Becoming: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In 1969, Michelle begins kindergarten at Bryn Mawr Elementary School. She already knows how to read and likes school right away. In class, Michelle’s teacher holds a kind of spelling bee, asking each student to stand and read colors off of a card. If they get one wrong, they are asked to sit down. Michelle recognizes that there is a “subtle sorting” happening. Kids who have had a head start at home are deemed bright at school, which only compounds their confidence and advantages.

When it is Michelle’s turn, she reads the colors at first with ease, and then with some effort. When she sees “white,” she gets completely stumped. But as she sits down, she immediately realizes what the word was. That night, she is plagued by feelings of failure and stupidity, worried that she wasn’t able to achieve as much as some of the other students. The next day, she demands that the teacher give her a do-over and she gets all of the words right.

Michelle’s neighborhood on Euclid Avenue is “middle-class and racially mixed.” It is undergoing an immense transition: in 1950, twenty years prior, the neighborhood was 96 percent white. In 1981, it would be 96 percent black. Michelle feels the effects of this transition in school. Her second grade class is unruly, and the teacher is incompetent. In the teacher’s eyes, Michelle writes, they are a “class of bad kids.” Michelle goes home and complains about her teacher to her mother.

Michelle’s mother listens, taking her daughter’s frustrations seriously, and then goes to the school and gets Michelle and a few other high-performing kids pulled out of class and placed in a bright and orderly third-grade class. Michelle calls this a “small but life-changing move.” At the time, she doesn’t ask what might happen to the kids who were left in the second grade class. Now, as an adult, Michelle realizes that “kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn.”

As time goes on, Michelle’s mother starts to push Michelle to engage with more kids in the neighborhood, rather than remaining at home and playing with dolls. Craig is an example for Michelle: he is a “growing sensation” on the basketball court. Basketball shows him how to approach strangers to play a pickup game, and also reinforces the idea that most people are good people if others treat them well, debunking myths about the “sketchy guys” in the neighborhood.

Michelle starts to explore the neighborhood, meeting kids from other schools. She goes to one housing community called Euclid Parkway, where two girls named DeeDee and Deneen live. Deneen is friendly and popular, but DeeDee doesn’t really like Michelle, and often makes cutting remarks whenever Michelle shows up. One day, when Michelle is fed up with being picked on, she lunges for DeeDee and the two fight. When they are pulled apart, Michelle sees that she’s earned DeeDee’s respect and has become a part of the “neighborhood tribe.”

Michelle’s mother and father treat Michelle and Craig very maturely, almost like adults. As they grow, they speak about drugs and sex and life choices, and don’t sugarcoat the “harder truths” of life. One summer, when Craig gets a new bike, he gets picked up by a police officer (who is also African American) who accuses him of stealing it, “unwilling to accept that a young black boy would have come across a new bike in an honest way.” His parents make the officer apologize to Craig, but they confess afterward that this type of treatment is unjust but unfortunately common.

Sometimes Michelle’s father would drive around a nicer area to the south called Pill Hill; Michelle thinks this was meant to show her and Craig what a good education could yield. Both of her parents had attended community college, but had abandoned school before completing their degrees. Her mother decided to be a secretary; her father had simply run out of money and joined the Army instead. He had no one to convince him to return to school. Now, Michelle’s father is focused on saving for his kids.

Michelle’s family sustains itself on simple luxuries, like pizza as a reward for good grades, or hand-packed ice cream. Each July, Michelle’s father takes a week off from his job tending boilers and they go to a resort near Lake Michigan. There they barbecue, play cards, and swim, which Michelle’s father particularly enjoys because his diminished mobility is less of a liability.

Each year in elementary school, Craig and Michelle find fewer and fewer white kids. “For Sale” signs pop up often, at first just for the white families, but then it seemed that anyone “who had the means to go” was going, including a close friend of Michelle’s mother, Velma Stewart.

The Stewarts, Michelle writes, are “the lightest-skinned black people” that she’s ever met, and they invite Michelle’s family to visit their new neighborhood. The two families have a pleasant day together, with Craig playing basketball, her parents having a catch-up with the adults, and Michelle following the Stewarts’ teenage daughter Pamela around. They enjoy the space and the quiet of the suburbs.

But at the end of the day, Michelle’s father finds that someone had keyed a gash across the side of his car, and Michelle’s mother wonders if anyone knew that the Stewarts were black before they visited. Her father gets in the car, barely acknowledging it. The family rides back to Chicago without much discussion, and the next day, Michelle’s father drives the car to a body shop and has the gash erased.