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August’s Brother
Although August and her brother’s mother never actually appears in the book, she looms large throughout the pages of Another Brooklyn. This is because August constantly thinks back to when she used to live with her mother in Tennessee on the family’s plot of land, which they call SweetGrove. A beautiful and loving woman, August’s mother becomes mentally unstable after her brother, Clyde, dies in the Vietnam War. Refusing to believe this, she continues to see and talk to him, insisting that he’s still alive. This causes problems in her marriage, especially when she claims Clyde told her that he caught her husband with another woman. In the last months of her life, she starts talking about bringing a butcher knife into bed when she sleeps. Soon enough, she commits suicide by drowning herself, though August refuses to accept this truth until many, many years later.
August’s Mother Quotes in Another Brooklyn
The Another Brooklyn quotes below are all either spoken by August’s Mother or refer to August’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1 Quotes
Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.
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In eastern Indonesia, families keep their dead in special rooms in their homes. Their dead not truly dead until the family has saved enough money to pay for the funeral. Until then, the dead remain with them, dressed and cared for each morning, taken on trips with the family, hugged daily, loved deeply.
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Chapter 4 Quotes
The woman had staggered to the corner, grabbing for the stop sign and missing it before disappearing around the corner.
How were we to learn our way on this journey without my mother?
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Chapter 6 Quotes
In 1968, the children of Biafra were starving. My brother was not yet born and I was too young to understand what it meant to be a child, to be Biafran, to starve. Biafra was a country that lived only inside my mother’s admonitions—Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra—and in the empty-eyed, brown, big-bellied children moving across my parents’ television screen. But long after Biafra melted back into Nigeria, the country from which it had fought so hard to secede, the faces and swollen bellies of those children haunted me. In a pile of old magazines my father kept on our kitchen table in Brooklyn, I found a copy of Life with two genderless children on the cover and the words STARVING CHILDREN OF BIAFRA WAR blared across the ragged white garment of the taller child.
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Chapter 7 Quotes
I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.
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What’s in that jar, Daddy?
You know what’s in that jar.
You said it was ashes. But whose?
You know whose.
Clyde’s?
We buried Clyde.
Mine?
This is memory.
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Chapter 8 Quotes
My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand. Squared, he said, is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.
Come with me, I begged.
But my brother looked up from his numbers and said, She’s gone, August. It’s absolute.
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Chapter 13 Quotes
When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water—and kept on walking.
When you’re fifteen, you can’t make promises of a return to the before place. Your aging eyes tell a different, truer story.
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August’s Mother Character Timeline in Another Brooklyn
The timeline below shows where the character August’s Mother appears in Another Brooklyn. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
August reflects that for a large part of her life, her mother wasn’t dead “yet.” Thinking back, August realizes that she and her brother could have had...
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...telling her that she spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence waiting for her mother to come back. “She’s coming,” August recalls saying to herself. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”...
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Chapter 2
August’s mother starts hearing the voice of her dead brother, Clyde, when August is eight years old....
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...friendship, wanting badly to join their tight-knit group. This makes her think about how her mother always told her to be wary of cultivating close female friendships because other women can’t...
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...where a nurse gives August wafers while she waits. Thinking back, August remembers that her mother insisted Clyde didn’t really die in Vietnam, believing that the military was wrong when they...
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Chapter 3
...and finally as far as they want. Walking through the streets, August searches for her mother, wondering what she looks like now and if she still cries Clyde’s name in the...
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...also moved to Brooklyn the year before August, but she came from South Carolina. Gigi’s mother, Gigi explains, wanted to spend her 21st birthday in New York City. Gigi then urges...
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Chapter 4
...from SweetGrove. For days leading up to this departure, their parents argued viciously and their mother vowed to start sleeping with a butcher knife under her pillow. She also claimed Clyde...
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...of focusing on the woman, August thinks about how Angela’s hands remind her of her mother’s when they suddenly curled into fists. As the woman turns the corner, August wonders how...
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...easily have hailed from Tennessee. For this very reason, Jennie reminds August’s brother of their mother, so he whispers to August that their mother is “almost back now,” though their father...
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...father nor Clyde knew how to tend to it, so the task fell to August’s mother. Accordingly, August has memories of her mother working with her hands in the fields, turning...
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Chapter 6
August recalls how unsettling it was when her mother used to urge her to eat because there were children starving to death in Biafra....
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Chapter 7
...her eyes and pretends she’s elsewhere. Gigi adds that she learned this trick from her mother, since Gigi often looks into her eyes and realizes that she’s absent. When Gigi’s mother...
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...themselves even more intensely in their group dynamic. August even fantasizes about the day her mother will return, when she can introduce her to Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi and tell her...
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Chapter 8
...Then, switching gears, he abruptly looks up from a worksheet and tells August that their mother is never going to return. “She’s gone, August,” he says. “It’s absolute.”
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As August continues to wait for her mother to come back to the family, she imagines that the women her father brings to...
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...As Sister Loretta scrubs the dishes, August looks at her and wonders what her real mother’s hands are doing at that moment. She also studies Sister Loretta’s figure and senses that...
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Chapter 9
...calling her “Sister Mama Loretta,” though she never forgets that Sister Loretta isn’t her real mother. To that end, August continues to wait for her mother’s return.
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...in the entryway, too nervous to advance any further because of the pointed look Sylvia’s mother gives them. Suddenly, they no longer feel “lost and beautiful.” Instead, they feel “ragged and...
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...he disapproves of her hole-filled socks and frayed bellbottoms. When the girls finally leave, Sylvia’s mother gives them a look, one that says, “Dreams are not for people who look like...
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Chapter 10
...to mosque with her family and Sister Loretta, listening to other women ask about her mother. When August’s father explains that August’s mother is gone, August can’t help but think about...
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Chapter 12
...a nearby public housing development. Frightened, Angela tells her friends that she can’t find her mother, but August assures her that everything is all right, insisting that the dead woman surely...
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Before everyone discovers that Angela’s mother is dead, Angela stays for three nights at August’s apartment. In this time, August tries...
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...Sylvia and Gigi that the authorities must have gotten the wrong woman, upholding that Angela’s mother isn’t dead. “Believe me,” she says. “I know.”
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...tells her that she has been wrong to think for all these years that their mother will come back. “She won’t be coming back until the resurrection,” he says.
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After Clyde died, August’s mother started vanishing for stretches of time. She also stopped doing any kind of cooking, so...
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Chapter 13
...through to her, then, August’s father brings her to Sister Sonja, who asks about her mother, though August is hesitant to discuss such matters.
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...world is falling down around her. Unlike the way August approached the loss of her mother, she realizes that she’s too old to simply deny reality, finding it impossible to forgive...
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Chapter 14
In a session with August, Sister Sonja asks her when she first realized that her mother died. Thinking this question over, August lets her eyes travel to the windows behind Sister...
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...fact, she takes it from its place on the bookshelf and finally looks inside. Her mother, August can now admit, “walked into the water.” With this in mind, August brings the...
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Chapter 15
...why she sleeps with closed fists, and she almost says, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”
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