Kenny experiences a fair amount of unkindness in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963. At home, Byron constantly pulls pranks on him and insults him by calling him “square.” And unfortunately for Kenny, the teasing doesn’t stop there, since he also faces bullies like Larry Dunn at school, where he’s often made fun of for having a lazy eye. Even LJ Jones, who is supposedly Kenny’s friend, steals his toys whenever they play together. In seemingly every area of his life, then, Kenny faces mistreatment and unkindness, but he himself still practices kindness. For example, when Byron gets his lips stuck to the car’s mirror while trying to kiss his own reflection in the freezing cold, Kenny tries to help him. He knows, however, that Byron would “do some real cruel stuff” to him if their positions were reversed—“but not me,” Kenny says, suggesting that he sees the value of kindness and compassion. The novel presents this compassion as an admirable quality, but it also doesn’t shy away from depicting the world as a place that can be full of cruelty. When Kenny witnesses the immediate aftermath of a gruesome bombing at a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, he comes face to face with racist violence and finds it difficult to move on from such staggering injustice. But Byron eventually reaffirms Kenny’s tendency to respond to injustice by practicing kindness in everyday life. The novel thus celebrates people who choose to spread love and compassion instead of letting cruelty prevail in their lives.
On the whole, kindness comes naturally to Kenny. He’s not the sort of person who takes advantage of other people or kicks them when they’re down. In fact, it’s almost as if he literally can’t adopt a cruel mindset. For instance, he ends up becoming close friends with Rufus even though he initially hoped the school bullies would pick on Rufus, thinking this would take negative attention away from Kenny himself. Before long, though, Kenny not only becomes Rufus’s best friend, but even starts sharing his lunch with him every day so Rufus won’t go hungry. It’s clear, then, that Kenny has a natural impulse toward kindness, perhaps because he finds it easy to put himself in other people’s shoes. He also demonstrates his empathy and compassion when Byron gets his lips stuck to the car mirror while kissing his own reflection on a blisteringly cold evening. Of course, he playfully makes fun of Byron for acting so foolishly, but he doesn’t take the rare opportunity to mess with his brother. Since Byron is stuck, Kenny could really do anything and wouldn’t have to fear immediate payback. But he doesn’t do anything mean to his brother because that’s not the kind of person he is. He knows that Byron would mess with him if they were in opposite positions, but even this knowledge doesn’t drive him to cruelty, thus demonstrating his unfailing habit of practicing kindness.
In fact, Kenny is such a compassionate person that he’s able to respond with kindness even when other people mistreat him. Even though Larry Dunn steals his nice leather gloves and beats him up, Kenny feels bad when Byron takes revenge by bullying Larry in front of a large crowd. Kenny watches in horror as his older brother pulverizes Larry, pushing him around on one of the coldest days of the year. As Larry scrambles, everyone sees that his jacket is only a thin, torn windbreaker and that the bottoms of his shoes have holes in them. And though everyone laughs at him for having such worn-out clothing, Kenny feels bad—so bad, in fact, that he can’t bring himself to watch the scene anymore. Even though Larry frequently beats him up and humiliates him, Kenny still feels empathy toward him, recognizing that Larry is a human being with his own challenges. Instead of simply resenting him and hoping that he suffers, Kenny would rather see Byron leave Larry alone, making it quite clear that his own compassion isn’t limited to a select few people in his life; rather, Kenny feels compassion for seemingly everyone and always tries to respond to adversity with kindness.
It is perhaps because Kenny always tries to respond to cruelty with kindness that he has trouble moving on in the aftermath of the Birmingham church bombing. When he finally breaks down and cries, he asks his brother why anyone would purposefully hurt children by bombing a Sunday School meeting. This unjust and hateful act of racism is so severe that it defies all understanding, which is why Byron says the men who bombed the church must have “let hate eat them up and turn them into monsters.” In the past, Kenny has been able to understand why his aggressors act the way they do—for example, he empathized with Larry Dunn when he saw that Larry’s family didn’t have enough money to give him warm winter clothing, ultimately making it easier for Kenny to forgive him for stealing the leather gloves. But it’s not really possible to empathize with the reasons that drove racists to bomb the church in Birmingham, since it’s such a sickening and unforgivable act. However, that doesn’t mean that kindness isn’t still important in everyday life—after all, practicing kindness is a sure-fire way for people to protect themselves from letting hatred “eat” away at them and turn them into “monsters.” What’s more, the compassion that Byron shows Kenny is the only thing that helps him move on from the traumatizing experience of the church bombing. In this way, then, Byron shows his little brother that kindness is still worthwhile and enriching—even in moments of hardship.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Bullying and Injustice vs. Kindness and Compassion ThemeTracker
Bullying and Injustice vs. Kindness and Compassion Quotes in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
I could have done a lot of stuff to him. If it had been me with my lips stuck on something like this he’d have tortured me for a couple of days before he got help. Not me, though, I nearly broke my neck trying to get into the house to rescue Byron.
