God Help The Child

In this short monologue, Brooklyn sounds off on Bride’s thoughtlessness after Bride finally contacts her by sending a note that is skimpy on details. Brooklyn, who believes she has a nose for ferreting out the truth, intuitively knows that Bride is chasing after Booker. Brooklyn compares her own act of running away when she was 14 to Bride’s current journey; Bride’s running away to “some place where there is no real stationary or even a postcard” (140) seems to be the behavior of a spoiled, thoughtless person to Brooklyn.

In the subsequent part of the chapter, the narration shifts to third person from the perspective of Bride. Bride finds the rural landscapes through which she drives to be boring as she continues her journey to Whiskey. The roads are too rough for her Jaguar, and to make matters worse, she has not had a period in two months, one more sign of her “crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl” (142).

Bride quickly finds the house she is looking for when she arrives in Whiskey. Out front is an older woman burning a bed in her front yard. As Bride sits in the car, her self-consciousness about her skin color—notwithstanding Booker’s argument that race is a construct and racism is a choice—returns as the local children gawk at her. After gathering her nerves, Bride finally approaches the woman she saw earlier—Queen Olive, it turns out—to ask if she knows where Booker is. Queen says Booker is laid up with a broken arm, and then she strong-arms Bride to come in to eat with her comment that Bride looks hungry.

The two women talk over a delicious meal, and Bride discovers that Booker has always been one to abandon the important relationships in his life, with the exception of the one he has with his dead brother. Queen tells Bride this exception is probably Queen’s fault because of her advice to Booker to hold on to Adam as long as he needed. Bride also learns more about Queen’s life. Queen has had many husbands and children, but her husbands always left, and they always got custody of the children.

Queen allows Bride to rifle through some of Booker’s forwarded mail. The mail she reads is stream of consciousness writing that Bride takes to be about her, especially a comment about a woman who suffers from a state of “permanent ignorance”  (148) and an admonition that “[y]ou should take heartbreak of whatever kind seriously with the courage to let it blaze and burn like the pulsing star it is unwilling to be soothed into pathetic self-blame"  (150).

Seeing Bride’s emotional reaction, Queen encourages Bride to go see Booker. Bride is hesitant because she cannot rely on beauty for confidence, especially now that she is aware of “its shallowness or her own cowardice” (151) after a childhood spent under Sweetness’s thumb. Queen sings a blues song— “Stormy Weather”—and ridicules Bride until Bride decides that the confrontation is for her sake, after all.

When Bride walks in, the two former lovers curse at and hit each other. As they yell, Bride learns that her decision to buy gifts for Sofia Huxley, a child molester in Booker’s eyes since he does not know about the false accusations made by Bride, deeply offended Booker, who tells her about Humboldt’s murder of Adam. Booker is shocked into speechlessness after Bride tells him that she fabricated her accusations against Sofia, and Bride promptly falls asleep on the couch.

Queen comes by later and helps Booker move Bride to the bed. As they talk, Queen learns about the reasons Booker and Bride broke up and advises Booker to let go of Adam, to stop using him as a “noble reason to fail” (155). Prodded by Queen’s questions, Booker realizes that the only time he has felt free of his grief was when he was with Bride.

Queen walks back to her place and muses over the tenderness with which Booker put Bride to bed. Despite the obviousness of the love between the two, Queen is certain that “[t]hey will blow it” (157) over trifling things and misunderstandings. Queen, having loved and lost so many men and children of her own, now thinks that the “motives for faking love” in her case had come down to “[s]urvival, she supposed, literal and emotional” (159). She is glad to have put all that away now that she is wiser and more forgetful.

While Bride sleeps, Booker thinks through the dissolution of his relationship with Bride and Queen’s harsh words. He admits that she was right—he has idealized Adam and has subsequently missed out on the chance to have love. He writes in his journal a plea to Adam to forgive him for making Adam a slave to memory.

When Bride wakes up, she feels refreshed and free from the guilt over her lies about Sofia. When Bride and Booker talk, he lets her know that the feelings he wrote about in the writing she looked at have changed. Booker learns how Bride found him using the pawn shop ticket and is excited when he learns that she has brought his trumpet to him.

Meanwhile, the fire Queen set to burn her mattress unexpectedly flares up and burns down Queen’s house, with her in it. Bride and Booker manage to pull her out, but Queen is severely burned and must be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Together, Bride and Booker hold vigil by her side. Queen briefly revives on the third day and the two take a break.

For safekeeping, Booker gives Queen’s gold earrings—ones she wore when they pulled from the fire—to Bride, who finds that the holes in her ears have returned. Bride also learns that, despite the many pictures of children Queen has, none of Queen’s children want anything to do with her. Hannah, a girl whose picture was most prominently featured in those Bride saw, may well be estranged from her mother because Queen ignored Hannah’s complaint that Hannah’s father, Queen’s ex-husband, was sexually abusing her.

Queen dies shortly after of an infection. Bride and Booker have her cremated. Three days later, Booker strews her ashes in a nearby stream and plays a clumsy rendition of “Kind of Blue” on his trumpet. Booker throws his trumpet in the stream afterward and feels a deep grief that he last experienced when Adam died. When Booker returns to the Jaguar where Bride is waiting for him, Bride tells Booker that she is pregnant and that the baby is his. He corrects her by saying the baby belongs to both of them. The two hold hands and imagine their future together and how they will love and protect their child from all the harm, give the child a life that is “[e]rror-free. All goodness, Minus wrath. So they believe” (174).