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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Another Brooklyn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss, Denial, and Grief
Friendship, Womanhood, and Support
Religion, Tradition, and Death
Racism and Classism
Summary
Analysis
August and her friends turn 13, and Angela—the last of the girls to get her period—tells them in secrecy that she has started menstruating. With these developments, men pay even more attention to the girls, constantly watching them and whispering lewd things in their ears. In the summer, they feel boys’ hands grazing their behinds in crowded areas. All the same, they spend the majority of their time with one another, smoking joints instead of hanging out with the many boys who are interested in them. At one point, Sylvia threatens to run away, prompting her father to let her have the girls over for the night.
As they get older, the girls continue to support one another. This is crucial for somebody like August, who has virtually no other form of female support or guidance (except from Sister Loretta, whose strict beliefs would likely be unhelpful in a conversation about sexuality). Furthermore, it becomes more and more obvious that the girls’ community does nothing to protect them from the inappropriate attention directed at them by men, leaving them to deal with unwanted advances on their own.
Themes
When the girls arrive at Sylvia’s for the sleepover, Sylvia’s father insists upon calling their parents to make sure they know where they are. After talking to August’s father, Sylvia’s father says that he’s a good man because he’s so devoted to his religion. Before he can call Angela’s mother, though, Angela insists that he shouldn’t bother because she already knows where she is. That night, the girls eat candy and watch TV while Angela teaches them to French kiss. They practice with each other for the next several hours, until their bodies feel like they’re “exploding.” They also whisper “I love you” to each other and find that they actually mean it. While kissing Jerome shortly after this experience, August evades his questions about where she learned to French kiss. All she cares about in this moment, she notes, is that he tells her he loves her.
In this section, Sylvia’s father continues to judge his daughter’s friends and their various backgrounds. And though his estimation of August apparently improves after speaking to her father, this doesn’t change the fact that he still subjects the girls to a classist and unfair form of scrutiny. Nonetheless, this doesn’t stop the girls from having a good time, as they turn to one another to learn new tricks about how to navigate their developing sexuality. In doing so, they experiment with new forms of intimacy, and though they don’t seem to make too much of what they’re doing with one another, it’s clear that their experimentations satisfy a desire to explore a new, sexually-charged element of their bonds with one another.
Themes
Angela remains a mystery to her friends, refusing to let them in when sudden dark moods descend upon her. Her dancing is hauntingly beautiful, hinting at a world of emotional turbulence, though the girls never understand where these feelings come from. While watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, Angela tells August that she’s going to “leave this place” someday. In response, August promises that they’ll all go with her, but Angela refutes this, saying that she’ll go on her own.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, is going on with Angela, except that she is clearly going through something that she finds too difficult to talk about with her friends. This is significant, since the friend group seemingly talks about everything and the girls often support one another. However, Angela’s inability to open up suggests that there are certain limits to friendship—limits that will become increasingly apparent as the girls grow up and experience more and more hardship.
Themes
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