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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Change, Coming of Age, and Maturity
Family, Friendship, and Support
Bullying and Injustice vs. Kindness and Compassion
Race and Class
Summary
Analysis
In Ohio, the family pulls over at a rest stop to use the bathroom. But Kenny and Byron are horrified to find that the toilets are really just wooden boxes with holes cut into them. They smell foul, so both Kenny and Byron decide to do their business in the woods. When they get back to car, their parents say that Byron better get used to this kind of outhouse, since it’s exactly what Grandma Sands has!
As the family gets farther from home, Kenny and his siblings begin to experience new things—like, of course, what it’s like to search for a bathroom and find, instead, an outhouse. Such experiences are part of the process of growing up, as all children encounter new things that can feel off-putting and that challenge their sense of what’s considered “normal.”
Themes
Eventually, everyone but Daniel falls asleep. Kenny wakes up every once in a while to find Joey’s head in his lap. He also hears his father tell his mother that, despite the original plan, he’s only going to stop in Cincinnati to fuel up and have a stretch. She’s skeptical, but he assures her that he has plenty of energy and wants to keep going for a little bit. Wilona agrees, not knowing what Kenny himself knows, which is that Daniel plans to do the entire drive—all the way from Michigan to Alabama—in one shot. Kenny heard his father telling his neighbor that he was going to try to do the drive in one go, since he heard of people driving all the way from Michigan to Texas, which is much farther.
Daniel’s playful, mischievous side comes out when he secretly decides to do the trip in a single run from Michigan to Alabama. Kenny knows that his mother would probably disapprove of doing so much driving all at once, but he doesn’t say anything. He therefore silently helps his father get what he wants, becoming something of a co-conspirator.
Themes
Kenny wakes up in Tennessee. Because the family is in the Appalachian Mountains, the air is thinner and makes him feel strange. Everything is dark at the rest stop where they pull over, and all of the children—including Byron—are scared by how menacing the surrounding mountains look. When Kenny and Byron go into the woods to pee, Byron scares both Kenny and himself by talking about white “rednecks” who have never seen Black people before and who, as a result, would hang a Black boy like Kenny if they found him in the woods right now. The conversation sends both brothers running back to the safety of the car. When they’re back on the road, Daniel puts his hands out the window and says it feels like he’s running his hands through God’s beard.
As the family drives south, Byron seems to have a growing awareness of the grim reality of bigotry and racist violence. Although he and Kenny haven’t thought much about these things in Flint, they are aware that this kind of hatred exists in the world, and though Byron only talks about scary racists as a way of scaring Kenny, it’s clear that the matter is truly on his mind—after all, he even scares himself, indicating that he’s genuinely worried about the possibility of encountering racist violence in the South.
Themes
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