that robs him of the ability to express his grief.
At first, Blow blames his mother for not knowing this could happen and, afterward, for not knowing it did happen, despite his silence. Then, he decides the matter is best confronted with a father figure, but he has none, so he retreats into shame and isolation. Blow is unable to trust other boys, the conflicting notions of abuse and attraction fused as one into his brain. Chester continues the abuse verbally, labeling Blow a “punk”—vernacular for gay—and hoping to shame him into silence. The strategy works, but suppressing his shame doesn’t eradicate it; rather, it transforms it into a need to disappear.
When school starts in the Fall, Blow attends Ringgold, the same school where his mother works; his other brothers still attend Gibsland Elementary or the local high school. While at Ringgold, he participates in an annual pageant during which a king and queen of each school division are crowned. As the judges interview him, Blow realizes that he has the ability to charm them. He creates an artifice behind which to hide, a necessary survival skill for “boys like me” (71). Blow wins the title but is bullied for it. As he falls into depression, his schoolwork suffers, and he is placed in the “slow” class. His mother protests, and he is eventually moved back to the “regular” class, but it doesn’t matter: “I would never again be a regular boy” (71).
One evening at the skating rink, Blow realizes that his only path to happiness is to divorce his body from his spirit, and to live in that space outside his physical form where the pain has no purchase on him. At eight years old, he decides to end his life. As he prepares to swallow an entire bottle of aspirin, a gospel song comes into his head. The song is one his mother often sings when they are alone together. He takes it as a sign that God wants him to live. He abandons thoughts of suicide and decides that religion will be his salvation. He attends weekly church services with his family, fascinated by the duality of the message: sin and repentance, darkness and light, and the idea that there can be no salvation without transgression. One Sunday, he answers the Reverend Brown’s call and approaches the altar, hoping to be saved, but he hesitates when the preacher wants to baptize him. He realizes then that he will have to be his own savior.
Once a year, families in Blow’s church community gather for Graveyard Working Day, an occasion to tidy up the cemetery. The Black cemetery is separated from the more pristine white cemetery by a chain-link fence. As the community honors their dead, they share stories and food and each other’s company. Blow finds out that Chester is a single surviving twin, his brother having been stillborn. He spends the day scouting out graves, searching for the grave of Chester’s dead brother, convinced that Chester must have killed him, robbing his brother of life the way he robbed Charles of his. He believes finding the grave will give him solace and salvation. Although he never finds it, he feels a communion with the spirits of the dead that lifts his soul and begins the healing process. Still, he realizes that he can’t spend all his time in a graveyard. He writes, “I had to find a place to heal myself among the living” (81).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Punk Next Door”
In third grade, Blow spends most of his time hanging out with Shane, a “punk” one year his senior. Although he fears the stigma-by-association, he also feels a kinship with the boy. The only other openly gay boys in town are both relatives of Blow’s. One, his second cousin Lawrence, hangs out in the local upholstery shop at night, a refuge where he can express himself openly. Those socially dangerous expressions frighten Charles who wrestles with his own sexual identity, vacillating between attraction to women and men. The appeal of women is more lurid to him, represented by naked images seen in magazines; but the faceless men that inhabit his dreams sometimes are a comforting presence. They are the opposite of Chester, kind men trying to fill the hole left in the wake of his abuse. Lawrence confuses him, however. Blow cannot see beyond the “deviant” behavior to the possibility of love and tenderness. Five years before Matthew Shepherd’s murder, Lawrence is killed, but the investigation is cursory at best, and his death generates no news coverage. Shane, while not as openly “out” as Lawrence, maintains his dignity and sense of identity in the face of taunts, tacitly challenging anyone to question his self-confidence, a monumental feat of defiance that Blow finds inspiring. In time, however, Shane moves away, and Blow “moves on.”
Soon after, a new family moves into the neighborhood. The father is a preacher with the Church of Yahweh, a fringe religion that Blow’s community distrusts. The man’s daughter Nevaeh is also a social outcast, and like Shane she doesn’t care, ignoring the taunts or deflecting them with her sharp wit. She and Blow become friends. One day, she takes him into her father’s church where the preacher delivers a lengthy lecture about “a black messiah, true Jews, and the lost tribes of Israel” (90). Unbeknownst to Blow, the man is a cult leader who would years later be convicted of conspiracy to murder. Unable to recruit followers, however, they soon move away.
