46 pages • 1 hour read
Susan CrandallWhistling Past the Graveyard
Susan CrandallFiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-19 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
Starla has a nightmare where Jimmy Sellers and a bear chase her. She wakes up sick, and Eula and Starla approach a tiny, dilapidated home. Two Black girls peer out the window, but a man and a woman answer the door and turn them away. Eula and Starla enter an abandoned tiny home, and Starla wonders why the Black family didn’t help her. Eula says that it’s for the same reason white people wouldn’t help her—people tend to reduce others to their skin color.
Starla and Eula find another house with a man on the porch. The man doesn’t have aspirin. He says that he lets God heal him; however, he mentions that there’s a drugstore nearby. They ask another woman for help, but she refuses. A Black woman with white hair, Miss Cyrena Jones, takes them in and lets Starla sleep on her couch.
Chapter 15 Summary
Cyrena doesn’t have children, but she teaches grades 3, 4, and 5 at the elementary school. As the school is tiny, the school combined the grades.
Starla has been asleep with a fever for a week, and Eula found a job. Cyrena thinks that Starla is “fortunate” to have Eula helping her and James. Eula slept beside Starla and treated her with garlic oil and vinegar. Eula told Cyrena that Starla got sick from falling into the river. Eula also told Cyrena that someone must have stolen Eula’s and James’s suitcases. As Eula hasn’t come back from work, Cyrena looks for her, and another woman, Mrs. Washington, looks after Starla.
Chapter 16 Summary
Eula is home, and Washington pesters Cyrena for bringing “strangers” into her house. She thinks that Cyrena and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) exacerbate racist conditions and encourage the Ku Klux Klan. Cyrena reminds Washington that it’s the Klan, not the NAACP, that’s brutalizing Black people. Washington relents, and they agree to disagree.
Cyrena serves Eula tea with liquor, and Eula tells her about a group of white men, the Jenkins brothers, who harassed her in their truck while she was working on Miss Clark’s front lawn. After work, they followed her, and she hid behind stacks of milk bottles. Cyrena convinces Eula to work in her kitchen, baking food to sell to restaurants.
Chapter 17 Summary
Eula bakes many items, from green tomato pie to apple-dapple cake. Starla helps her make a chess pie and turns into Eula’s assistant. Starla loves the ticking of the baking timer. Restaurants buy the goods they make. Eula says that she loved babies “too much,” so she switched to baking. She believes that God gives every person gifts and that experimentation is how a person realizes their talents.
Fed up with the indoors, Starla convinces Cyrena to take her on deliveries. Cyrena tells Starla about the town: The name is Bottoms, as it is low and vulnerable to flooding. Black people don’t “choose” to live here, but they’re “allowed” to live here. Cyrena and the activists want Black people to have the same choices as white people, including the choice of where to live.
Cyrena points out her school, which looks like an old church. There’s no money for a playground, but the kids in the Black school are like the kids in the white school—some are clever, some are shy, some have trouble with reading or math, and some are bullies.
Starla and Cyrena arrive in a town with a hotel, department stores, and larger houses. Cyrena orders Starla to stay in the car and not speak to anyone, but Starla goes to the drugstore to survey the candy. A truck runs over a dog, and Starla goes outside to yell at the driver, Jobie Jenkins (one of the Jenkins brothers), who gives Starla the middle finger before driving off. Cyrena scolds Starla for attracting attention.
At a park without swings, Starla and Cyrena discuss the civil rights movement and change. Starla doesn’t want Cyrena or Eula to become activists and get hurt by police dogs or assaulted in a store. However, Starla wants to go to the upcoming nearby carnival.
Chapter 18 Summary
Baking exhausts Eula, so Starla washes the dirty tins and cares for James. After dinner, Cyrena, Eula, and Starla go to the carnival. The three enter the carnival separately, and Starla processes the sights before she goes on rides with Troy, a boy approximately two years older than her. On a rollercoaster, Starla screams, “Let me off!” Troy and other people at the carnival laugh at her, and Starla walks away from Troy, who calls Starla “Red” due to her red hair.
Starla sees a red and white truck with a Confederate flag on the hood. It belongs to the Jenkins brothers, so Starla breaks one of the headlights with a rock.
