39 pages 1 hour read

Toni Morrison

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Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The setting is a farm in Lotus, Georgia. Frank, the first-person narrator, and his younger sister, Cee, are trespassers who find a “a crawl space” dug by an animal and slither on their bellies through the grass to watch a pair of noble horses fighting (3). As the children attempt to crawl back out through the hole, they hear voices. Peeping through the grass, they see a group of men pull a body from a wheelbarrow and throw it into a hole. Cee is upset “when she saw that black foot with its creamy pink and mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave” (4). The boy hugs his sister’s shoulders tight and feels that, while he can handle the sight, he needs to protect her. The children are so scared that they wait long after the men are gone and the moon is high in the sky before they go home. The children expect to be punished for their lateness, but the grown-ups are too distracted by something else to notice. At the end of the chapter, Frank addresses the person who is set to tell his story, saying that he forgot about the burial but remembered the horses.

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