Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Change, Coming of Age, and Maturity
Family, Friendship, and Support
Bullying and Injustice vs. Kindness and Compassion
Race and Class
Summary
Analysis
On Sunday morning in Birmingham, Kenny hears Joey getting ready for church. She always goes to Sunday School, but he doesn’t usually join her. As she’s on her way out, he has the urge to say something to her, so he tells her that she looks pretty. Shortly after she leaves, there’s an extremely loud sound, and everything around Kenny shudders. Everyone in the neighborhood rushes outside to see what happened. Wilona, Daniel, and Byron all ask each other what made the sound, and then somebody stops by and tells them that a bomb went off at the church where Joey went to Sunday School.
Given that the novel is set in Birmingham in 1963, it’s reasonable to assume that this bombing is based on the real-life bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which took place on September 15, 1963. The church was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, an extremist hate group known for its racist violence. As is the case in this scene, the bombing took place during Sunday School, when the church was full of children. Four young Black girls died that day, and many others were injured. The novel dramatizes this event, giving readers a window into how devastating and heart-wrenching it must have been for families who sent their children to church that day.
Themes
Kenny is dumbfounded at first, but then he goes into the street and makes his way to the church. He feels as if his ears have stopped working, but he can still see everything around him. He sees Byron and his parents huddled together with a crowd outside the ruined church. Nobody stops Kenny from walking up to the church and standing where the door used to be. He sees a man covered in blood and carrying a little girl’s body out into the open. The girl is wearing a blue dress. Next, Kenny observes the rubble created by the bomb. Among pieces of broken concrete, he finds a shiny shoe that he tries to pick up—but it won’t budge. Suddenly, he thinks the Wool Pooh is holding onto it with big gray fingers.
Kenny’s mind once again latches onto the idea of the Wool Pooh. For him, the Wool Pooh is the epitome of evil, so it makes sense that he thinks he sees the creature lurking in the rubble. The implication is that only someone as cruel and wicked as the Wool Pooh would bomb a church during Sunday School—and, in a way, Kenny’s right about this: such a racist act of violence really is monstrous.
Themes
Terrified, Kenny yanks the shoe free and leaves the church. Outside, he walks by the girl in the blue dress, who has been lain out on the grass next to another girl in a red dress. Since Joey’s dress was white that day, Kenny realizes that if she were lying next to them, their dresses would make up the colors of the American flag: red, white, and blue. Kenny walks all the way back to Grandma Sands’s house, passing people with looks of dismay on their faces.
Kenny’s thought about the American flag symbolically hints at some deeper ideas about the racist violence upon which the country was built. If Joey were lying injured or dead next to these two Black girls, the image would represent the fact that the United States was shaped by slavery—many Black lives, in other words, were cruelly sacrificed just so that rich white people could make more money and live prosperously. This twisted kind of prosperity, it seems, is what the racists who bombed the church want to preserve.
Themes
Back at the house, Kenny examines the shoe, which he recognizes as Joey’s. There’s a rip in the heel that Kenny thinks developed when he was wrestling it out of the Wool Pooh’s grasp. He thinks about Joey, wishing he’d told her that she helped Byron save him that day in the water, since her image appeared in the form of an angel. But then he hears her voice: she’s asking him what he’s doing. He doesn’t respond, so she asks where everyone else has gone. He refuses to look at her, thinking that she’s dead. Instead, he thanks her for saving his life, but she has no idea what he’s talking about. Still, he tells her that he loves her—at which point she throws the shoe at him, and he looks up.
Kenny thinks he’s talking to some kind of ghost, since he believes Joey died in the bombing. He therefore regrets not telling her that he loved her before she left for church. He also wishes he’d thanked her for appearing when he was in the midst of drowning, since mentioning her appearance would have been a good way to show how much she means to him—so much, it seems, that he sees her as his savior.
Themes
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Joey stands in front of Kenny looking exactly like she did when she left for church that morning. Kenny asks if she went to Sunday School. She says that she did but that it was too hot in there, so she went to stand on the porch. While she was standing on the porch, she saw Kenny come down the street. He was laughing and wouldn’t stop to let her catch up, so she chased him all the way down the street, she says. However, Joey slowly points out that Kenny was wearing different clothes when she ran away from the church with him. Finally, Kenny realizes that the Wool Pooh didn’t get Joey. Overjoyed, he bursts out of the house to go tell his parents and Byron that Joey is perfectly fine.
In the same way that Joey appeared as an apparition or angel to help save Kenny from drowning, Kenny seems to have appeared to help lure Joey away from the church just before the bomb went off. Again, the novel isn’t necessarily interested in exploring religious themes—rather, it simply uses these angelic appearances to symbolize how important family members are when it comes to supporting each other. Kenny and Joey are so connected, it seems, that they’re capable of saving each other from mortal danger.
Themes
