Becoming: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

As Michelle grows up, Craig starts to accumulate a variety of unfounded fears: going blind, going deaf, losing an arm. His most realistic, Michelle writes, is a house fire, and he starts to run evacuation drills with the rest of the family. He practices hauling Michelle’s father over to the stairwell, knowing that his father probably wouldn’t be able to run or jump from a window given his disability.

Simultaneously, Michelle becomes more social and spontaneous, more willing to explore the “messes of the wider world.” Michelle’s mother’s relatives gather mostly at Southside’s house, and Michelle enjoys visiting for the music, for the exuberant environment that includes many cousins, and for the dog that Southside bought for her (which Michelle’s mother insisted could not live at their house).

Michelle’s father’s family, on the other hand, lives throughout the wider Chicago area. On Sunday afternoons, Michelle’s family drives to Parkway Gardens to eat dinner with her father’s parents, whom they call Dandy and Grandma, as well as his three youngest siblings. Dandy is somewhat bitter and irritated by everything. He frequently yells at Michelle’s grandmother, and her passivity in the face of this treatment grates on Michelle. She tells Dandy to stop, asking why he’s so mad all the time.

Michelle (as her adult self) acknowledges that Dandy is angry for a multitude of reasons. He was born in 1912 in South Carolina and was the grandson of two slaves. He was bright and had set his sights on going to college. But he was black, poor, and grew up during the Great Depression. He worked at a lumber mill after high school, but when the mill closed, he joined many other African Americans in his generation and moved north to Chicago, joining the Great Migration.

When Dandy arrived in Chicago in the early 30s, jobs were hard to come by, and factories often hired European immigrants over African Americans. He gave up on the idea of college, and many jobs were unavailable to him without a union card—which was incredibly difficult to get as a black man. This form of discrimination, Michelle writes, “altered the destinies of generations of African Americans,” including her own family. They were denied access to high-paying jobs, which kept them from being able to save for the future. This is why Dandy continues to live with bitterness and anger.

Only over time does Michelle learn that her questions for Dandy are “hard and unanswerable.” She is forced to face some of these kinds of questions herself. When visiting some distant relative, one of the girls Michelle is playing with asks her why she talks “like a white girl.” Michelle protests, but she understands what the girl means. Her parents had emphasized the importance of using proper diction, but to other black people, this was often perceived as a “betrayal,” or a denial of one’s culture. Michelle sees this same confusion play out years later, as Barack steps onto the national stage and people across the country have a hard time squaring his ethnicity with his persona.

The rest of the day, Michelle feels uneasy about the exchange. She is frustrated by the girl’s hostility, but also wants to seem genuine. She thinks to herself that everyone else around her seems to fit in except for her. Looking back on this exchange, Michelle recognizes the “more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.”