Chapter 19 Summary
Cyrena grabs Starla and scolds her for damaging the truck—it doesn’t matter that it belongs to the Jenkins brothers. Using a racist term, Troy asks if Cyrena is bothering Starla, and Starla goes back to Troy so that the Jenkins brothers don’t think he broke their headlight and beat him up. A deputy police officer arrives, and Starla blames the broken headlight on a skinny, tall kid. The deputy tells the Jenkins brothers to go home and not make a big deal about the headlight—they’ve gotten away with much worse.
The deputy questions Starla, who tells him that her name is Nancy Drew and that her parents will pick her up at nine. The deputy mentions a “runaway” with red hair, so Starla yells about a thief and pushes the officer away. Troy reappears and gives Starla a ride to Cyrena’s car on his bicycle. Troy is impressed that Starla is a “runaway girl.”
Chapters 14-19 Analysis
The Impact of Racism on Individuals and Communities manifests when the Black family in the dilapidated house won’t help Starla, who wants an explanation, so Eula replies, “Same reason some white folks slam the door when they see I’m colored. Some folks don’t see nothin’ but your skin. It ain’t right, but it’s the way people are” (196). Like white people, Black people can possess prejudices and mistreat people based on their skin color. However, the discrimination Starla feels isn’t tantamount to the racism facing Eula and Black people. Countless laws and policies perpetuate the latter, so it’s structural. Still, Starla begins to understand to a minimal extent the barriers in place for Black people during this time.
Additionally, in the Bottom, the theme of the impact of racism on individuals and communities supports Adolph Reed’s belief that Black people aren’t monolithic or collectively committed to eradicating racism. Cyrena supports the civil rights movement, but Washington opposes the activism, declaring, “All you and your N-double-A-CP friends are doing is making things worse! More outsiders always bring more trouble. Nothin’ is ever gonna change in Mississippi” (196). Like white people, Black people during this time period have divergent viewpoints irreducible to a specific goal. The opposing ideologies don’t lead to dehumanization or banishment from the community. Washington and Cyrena are friends, and Washington looks after Starla and James while Cyrena finds Eula.
Washington’s criticism of the NAACP, a civil rights organization founded in 1910 by well-known activists like Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, complicates the theme of Wishful Thinking Versus Confronting Adversity. Washington implies that the activists can’t deal with the reality that racism won’t go away. Conversely, Cyrena argues that people like Washington are under the illusion that the racist status quo is indefinitely tolerable. Cyrena reminds Washington, “[T]he Klan has been doing wrong long before the N-double-A-CP showed up” (217). Cyrena claims that organizing doesn’t produce racism. Rather, prejudiced ideology creates racist people and communities. Cyrena wants to confront the bigotry not to cause “trouble” but to give Black people the same resources and choices as white people.
Meanwhile, Starla keeps confronting injustice and adversity. She faces the Jenkins brother who runs over the dog and then she breaks the headlight on their truck. Not wanting to commit an injustice, she returns to help Troy, which leads to a tense interaction with a police deputy. As in the previous sections, Starla’s inability to ignore wrongs spurs the narrative, creating drama and suspense. It is made apparent that Starla’s headstrong nature is in many ways a privilege due to her white skin, as she is able to stand up to others and manipulate the system in ways that Black characters such as Eula sometimes cannot.
The town name, the Bottom, alludes to Sula (1973), the second novel by the canonized Black novelist Toni Morrison, creating a relationship between Crandall’s story and Morrison’s work. In both narratives, the towns link to racism. In Sula, a white enslaver loses a bet to a Black enslaved person and then manipulates him into taking different land. In Whistling Past the Graveyard, the Black people live in the Bottom because, as Cyrena says, “It’s where they’re allowed to live” (242). The name symbolizes the abject traits of the town and the racist hierarchy. The town also relates to the real-life town of Black Bottom, which is within Detroit. As Ken Coleman explains in “The People and Places of Black Bottom, Detroit” (Humanities, 2021), Black Bottom flourished during the 1920s and 1930s with many businesses and stores. Unlike the Bottom in Graveyard, the Bottom in Detroit wasn’t underdeveloped.
The Complexity of Familial Relationships also develops in this section, with Cyrena housing Eula, Starla, and James. They become a family, and Eula acts like a mother to Starla, treating her fever and sleeping by her side until she gets better. Cyrena acts like a mom to Eula, making sure that she’s safe from the Jenkins brothers and giving her the resources to make pies. Cyrena has an intricate view of family. She doesn’t have kids, but she views the students she teaches at the elementary school as her kids. Family is a fluid term, and in the novel, the concept transcends race and biology.
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