Chapter 25 Summary: Miriam in 1968

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens on a cold March evening in 1968 as twelve-year-old Miriam North walks home from her piano lesson. Pausing to study her reflection in an ice-coated window, she is struck by how closely she resembles her mother, Hazel—the same doe eyes, the same brown skin, even the same way of biting her lip. Miriam is disappointed; she had hoped to look like her father, Myron, who died when she was an infant. She prays to have his face, but instead she sees a petite, bright image like her mother. She cannot fully resent her looks, especially since her younger sister August, born five years earlier, carries some of the darkness and height Miriam longs for, even though August's father is not Myron.

Miriam recalls the freak blizzard that had hit Memphis two weeks earlier, dumping ten inches of snow and ice. The storm gave her a few snow days, which she and August enjoyed as a holiday. Her mother had pulled out her winter coat from a lacquered chest, muttering about having just put it away. Now, still wearing that moonstone-colored wool coat, Miriam thinks back to an earlier February evening when she came home to find her mother sitting in the dark, unusually still. Hazel told her she had seen the bodies of two sanitation workers who had been crushed to death by a trash compactor, their cries ignored by white coworkers. That night, Miriam helped her mother paint a large white placard with bold black letters reading