44 pages • 1 hour read
Ayana MathisThe Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Franklin: 1969”
Hattie’s son Franklin is on a mission in Saigon in 1969. While the other men in his squad plant mines on beach, Franklin stands watch, tasked with surveying the bay for enemy vessels. He drinks too much, so cannot be trusted with the delicate work of seeding the sand with explosives.
As Franklin squints out at the dark water after nightfall, one murky shape assumes a sinister aspect. Staring at it, Franklin grows certain it is an enemy submarine. He fears he will not survive the mission and thinks of his wife, whom he hasn’t seen for over a year. Recollections of his broken marriage alternate with Franklin’s first-person account of the beach-mining mission.
Franklin first saw Sissy at the beach when he was 19 and she was 22. He learned where she lived and planned to impress her with his uncle’s Cadillac and his manners. When she answered his knock at her door, all he could think to ask was if they “couldn’t go out walking one evening” (166). She agreed, and they married six months later.
Franklin began staying out all night, drinking and gambling. During one game, a fellow gambler had nothing left to bet but his sister. Franklin won and took the girl. He spent the next five days drinking, gambling, and then staggering back “into the prize’s bed” (170). On the sixth day, he finally went home, but Sissy had left.
Franklin found Sissy, professed his love, and begged her forgiveness. He reflects, “I meant every word, but she shouldn’t have taken me back” (171). He knew he would wrong her again, despite the cost. A month of harmonious home life followed, but then Franklin’s gambling debts caught up with him, and their furniture was repossessed. Sissy left Franklin again, and he joined the military.
On his first leave, Franklin went to Sissy’s new apartment and again entreated her to forgive him. She refused. Before he left, they made love for the last time.
Now in Saigon, Franklin has just received a letter from Sissy informing him he has a daughter. After surviving the harrowing 24-hour beach mission, Franklin resolves to mend his ways. He wants to see his daughter and explain to Sissy that he “couldn’t possibly be the same fool after what I’ve been through tonight” (179).
As Franklin’s squad sails away from the beach, a small boat carrying an old man and a boy explodes in the bay. Acknowledging he has ruined so many lives without taking responsibility, Franklin decides to face the damage he’s done. He looks in the water for body parts and wagers, “If I see any evidence of the boy whose life we took, I will never drink again” (183). He sees nothing and finishes his beer, relieved to relinquish the people he loves and remain a drunk.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Bell: 1975”
At age 40, Bell resigns herself to dying alone in the roach-infested apartment she shared with Walter until recently. A former pimp turned petty thief, Walter appealed to Bell because of his mean streak and recklessness. When Walter learned that Bell had contracted tuberculosis, he moved out. This disappointed Bell, who “had believed in […] his utter disregard for himself and everyone else” (199).
After Walter left, Bell retreated to her bed, enduring painful coughing spasms and waiting to die. She quit her lounge job the day after her coworker took her to see Willie, a juju woman, about her cough. Willie recognized Bell’s name and knew Bell’s mother, Hattie, as they were once neighbors. Bell hasn’t seen Hattie for eight years. When Bell moved to the “ghetto,” her family “excommunicated” her (191). Willie concocted an herbal tonic for Bell, but Bell later threw it away, untouched.
As a child, Bell yearned for a sign of Hattie’s love, but her mother had offered only “rages and silences” (202). Bell resented Hattie’s secretive yet volatile nature, although her sisters often compared Bell’s temperament to her mother’s. When Bell was a teenager, she caught a glimpse of Hattie walking with an attractive man. To Bell’s astonishment, Hattie was laughing and happy. The man, Bell learned, was Lawrence Bernard.
Nearly a decade ago, Bell crossed paths with Lawrence. She recognized him immediately, although he didn’t know her, and she introduced herself as Caroline. Bell flirted with him, enticed by the sudden opportunity to have “revenge on her mother” (204). After they spent the night together, however, Bell felt “she had become her mother in some way—not the angry, exhausted Hattie but the laughing beautiful woman Bell had seen” (204) on the street.
What began as spite turned to romance. One evening, several months into their affair, they arranged to meet at Wanamaker’s store. Lawrence was engaged in conversation as Bell approached. When Lawrence greeted her as Caroline, the woman stepped into view. Bell’s shock matched her mother’s, and in that moment Bell’s duplicity was exposed. Hattie fled, followed by Lawrence, and Bell has not seen either since.
Bell dreams someone is shouting her name. When she wakes, she is in a hospital room. Hattie sleeps in a chair nearby. After Willie told Hattie of Bell’s plight, the two women broke into Bell’s apartment and found her nearly dead.
Hattie visits every day. Although Bell remembers fearing her mother, “who heaped punishment on her children […] for a hint of insubordination” (212), she decides Hattie has mellowed. Bell ventures an apology, and Hattie admits she’s been angry much of her life but is too tired to carry such a burden anymore. Realizing she has her mother’s restless spirit but not her strength, Bell acknowledges that Hattie “didn’t know how to tend to her children’s souls, but she fought to keep them alive […] That was more than Bell could say” (217).
Hattie and August plan to buy a small house, where Bell will join them.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
These two chapters complicate the conventional notions of strength and love, and thereby allow greater insight into Hattie’s character.
Hattie’s children Franklin and Bell are both ruled by self-destructive impulses. Although Bell completed high school and even a year of college, she tells Walter she grew up in the ghetto and chooses a seedy existence with him. She mistakenly believes Walter shares her “utter disregard” for life and fantasizes they will “die together romantically and decadently and in squalor” (199). Regarding his own destructive habits, Franklin admits, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not like I don’t know I’m doing wrong […] I just do what I’m going to do, despite what it’ll cost me” (171).
Bell’s sisters have noted that Bell’s impetuous personality resembles Hattie’s, and Franklin is similarly rash and impulsive. During their conversation in Bell’s hospital room, Hattie acknowledges that they both have a restless impulse to “spread out” (216), but she adds that Bell never learned “that sometimes all you have is your own dignity and self-control” (217). One by one, Hattie’s dreams and desires have been thwarted. Her disappointments have been crushing, yet she has always picked herself up and carried on. This is Hattie’s strength, without which she may have succumbed to despair, like Bell and Franklin. Bell ultimately understands this and concludes that she and Hattie are not “just alike” (217): “Hattie was stronger than Bell could ever be” (217).
Unlike Bell, who wallows in the intensity of her feelings, Hattie is not obviously sentimental or even affectionate. She does love her children ferociously, but her love takes the form of strength, not tenderness. Without her tremendous strength, Hattie would not be capable of repeatedly sacrificing her own needs to provide for her children. She uses all her resources to feed and clothe her family, while August spends his time and money as he pleases. Bell has always believed Hattie did not love her and, even as an adult, “felt defective in some vital way” (212). When she and Hattie talk about their relationship, Bell finally appreciates how Hattie “fought to keep them alive” and understands that this relentless effort is Hattie’s show of love.
Fully aware of his father’s shortcomings, Franklin wonder’s how August “could stand knowing he was my mother’s ruin. He was too weak to leave her” (179). He considers himself Sissy’s ruin, and while she is the one who leaves him, he ultimately respects her decision despite his enduring love for her. By Franklin’s reasoning, he is not weak like his father but rather has sufficient strength to let Sissy go free, which is his greatest expression of his love for her and their daughter.
