Notes

This chapter returns us to Mick, who is still pursuing her love of music, now by playing the piano that is set up in the school gymnasium. McCullers brings out a new aspect of Mick in this chapter. Earlier, at the failed party, she has shown that Mick has left childhood behind. Here, she shows Mick discovering her fierce love for her younger brother, Bubber. The sad accident of Bubber shooting Baby Wilson in the head brings together some of the characters we have seen before Mrs. Wilson, with her deluded notions of her childÂ’s prospects as a movie star and her notions of providing her daughter with the privileges of a special child at the expense of a family that is clearly suffering from severe poverty, Biff Brannon, with his inappropriate attraction for Mick and his attempts at making friendly contact with her, Mr. Kelly, who doesnÂ’t understand his sonÂ’s action and is incapable of stopping the flow of events that will make his family even poorer than it already is, MickÂ’s sisters, Etta and Hazel, who think of the shooting accident from the egoism of teenagers who will be embarrassed to show their faces in public again, and Mick, who thinks because of her care-taking of her younger brother that she can handle him, but who blunders so badly that she hurts him irreparably.

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