Growing Up

Baker describes his mother as petite but formidable, “determined to have her way” and able to “bend those who oppose her” (12). She “hurled herself at life with chin trust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run” (12). Lucy believes life is a struggle, and only the strong survive.

Baker describes his mother’s view of men as “a strange blend of twentieth-century feminism and Victorian romance” (26). She is both ahead of her time and a product of it. She argues for women’s suffrage in 1913, attends college, and rails against the advantages men have by virtue of wearing pants. At the same time, she subscribes to the traditional belief that women’s role is to save men from their indolence and brutishness. Lucy grooms Baker as the head of the household and teaches him traditional etiquette—holding the door open for women and walking on the outside of the street.

Lucy idealizes her childhood and her refined father, though he left the family penniless when he died. At 27, she becomes pregnant with Baker and faces down her future mother-in-law’s objections to marry Benny, Baker’s father. After his early death, she finds a way, with her brothers’ help, to keep her children fed and clothed, and she devotes herself to ensuring Baker succeeds. She works with him on his schoolwork, finds him employment, and enrolls him in a challenging academic program. She prays for him and has faith that he will succeed. Her goal is for him to “make something of himself,” her repeated refrain throughout the book. Though she objects to his choice of wife, she provides material and emotional support to the couple.

Baker’s father has “coarse black hair and dark brown skin” and “rough, callused, competent” hands. He is well-mannered and uneducated but not intimidated by Lucy’s education. A diabetic in the age before the widespread use of insulin, Benny is also an alcoholic, a lethal combination. Benny dies at the age of 33 after a drinking binge. Baker remembers his father as a patient, gentle man who accepted his wife’s abuse over his alcohol use and encouraged young Baker when he struggled to learn how to read.

Ida Rebecca is the “iron ruler” of her family, and her sons are “celebrated” as “good boys who listened to their mother” (33). Their wives are pre-approved by Ida and accept her supremacy, Lucy being the only exception. She is six-feet tall, broad-shouldered, and dresses in the 19th-century fashion. Her porch is the family’s gathering place evenings after work, and she hosts Sunday family dinners. Ida Rebecca believes men should labor rather than worry about “making something of themselves” as Lucy believes. She is suspicious of Lucy’s education and believes Lucy is too strict with Baker. She and Lucy never become comfortable with each other, as they are two strong women with strong opinions about the world.

Baker’s younger sister by two years, Doris is “on the slight side, thin and not very tall for her age, with dark brown hair and dark skin” and “a pert upturned nose and an ear-to-ear grim that gave her the expression of a contented cat” (131). Doris possesses the gumption Baker lacks. She is active like her mother, helping out around the house from an early age. By the age of seven, she is capable of confronting an A&P manager when he overcharges her, threatening legal action, and returning home with more than she paid, “for forgiveness” (18). When Baker’s lackluster sales pitch results in no sales, Lucy sends Doris out with her brother to show him how to sell magazines. Instead of standing on the street corner as Baker does, Doris marches up to cars at the stoplight, bangs on windows, and thrusts the magazines at passengers, telling them they need it. In the span of twelve light changes, she sells the entire batch.

Doris also shows Baker to have compassion with their stepfather, Herb. When Baker mocks his stiff gait, Doris tells him if he had spent his life shoveling coal, as Herb has, he too might walk funny.

Born in 1961, Annie Grisby is “a short, gray-haired, rotund woman of weary carriage and a dignity appropriate to her remarkable birth” who lives in Baker’s rural Virginia town (48). He remembers her kindness to him, Doris, and their cousin Kenneth. One day, she offers him turtle soup, and Baker tells his mother, “colored people ate turtles” (48). His mother tells him they are just like everybody else, his first lesson in race relations. Though Annie is treated as an important historical figure of whom the town is proud, she does not mingle with white residents unless she is needed. After Baker’s father dies, Annie takes Baker to say his final goodbye to him.

Baker describes Allen as a rare breed who meets Lucy’s definition of a “good man.” Having faced hard times himself, he becomes compassionate rather than bitter and opens his home not only to Lucy and her children but to his brothers as well. He becomes Baker’s first paying customer during his time selling the Saturday Evening Post.

He is a quiet man, short, and a dapper dresser with a southern drawl. He owns two suits, which young Baker sees as a sign of Allen’s success. Like Lucy, Allen believed that a hardworking man of good character and “an honest nature” could “make something of himself” even during hard times 65). He has worked as a day laborer in a Virginia sawmill, commercial fisherman in New England, soda jerk in a cigar store, and grocer in Washington. When Baker, Doris, and Lucy move in with him and his wife, Pat, Allen is working as a salesman. Baker calls Allen’s ability to keep the family fed and sheltered throughout the Depression “a heroic feat” (86).

