91 pages • 3 hours read
One Crazy Summer
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 17-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “China Who”
At the center the next day, the girls help stamp designs onto t-shirts with paint. Sister Mukumbu asks Delphine, Eunice (the eldest Ankton sister), and Hirohito to fill up water containers for the project. While they fill the containers, Delphine looks at Hirohito out of the corner of her eye and wishes she could ask him what it is like to be “a colored Chinese” (112). Hirohito catches her and confronts her. Embarrassed, Delphine reminds him that he almost crashed into her and her sisters with his skateboard on their first night in Oakland. When Hirohito corrects Delphine by pointing out that he was riding a go-kart instead of a skateboard, Delphine calls him a “China boy” (113).
Eunice ridicules Delphine for not knowing that “Hirohito” is a Japanese name. Hirohito leaves, and Eunice tells Delphine that she would not pick on Hirohito if she knew what happened to his father. After Eunice refuses to tell Delphine what happened to him, she walks off.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Expert Colored Counting”
Since Delphine was so successful at getting Cecile’s permission to use the kitchen, the sisters decide to ask Cecile for a TV. Just as she has been taught to do at the center, Delphine calmly takes her demands to “the Establishment,” which is Cecile, since she “was someone over thirty years old who had the power” (117).
Back home, the girls kept count of how many African Americans appeared in shows and commercials, and they also kept track of how much dialogue the African Americans had. They want to continue their scorekeeping at Cecile's house, and they tell Cecile that having a TV will help them to leave her in peace. The sisters even sing their protest song—one by the Monkees—hoping that the noise will convince Cecile to give in. When the girls return home the next day, they find a secondhand radio in their room.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Civic Pride”
For as long as she can remember, Delphine has been learning about civic pride. She once watched a film that explained boys could show their civic pride by becoming policemen and firefighters, while girls “could look forward to becoming teachers, nurses, wives, and mothers. Poets were never mentioned” (121).
At the People's Center, lessons about civic pride are different. There, the children learn their “rights as citizens and how to protect those rights when dealing with the police” (121). Crazy Kelvin even tells the children that the Oakland police are “pigs” (122) and racists who will violate their rights. He demonstrates this by explaining that the Oakland police raided the Woods’ home and arrested Hirohito’s father, a Vietnam War veteran. Hirohito looks upset, but Crazy Kelvin doesn’t stop talking until Sister Mukumbu escorts him out.
When Delphine imagines how afraid Hirohito must have been during the raid, the only comparison she can think of is how scared she felt when her father pulled off the road to nap during a family trip to Alabama. Due to segregation, the only other places he could have stopped were gas stations or the homes of other African-American families. A white state policeman approached their parked car, called her father a disrespectful name, and forced their family to move on. Delphine was terrified during the ordeal; her father told Big Ma that nothing unusual happened during their trip to the South.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Rally for Bobby”
At the center, Delphine learns about Bobby Hutton, a teenager and one of the earliest members of the Black Panthers. Despite surrendering and being unarmed, Bobby was killed during a shootout between the Oakland police and the Black Panthers. The Oakland community wants to rename a local park after him. Police brutality and the revolution seem more real to Delphine after she reads about Bobby in the Black Panthers’ newspaper and realizes how close in age she is to him. She decides that it may be too dangerous for the girls to continue attending the center.
Sister Mukumbu tells the children that there will be a rally for Bobby, but Delphine announces that she and her sisters cannot attend. However, when Vonetta learns that she will have an opportunity to perform at the rally, Delphine realizes that it will be difficult to keep her sisters from attending it. Vonetta and Fern want to perform their "la-la" song at the rally because it reminds them of their mother. Delphine tells them that they cannot sing the song because the rally is about a revolution, not mothers. Vonetta and Fern insist that singing the song will get Cecile’s attention, but Delphine tells them it will not.
Sister Mukumbu finally intervenes and asks Delphine for help with a task. When Delphine tells Sister Mukumbu that attending the rally and the center is dangerous, Sister Mukumbu tells her that unity is important. Delphine determines that survival is more important than unity, and she decides that she and her sisters will not attend the rally or come to the center anymore.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Eating Crow”
The next morning, Cecile forces the girls to go the center. Once there, Vonetta and Fern eagerly join in the preparations for the rally, but Delphine feels embarrassed to be back at the center after she insisted that she and her sisters wouldn't return. When Eunice asks why the Gaithers have returned to the center after Delphine declared that they wouldn't, Delphine doesn’t have a real answer. Instead, the two girls bond over how disgusted they are by their middle sisters, who are both chasing after Hirohito.
Chapters 17-21 Analysis
Throughout these chapters, the historical setting of the novel and the personal concerns of the characters begin to intersect more frequently. These intersections are most prominent when Delphine develops her racial consciousness and realizes that racism and activism against racism have a price—the safety of her sisters.
At the start of the novel, Delphine sees herself as a "colored" (63) girl with two simple responsibilities. The first is to honor authority inside her home, and the second is to not shame other African-American people by misbehaving outside of her home. At the center, however, she learns that authority can be challenged and that misbehaving is necessary to secure one's rights when authority figures take away these rights. When the girls demand that Cecile give them a TV, their demand is meant to be humorous. However, this instance is one of Delphine's first successful attempts to force the main authority figures in her life—adults—to listen to her demands. The center has changed Delphine's idea of what it means to be a good black girl.
Not all the lessons Delphine learns at the center are affirming. The story of what happened to Mr. Woods reminds Delphine of the encounter her father had with a racist policeman in Alabama. After remembering that experience, Delphine finally realizes how much danger her father was in because of a racist social system. She is even more terrified when she realizes that even young people cannot escape the danger of racism. The Black Panthers’ newspaper and Sister Mukumbu both present Bobby Hutton's death as an inspirational story. But Delphine is convinced that survival is more important than speaking out against racism now that she knows that attending a rally could harm her and her sisters. Delphine's decision to stop her sisters from attending the rally and the center demonstrates that she is reverting back to the values she learned from Big Ma and her father.
Unlock all 91 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Rita Williams-Garcia