Blow briefly associates with the Sparrow children, “an unruly bunch” (92). But their behavior and that of the adults in their orbit is too extreme—sexual assault, alcoholism, incest—and those friendships are fleeting. Seeking a middle ground, Blow befriends Sam Robert, a neighborhood boy whose family is poorer than his but who shows kindness and responsibility. Sam’s mother, however, drinks heavily and curses fiercely, one day belittling Charles loudly as he knocks at the door. He never returns.
Unable to maintain suitable and lasting friendships, Blow becomes a loner, spending hours in an abandoned house “where I hid and healed and thought and played” (94). When the old house is torn down, he wiles away his hours in a “forested lot” across from his house, communing with nature and taking strength from its resilience.
In fourth grade, Blow transfers back to his old elementary school Gibsland. For the first time, he feels noticed and his intelligence validated. The mostly Black faculty is a revelation, teaching him about Black History Month and singing the “black national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” He also gains popular status as the friend of Russell and Alphonso, two of the cool kids. He uses his natural strength and agility to reinvent himself into the boy he wants to be: not the shy loner but the boy Russell and Alphonso have ordained him to be.
One of his few diversions is watching overblown, theatrical wrestling matches at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium. The façade of ferocity he witnesses during these matches inspires him to adopt a similar attitude—false bravado in the face of a challenge—but underneath, the pain of Chester’s assault lingers. Meanwhile, Alphonso teaches him the art of psychological warfare. Blow learns how to disarm a bully with a snide comeback and a withering glance so he doesn’t have to resort to violence. He gathers and refines the lessons he has learned from Russell, Alphonso, and Shane, creating a confident, intelligent persona for himself.
One day, a white boy shouts a racial epithet at him, and Blow suddenly becomes aware of racism and the fraught dynamics between Black and white. However, rather than internalizing the racial fear and anger that so many people of color felt toward white people, Blow’s personal experience with his grandmother and her white employers allow him to imagine a more racially harmonious future, one in which Black people and white people treat each other simply as people without the stigmatizing burden of race.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
The cryptic events of the prologue are given background and context as Blow reveals his traumatic secret. Sexual predators often seek out loners and social outcasts, and Blow fits that description. Already struggling with his culture’s rigid definition of manhood, Blow proves a convenient target for Chester, who lays the groundwork by gaining Blow’s trust with his sly charm. One of the strategies predators use to perpetuate their crimes is to convince the victim that revealing the secret is worse than keeping it, and Charles, even though he refuses Chester’s repeated advances, holds the secret out of guilt and shame. The cruel paradox here—as in so many of these cases—is that the victim assumes the onus of responsibility. Blow is no different. In the aftermath, trying to understand what has happened, his initial thoughts are of personal responsibility. He writes, “Surely I would have gotten in trouble. Somehow this was my fault” (67). Blow eloquently details the process of psychological self-destruction that victims put themselves through: I should have called for help. I should have been stronger. I should have known I was being manipulated. Sexual assault carries a burden of shame unique to the crime that can lock its victims into silence, preventing their own recovery and allowing the perpetrators to continue unabated.
Furthermore, the trauma manifests in many forms and can last for years. Chester’s assault sends Blow deeper into isolation: His grades suffer, other kids label him a “punk,” and for a brief moment, he considers suicide. The saving grace of an old gospel song pulls him from his despair and gives him the will to carry on, but it sends him on a fraught trajectory of self-discovery. He seeks out religion, questions his sexual identity, makes a series of eccentric and nonconformist friends, and even encounters a cult leader, the kind who often prey on the same sort of outcasts as sexual predators. Eventually, this path leads him to Russell and Alphonso, two popular boys who give him the validation he desperately needs and bring out his natural talents, athleticism, and strength.
As Blow matures, he also discovers the harsh reality of racism, particularly in his new desegregated school. He begins to hear racial slurs tossed around casually and with an underlying venom. Attitudes of the old South linger in Blow’s world, and attempts to deal with inequity are met with deep-seated resistance. He witnesses firsthand how grown men, proud and dignified, debase themselves before white people out of fear of the institutions that reinforce white supremacy. Just as he does with his own personal tragedy, Blow unearths the distinctly human cost of centuries of racism and inequity, and the shame and anger that inevitably go with them.
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