Long Division

The Long Division book that City Coldson reads throughout the novel is a motif that develops themes of the Impact of Media on Self-Perception and Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience. City first discovers the book in Principal Lara Reeves’s office in Part 1, Chapter 2. City is taken by the book because there isn’t “an author’s name on the cover or the spine” (17). He’s therefore confused as to whether the book is “fiction or a real story” (17). His confusion on this point reflects a broader struggle: City is desperate to understand how his internal, subjective experience (particularly of himself) relates to his lived experiences. He finds reading and writing fruitful ways of exploring this question and therefore of navigating his self-discovery. Long Division fascinates him because it marries the fictional with the real. Indeed, City both reads Long Division in his spare time and begins to write about his own experiences in the blank pages of the book, further blurring those lines. In doing so, City gains a sense of direction and power over his life.

Because it appears in Parts 1 and 2, the fictional Long Division book also underscores how the written word both canonizes the past and predicts (or even influences) the future. The Long Division book that City reads in Part 1 is the same Long Division book that City is writing in Part 2. In turn, the Long Division book that City reads in Part 2 is the same Long Division book he is writing in in Part 1. The temporal enmeshment that the book embodies is partly responsible for the characters’ trauma; racism persists and mutates across generations, and so too do its effects. However, the novel suggests that recognizing this is crucial to changing things for the better. While the stories the book contains are some of the saddest stories “in the history of [the] state [of] Mississippi” (4), they offer City and his friends direction and understanding. The words in the book help the characters to navigate their lives in the present, to make sense of their lives in the past, and to take control of their lives in the future. At the end of Part 2, City sets out to write his family back into existence and thus to set them free. The book therefore liberates whoever interacts with it, offering the characters both clarity and autonomy over their stories.