I couldn’t believe it. I think Byron was proud of me!
When everybody saw Byron wasn’t going to do anything to me for being smart they all decided that they better not do anything either. I still got called Egghead or Poindexter or Professor some of the time but that wasn’t bad compared to what could have happened.
Finally Byron gave me some good advice. He noticed that when I talked to people I squinched my lazy eye kind of shut or that I’d put my hand on my face to cover it. I only did this ’cause it got hard to talk to someone when they were staring at your eye instead of listening to what you had to say.
“Look, man,” he told me, “if you don’t want people to look at your messed-up eye you just gotta do this.” Byron made me stand still and look straight ahead, then he stood on my side and told me to look at him. I turned my head to look. “Naw, man, keep your head straight and look at me sideways.”
Then he said something that made me get all funny and nervous inside, he said, “How come your eyes ain’t lookin’ in the same way?” I looked to see if maybe this was the start of some teasing but he looked like he really wanted to know. He wasn’t staring at me either, he was kind of looking down and kicking at the dirt with his raggedy shoes.
The other thing wrong with him was his clothes. It didn’t take people too long before they counted how many pairs of pants and shirts Rufus and Cody had. That was easy to do because Rufus only had two shirts and two pairs of pants and Cody only had three shirts and two pairs of pants. They also had one pair of blue jeans that they switched off on; some days Rufus wore them and some days Cody rolled the legs up and put them on.
I couldn’t believe how sad I got. It’s funny how things could change so much and you wouldn’t notice. All of a sudden I started remembering how much I hated riding the bus, all of a sudden I started remembering how lunchtime under the swing set alone wasn’t very much fun, all of a sudden I started remembering that before Rufus came to Flint my only friend was the world’s biggest dinosaur thief, LJ Jones, all of a sudden I remembered that Rufus and Cody were the only two kids in the whole school (other than Byron and Joey) that I didn’t automatically look at sideways.
“But you notice that not everybody gets froze like that, it’s just them folks from down South who got that thin, down-home blood who freeze so quick. And you know Momma ain’t from Flint, she grew up in Alabama and that means half of y’all’s blood is real thin, so Momma’s worried that one morning it’s gonna be cold enough to freeze you all.
“That’s where them fake garbage trucks come in. Every morning they go round picking the froze folks off the street, and they need them big doors because someone who got froze don’t bend in the middle and they wouldn’t fit in no regular ambulance.”
Byron jerked Larry’s arms over his head three times. Larry Dunn was really tough! Not only because he wasn’t crying when By was going to mess him up, but also because when Byron jerked his arms over his head like that we all could see that Larry’s skinny little windbreaker was ripped under both arms and Larry just had on a T-shirt underneath it.
I gave the shoe one more hard tug and it popped loose from a frilly white sock. I got real scared. I walked as slow and as quiet as I could out of the church. Maybe if I moved quiet enough he wouldn’t come for me. Maybe if I walked and didn’t look back he’d leave me alone. I walked past where the adults were still screaming and pointing, I walked past where that guy had set the little girl in blue, right next to where someone else had set the little girl in red. I knew if Joey sat down next to those two their dresses would make the red, white and blue of the American flag.
Grandma Sands called a couple of times and told them that the police thought two white men drove by in a car and threw it in during services, or that they’d already hidden it in the church with a clock set to go off during Sunday school. However it got in the church it had killed four little girls, blinded a couple more and sent a bunch of other people to the hospital. I couldn’t stop wondering if those two little girls I saw on the lawn were okay.
From my secret hiding place in the living room I could listen to Momma and Dad and it seemed like they spent most of the time trying to figure out how they could explain to us what happened. Some of the time they were mad, some of the time they were calm and some of the time they just sat on the couch and cried.
He waited a long time before he answered, “I don’t know, Kenny. Momma and Dad say they can’t help themselves, they did it because they’re sick, but I don’t know. I ain’t never heard of no sickness that makes you kill little girls just because you don’t want them in your school. I don’t think they’re sick at all, I think they just let hate eat them up and turn them into monsters. But it’s O.K. now, they can’t hurt you here. It’s all right.”
