The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Because she grew up in the South, Wilona isn’t used to the cold. She therefore makes her kids dress in very warm clothes each winter—so warm, in fact, that Joey can’t even get out of her snowsuit without help. Each day at school, then, Kenny takes off his own coat and finds Joey to help her peel off the many layers.

Joey is always sweating and hot when she finally gets free of her snow clothes, so she asks her mother if she can wear fewer layers. Wilona refuses, insisting that people can die from the cold. If that’s the case, though, Joey notes that there would be frozen people in the streets, but Wilona disregards such an outrageous idea. But while waiting for the bus, Byron tricks Joey and Kenny by claiming that people really do freeze in the streets. The only reason Joey and Kenny have never seen frozen bodies is because garbage trucks come around and collect them before anyone can see. Suddenly terrified of garbage trucks, Joey starts crying, but Byron doesn’t care—he just tells Kenny to give his “regards” to Clark Elementary and leaves them there in the cold.

Because Wilona is so afraid of the cold, she gives each of her children real leather gloves. Nobody else at school has such nice gloves—they have to run around with their sleeves pulled over their hands. But Kenny and his siblings each get two pairs of leather gloves. Knowing he still has another pair, Kenny gives his first pair to Rufus, who doesn’t have anything to wear on his hands. He tells his mother that he lost the first pair, but then he actually loses the second pair, so he and Rufus have to share, each of them only wearing one glove whenever they have snowball fights.

One snowy day, Larry Dunn encounters Rufus and Kenny and starts bullying them. He rubs their faces in the snow and torments them for a while before eventually moving on, though not before Kenny notices that he’s wearing leather gloves that look quite similar to the pair he originally “lost.” The only difference is that they’re black instead of brown. After Larry leaves, Rufus points out that Larry must have stolen the gloves, since all of the snow that Larry touched is now black. It becomes clear that Larry stole the gloves and then changed their color by covering them in black shoeshine, which is now rubbing off in the snow.

Kenny and Rufus tell Byron that Larry bullied them and stole Kenny’s gloves. After finding Larry, Byron slaps him multiple times and rips the gloves off his hands. He pushes him into a nearby chain-link fence over and over again. Larry has no good way of defending himself, since he’s standing on a patch of ice. He therefore keeps crashing into the fence, but he doesn’t cry.

Kenny marvels at how tough Larry is, especially when Larry lifts his hands over his head, inadvertently revealing that he’s only wearing a thin, ripped windbreaker and a flimsy t-shirt. When he falls down, everyone can see holes in the bottom of his shoes. The gathering crowd laughs at him, but he maintains his composure. Still, Byron keeps thrashing him, but Kenny doesn’t stay to watch—he wishes he never even told Byron what happened. He would rather have gone with just one glove for the rest of the year than watch his brother treat Larry so cruelly.