In The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, 10-year-old Kenny Watson watches his older brother, Byron, transition into adolescence. As Byron makes mistakes and gets into trouble, both he and Kenny learn valuable lessons about what it means to grow up and become more mature. But learning these lessons isn’t always easy. When Byron finally brings his parents to a breaking point by misbehaving, they inform him that he will be spending the entire summer—and possibly the following school year—in Birmingham, Alabama with his strict grandmother, Grandma Sands. For Byron, living with Grandma Sands sounds like a terrible punishment, but his father, Daniel, believes it’s a necessary step, since Byron needs to learn that “the world doesn’t have a lot of jokes waiting for him.” In other words, Daniel wants to show Byron that adulthood is full of real consequences—although Byron might find it easy to shrug off his responsibilities as a 13-year-old, doing so in adulthood might cost him dearly. Kenny, for his part, finds the idea of adulthood “scary,” and though he’s still somewhat protected from the real world, the novel suggests that he isn’t necessarily wrong: the world really can be scary, which becomes overwhelmingly clear when Kenny witnesses the horrific aftermath of a church bombing carried out by racist white people. Dealing with this traumatic experience is very difficult for Kenny, but it emphasizes his father’s point about the seriousness of the real world, and it suggests that growing up means acknowledging troubling realities in life and learning to go on in spite of them.
In its exploration of the coming-of-age process, the novel calls attention to the fact that older siblings often play a big role in young people’s lives. For Kenny, a huge part of growing up means observing Byron and learning from his behavior. When Byron gets caught playing with fire, for instance, Kenny pays close attention to how much trouble his older brother gets in. He takes careful note of what happens to Byron not because he necessarily wants his brother to suffer, but because he’s interested in playing with fire, too. If Byron gets off easy, Kenny thinks it might be worth taking the risk of doing exactly what his brother did to get in trouble in the first place. In the end, though, he sees that his mother is extremely serious about punishing Byron, since she tries to burn his fingers to teach him a lesson (though Joey interferes, making it impossible for her to go through with this plan). Kenny therefore learns from Byron’s mistakes, which help him identify which boundaries can be crossed and which ones can’t be crossed.
While children often look to their siblings for guidance, the novel also portrays coming of age as a process of discovery—a process of trial and error in which children figure out what it means to grow up and become mature. Indeed, it can be hard to develop a sense of maturity, especially when it’s not always clear what the world expects of people. Kenny feels this way when he tries to understand why his parents decide to punish Byron by sending him to Birmingham. He knows that Byron deserves some kind of disciplinary action, but he doesn’t quite grasp why his parents think they have to send him away—it seems like an overreaction. But his father explains that growing up forces people to take responsibility for their own behavior. Byron can’t just continue misbehaving and expect that nothing will happen as a result. Listening to his father, Kenny begins to comprehend that maturity requires people to think carefully about what they do. And yet, his father’s wisdom also mystifies him, making Kenny feel like he’ll never know “how to take care of things.” He feels as if adulthood is confusing and “scary,” perhaps fearing that he, too, could end up in really big trouble if he doesn’t pay close attention to his behavior and the decisions he makes. In other words, he finds the responsibilities that come along with growing up intimidating and frightening.
What both Kenny and Byron eventually learn, though, is that the real world is often frightening no matter what they do—regardless of the decisions they make or the way they behave, there’s no avoiding the fact that life can be scary. After a church bombing in Birmingham nearly kills Joey, Kenny is deeply disturbed. Emotionally unsettled by what he saw at the church that day, he has trouble enjoying the things in life that used to bring him pleasure. Thankfully for him, though, Byron is able to help him see that he shouldn’t cut himself off from the joys of life just because the world can be ugly and cruel. Byron’s wise words in this moment illustrate that he has matured over the course of the novel. Before the family went to Birmingham, he didn’t seem to care about anything. Now, though, he shows compassion and kindness toward his little brother, suggesting that his exposure to hardship and injustice has given him a new sense of maturity and responsibility; the world can be unpredictable and awful, but Byron won’t let this unsettling reality derail his life or his ability to be happy. In turn, he demonstrates what it looks like to approach life with a level-headed sense of maturity, which in this case means showing emotional strength in the face of the world’s many challenges.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Change, Coming of Age, and Maturity ThemeTracker
Change, Coming of Age, and Maturity Quotes in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
“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.”
