Betsey Brown

Betsey Brown Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

This story begins in a middle-class neighborhood in St. Louis in the fall of 1959. From the moment we meet the precocious, passionate and saucy yet sensitive title character, thirteen-year-old Betsey Brown, we know she feels "different" from her family: the oldest of four children, she has staked out the secrets spaces of the house where she can watch the sunrise in peace or just keep herself apart from the hubbub of the house.

We meet the Brown family as they assemble to start a new day, with the parents off to work and the children off to school. The two younger, Margot and Sharon, squabble over bathroom privileges and clothes. The youngest, Allard, wails about spooks in the shadows and, as usual, decides to solve the problem by setting a fire. Cousin Charlie, who has come to stay with the family after having been kicked out of a school up North, teases and bickers with everyone.

Adding a strong, energetic rhythm to this mostly joyful noise is Betsey's father, Dr. Greer Brown, who keeps the house jumping with music, words and art he considers important: Tina Turner, W.E.B. DuBois, Dizzy Gillespie, Gauguin. He is "one of just five thousand Negro doctors in the whole country," a job he holds with pride, but what he truly values is his contribution to the Race; he gathers his children together in the morning with a conga drum and Negro chant for a family quiz.

Betsey's mother, Jane, a psychiatric social worker, provides a more delicate counterpoint to Dr. Brown's steady drumbeat. She longs for quiet, refined, predictability of their early years together, and retreats often into the calming world of solitaire and highballs, or to Greer's comforting embrace. Her mother, Vida, who shares the house, longs more openly for the traditional past. She thinks Greer is too dark and too "kinky headed," especially compared with her dead husband, Frank, whose diction and articulation were so fine, to her recollection, that "no one could even tell he was a Negro."

Amidst this chaos we find Betsey, calmly and completely focused on her goal for the day: First Place in Mrs. Mitchell's elocution contest for Class 7B. While the maelstrom swirls around her, Betsey reaches into parts of her experience searching for just the right voice to use when she recites Paul Laurence Dunbar: "Speak up, Ike, an 'spress yo'se'f." While her siblings are fighting, she is trying on for herself the sultry passion of the two girls she knows who were fighting over a boy, the unshakeable love of her grandmother, and her own thoughts about love.