In contrast with her husband, Pat is large and “ebullient” (67). Half-Cuban and half-Irish, Pat is from Brooklyn and grew up in an orphanage. She is not afraid to give someone who crosses her “a piece of her mind” and is prone to exclaiming “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” when startled (67). Childless when Baker and his sister move in with her, she introduces them to “city living,” taking them on errands with her and giving shopkeepers a “piece of her mind” when they cross her. Baker says he always seemed to be running to catch up with her.

Baker credits her with first stirring his love of newspapers because she was a “hopeless news junkie” (68). On a slow news day, a newsboy tells her one cartoon character has shot another. She buys the paper and sees the newsboy has fooled her. She tells Baker, “Your Aunt Pat’s been played for a sucker” and laughs about it with Allen (68). She also introduces him to politics. When their landlady puts a poster of Herbert Hoover on her front door, Pat is enraged and enumerates for Baker the many ways Hoover is destroying America.

Oluf courts Lucy when she first moves the family to New Jersey. Unable to get a job herself, Lucy hopes to marry Oluf. He is an optimistic Dane who invested in real estate and moved up from baker to salesman. At the onset of the Depression, he remains hopeful, but as the months pass, his financial situation deteriorates. Baker reprints Oluf’s letters to Lucy without edits, showing his slide from optimism to despair. Oluf writes of sending dozens of letters to potential employers he considered friends. They go unanswered. He attempts to return to his native country but cannot raise the money for passage. His last letter to Lucy asks her not to contact him anymore and to find a man who is good enough for her.

Hal is the oldest of Lucy’s brothers. He arrives in Chapter Eight with a small suitcase and three walnut boards he claims are “worth a fortune” and the hope for his new business venture (93). Baker is impressed with his “commanding manner,” “impressive mustache,” and “fortune in lumber” (93). Hal is also toothless because he cannot afford new teeth, but Baker is not initially aware of this. The family calls him “the Colonel.” He is not a reader or intellectual but has grand entrepreneurial visions that never materialize. He butts heads with Charlie, his youngest brother, who recognizes that Hal is unable to achieve his grand intentions and has “been a faker all his life” (101). He concocts a plan to send Charlie to Baltimore with Lucy and uses her savings for a lumber company. The company eventually dissolves, and Hal is last seen chasing business opportunities in the south.

The youngest of Lucy’s brothers, Charlie is short and skinny, wears Allen’s hand-me-downs, and does not work or leave the house. He has pale blue eyes and skin, blond hair, and “lips that curled up at the corners to make his happiest smile look like an elegant sneer” (97). His four pastimes are sleeping, reading, smoking, and drinking coffee. Though Lucy loves him, she calls him lazy, and Charlie serves as her example of what a man should not be. He is the lone Republican in the household and rails against people who collect government money for doing nothing. His intellectual interests, lack of work ethic, and disdain for Hal’s grad illusions cause conflict with Hal. Though frustrated that Charles’s laziness is tolerated, Baker likes Charlie because he treats Baker like an adult and tries to interest him in great books.

Uncle Harold is a gentle man who loves telling outrageous stories. He served in World War I, spent sixteen years in the Marines, and never received much of an education. He digs graves and cuts grass at a cemetery but is always well-dressed and manicured when he sits down for dinner. He claims to have been shot between the eyes, to have been accidentally buried alive and survived, and to remember being born. Lucy calls him “the biggest liar God ever sent down the pike” (124). Gradually, Baker comes to see that Harold is not a liar but a storyteller. Baker sees in Harold’s love of stories a boyish playfulness and desire to lighten life’s burdens. Baker credits Harold with teaching him the value of storytelling.

Harold is also caring and perceptive. He buys Aunt Sister gifts of perfume and lingerie, and he recognizes Doris’s need to feel beautiful. He makes a point of telling her she looks pretty. He and Aunt Sister arrange a reunion between Doris and Audrey, the daughter Lucy gave up after Benny’s death. Raised by her doting aunt and uncle, Audrey appears to Doris to be “the most spectacular vision of elegance she had ever seen outside a movie palace” (131). Harold sees from Doris’s expression that she feels shabby in comparison. The next day, he presents her with a colorful bathrobe, telling her she will have pretty things too.

Herb is Lucy’s second husband. Like so many of the people in Baker’s world, Herb has survived a difficult childhood. His mother burned to death before his eyes when he was five, and he was taken out of school at ten to work. When Baker meets him, Herb works as a fireman for the B&O Railroad, shoveling coal to put out railroad fires. His goal is to become an engineer, which he eventually achieves. Herb is a “good man” according to Lucy, a hard worker who moves up in his chosen field through determination, patience, and persistence. Though Baker initially tries to belittle and shun him, Herb is patient, eventually earning Baker’s respect and admiration. Herb buys the family a home in 1941, finally giving Lucy what she has dreamed of since Baker was a child: a home of her own.