It was hard to do, but I kind of felt sorry for Byron, though not too sorry because I knew he deserved whatever happened, first because he had a chance to escape and didn’t take it and second because he was being a bad influence on me. Nazi Parachutes Attack America and Get Shot Down over the Flint River by Captain Byron Watson and His Flamethrower of Death looked like a real cool movie for me to make too. If Momma just gave Byron some stupid punishment, then maybe it would be worth it for me to flush some Nazis down the drain myself. But if you got set on fire for doing it the movie wasn’t worth making.
I tried to look real intelligent and I guess it worked ’cause finally Dad said, “Kenny, we’ve put a lot of thought into this. I know you’ve seen on the news what’s happening in some parts of the South, right?” We’d seen the pictures of a bunch of really mad white people with twisted-up faces screaming and giving dirty finger signs to some little Negro kids who were trying to go to school. I’d seen the pictures but I didn’t really know how these white people could hate some kids so much.
“I’ve seen it.” I didn’t have to tell Dad I didn’t understand.
“Well, a lot of times that’s going to be the way of the world for you kids. Byron is getting old enough to have to understand that his time for playing is running out fast, he’s got to realize the world doesn’t have a lot of jokes waiting for him. He’s got to be ready.”
“Well, that’s what being a grown-up is like. At first it’s scary but then before you realize, with a lot of practice, you have it under control. Hopefully you’ll have lots of time to practice being grown-up before you actually have to do it.”
“Man, they got crackers and rednecks up here that ain’t never seen no Negroes before. If they caught your ass out here like this they’d hang you now, then eat you later.”
After Grandma Sands gave us directions Byron looked at me sideways and said, “What you starin’ at, square?”
I just shook my head.
“What you expect?” By asked. “You seen her. That bird’s as old as dirt. She’s so old I bet she used to step over dinosaur turds. I ain’t gonna have her death on my hands.”
I knew that was a lie.
It seemed like all of the fight was out of Byron and we’d only been in Birmingham for a couple of minutes.
I picked up my spoon and kept eating. This was great! I’d never seen Momma act like a little kid who just got yelled at but there she was, picking at a piece of paper towel and looking kind of embarrassed.
Who could understand Byron? Here was a chance for another Fantastic Adventure and he was going in the wrong direction. Something was wrong with him. If he was in Flint and you told him not to do something he’d go right out and do it, but now he was acting real dull and square. Maybe it was the heat, maybe just like it had sucked all the energy out of me it had sucked all the meanness and fun out of Byron.
There’s one good thing about getting in trouble: It seems like you do it in steps. It seems like you don’t just end up in trouble but that you kind of ease yourself into it. It also seems like the worse the trouble is that you get into, the more steps it takes to get there. Sort of like you’re getting a bunch of little warnings on the way; sort of like if you really wanted to you could turn around.
Byron dropped me on the ground right on top of all the water and junk that I’d thrown up. I knew he was going to make a stupid joke about me landing face-first in all that mess but he didn’t, he just wrapped his arms around my shoulders real tight and put his mouth right on top of my head! Byron was shaking like he was getting electrocuted and crying like a baby and kissing the top of my head over and over!
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.”
He was also very wrong about there not being anything like magic powers or genies or angels. Maybe those weren’t the things that could make a run-over dog walk without wobbling but they were out there.
Maybe they were in the way your father smiled at you even after you’d messed something up real bad. Maybe they were in the way you understood that your mother wasn’t trying to make you the laughing “sock” of the whole school when she’d call you over in front of a bunch of your friends and use spit on her finger to wipe the sleep out of your eyes. Maybe it was magic powers that let you know she was just being Momma. Maybe they were the reason that you really didn’t care when the kids would say, “Yuck! You let your momma slob on you?” and you had to say, “Shut up. That’s my momma, we got the same germs.”
