41 pages • 1 hour read
De'Shawn Charles WinslowIn West Mills
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Knot sends a letter to her family, saying that she is back in West Mills and will visit soon. She considers moving home permanently but decides against it; her family, including her once-alcoholic father, would not support her lifestyle. 15 days later, Knot receives a letter from her mother, Dinah Bright Centre, stating that Knot’s father is seriously ill. The next morning, Knot catches a bus towards Ahoskie and reads Charles Dickens's Bleak House, a gift from Valley, on the way.
Knot arrives at her parents’ home. Instead of greeting Knot, Dinah squeezes Knot’s breast to find out whether she is producing milk; in pain, Knot calls out, “Bitch!” (69). Discovering the truth, Dinah refuses to let Knot—whom she refers to as “Azalea”—into the house and confronts her for returning without her child and a husband. Learning that her father’s supposed illness was just a ruse, Knot asks Dinah how she found out about the baby, and Dinah says she received a note from a stranger. Crying, Knot tells Dinah that she forgives her and leaves to find her father, George Washington Centre.
On the way, she remembers learning as a child that her parents’ marriage was arranged by her paternal grandfather, a landowner, and her maternal grandfather, a sharecropper. Knot wonders whether unhappiness in marriage accounts for Dinah’s meanness. She recalls her parents arguing about how to speak, with Dinah preferring to speak more formally and George preferring the relaxed vernacular of his childhood.
Knot finds her father alone in the small room adjoined to a church where he practices dentistry and tells him what happened. First saddened and then angry, he tells her to stay with her sister Iris while he tries to work things out with Dinah. Knot is stung when he calls her “Azalea” instead of “Knot,” the nickname that he gave her when, as a small child, she curled her body into a ball while holding onto trinkets.
Knot stays with Iris, who speaks little. Her other sister Mary arrives after two days and joins Iris in scolding Knot. When they defend Dinah’s actions, Knot runs away, taking brandy belonging to Iris’s husband who is out of town.
A stranger delivers a letter from Knot’s father that includes a request, couched in religious language, for her to “depart” from them and not return until she receives an invitation (83). Knot rereads the letter while waiting for the bus to take her back to West Mills. Deciding to burn it, and confident that her father will soon welcome her back, she borrows a match from a White woman, Jo, who gripes about her failed marriage and losing custody of her children.
Back in West Mills, Knot finds housework “on both sides of the bridge” that divides the White community from the Black neighborhood (87); she also sells bread pudding. Soon after returning, she goes to Miss Goldie’s Place with Valley. Knot first met Valley shortly after arriving in West Mills when he built steps for the schoolhouse. A few weeks later, Knot asked Valley about Otis Lee, her new neighbor. Valley says that he was raised by Otis Lee’s aunt Gertrude who bought the land for the Lovings to live on in West Mills. Swearing Knot to secrecy, Valley reveals that Gertrude got the money by blackmailing Essie, threatening to expose her as Black. Later, during Knot’s pregnancy, Valley was one of the few to piece together the truth and visit her.
At Miss Goldie’s Place, knowing that Valley is gay, Knot jokingly chides him for not complimenting her looks. Milton Guppy appears and insinuates that Knot may not have had the pox. He also confronts her for quitting and therefore not valuing the teaching position she took over from his wife, who subsequently left with his children. Valley and Guppy begin to fight, and Miss Goldie promptly sends them out. Miss Goldie tells Knot that Guppy told her about Knot’s pregnancy. Knot concludes that he must have given Dinah the note.
Leaving the juke joint, Knot is surprised to run into William, who is back in town. After she assures him that she has no husband, he escorts her home where they flirt and then have sex. The next morning, Knot enjoys hearing him sing. He stays with her for several days before leaving town.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
In November 1942, Otis Lee and Pep invite Brock and Ayra Manning, a couple who own a general store, over for dinner. After dinner, Otis Lee tells the Mannings that Knot is going to have another baby and asks whether they would like to adopt the child. Brock hesitates, but Ayra accepts. Later that night, Rose invites Otis Lee to go for a walk and advises him not to get “caught up in other folks lies and secrets” (106).
In May 1943, Knot’s second daughter is born. Otis Lee, who wants Knot to keep her child, is happy to see Knot nurse the baby but disappointed when she sends him to get the Mannings. Arriving at the Mannings’ store, Otis Lee is surprised to see a broken window. Brock explains that when he objected to a teenage White boy’s flirtatious comments towards Ayra, the boy, who is a member of the powerful Pennington family, grew angry, called Brock the n-word, and left. A few minutes later, a bottle was thrown through the window. Brock suggests that such treatment “comes ‘long with the territory” (109), to Otis Lee’s dismay. When Otis Lee tells them that Knot’s baby was born, they dance spontaneously.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Knot watches her children, Frances “Fran” Waters and Eunice Manning, grow up from a distance. Fran plays piano, like Pratt, and Eunice is a gifted singer, like William. Knot stands by her decision to give them up for adoption.
In the summer of 1948, the latest in a series of letters written by Knot to her father is returned unopened. She and Valley share a drink in her yard. Suddenly Fran, now six years old, appears and announces that she “got a idea” (114): that she and Knot be “best friends” (115); Knot responds that they can think about being friends once Fran is grown up.
12 years later, in 1960, Eunice and Fran are now 17 and 18 years old, respectively. Eunice directs multiple choirs, and Fran is the piano accompanist for two of them. One night at Miss Goldie’s Place, Valley tells Knot that Fran and Eunice have both fallen in love with the same boy: Breezy.
Part 1, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
These chapters see Knot struggle to define her relationships with her parents and children. She receives both physical and verbal abuse in her encounter with Dinah but is even more shaken after seeing her father’s disappointment and anger. During her meeting with her father, which takes place in a church, he references “the Almighty,” and cites religious reasons for asking Knot to distance herself in the letter he writes. Although Knot seeks and offers forgiveness, a traditional Christian value, she receives none from her devout parents.
Though she appears only briefly, Jo, the woman at the bus stop who lends Knot a match, can be seen as a foil character to Knot. Jo chose to marry but eventually separated from her husband and lost custody of her children, who are under her mother’s care at the time she encounters Knot. Jo embodies two of Knot’s biggest fears: that her marriage, if she entered into one, would be unhappy, and that she would be an inept mother. After seeing Jo, Knot feels surer than ever of her choice to give Fran to the Waterses, which is perhaps the first time she allows herself a significant difference of opinion from her father, his recent rebuke notwithstanding.
While Knot finds herself unwillingly distanced from her parents, she maintains a careful distance from her daughters. She does so to protect them from the secret that she is their mother. Knot’s determination to keep secrets, including that of the identity of Otis Lee’s mother, is understandable, given that it was her inability to keep the birth of her daughter secret from her family that so damaged her relationship with them.
Knot’s subsequent fling with William and the birth of her second daughter might be seen as evidence that she has not changed. However, Knot’s willingness to hold and nurse Eunice, instead of only taking a small glimpse, as she did when Fran was born, demonstrates that she has developed the strength to look at and love her child, while maintaining her resolve to give her away to a couple that can provide a more advantageous upbringing.
