CONFLICT

Protagonist

Frances "Frankie," "F Jasmine" Addams, a twelve year old girl who is going through the rites of passage which will take her from girlhood to womanhood.

Antagonist

The in-between time of adolescence. Frankie is neither a child nor a woman at this point in her life and experiences the discomfort and anxiety of not belonging.

Climax

Frankie encounters adult sexuality when she has her date with the red-haired soldier.

Outcome

Frankie grows up as a result of her humiliating experience at the wedding and her later attempt to run away. She becomes thirteen and gets a new friend.

 

SHORT SUMMARY (Synopsis)

Part 1 begins with Frankie Addams in the kitchen in the dog days of summer with Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. Her brother, Jarvis, has just been home on a brief visit to introduce the family to his fiancee, Janice. They will get married the next week in the town of Winter Hill, Janice's home town. Frankie's brother has been living in Alaska and is home only briefly to get married and then will join the army to fight in World War II. Janice and Jarvis's visit has interrupted the longest and most unbearable summer of Frankie's life. Frankie's best friend left town before the summer began and all the other girls seem to be thirteen already. They won't allow Frankie to be a member of their girls' club because she's too loud and rude. Frankie has spent the summer playing cards and talking to Berenice and John Henry in the kitchen of her house. Her father is gone all day at the jewelry store and has become something of an opposing force in Frankie's life ever since he told her she had to begin to sleep in her own bed instead of sleeping with him now that she is twelve. Frankie realizes she belongs no where and when she sees her brother and his fiancee, she decides to become a member of the wedding. She tells Berenice Janice and Jarvis are "the we of me."

Part 2 begins with Frankie's walk around town under the new name of F. Jasmine Addams. Her task is to buy a wedding dress, but she encounters many people along the way. When she hears the organ grinder playing for his monkey, she searches for him until she finds him standing on the street arguing with a red-haired soldier who his holding a wad of dollar bills. The monkey runs up F. Jasmine's body and sits on her head until the organ grinder coaxes it down and leaves. F. Jasmine speaks to the soldier who seems strange and talks to her as if she were an older girl. They go the Blue Moon cafe where he asks her to meet him later to go dancing. F. Jasmine is proud of herself for being grown up enough to be asked on a date by a soldier. She goes home and models her new dress for Berenice and John Henry. The three of them have a long talk into the late afternoon over several sessions of eating their dinner. Frankie tries to tell Berenice about her connections with people in the town that afternoon. She had walked all over town telling strangers about her plan to join the wedding and go on the honeymoon with the couple and then become world travelers with them. Berenice tells Frankie about her own experience with falling in love with the wrong objects of affection. She had one great love in her life and was married happily to him for a number of years before he died of pneumonia. Then she had met a series of men who had reminded her in some way or another of Ludie. Each of the men had been a horrible disappointment and one had been dangerous enough to put her eye out so that now she wore a blue glass eye. She warns Frankie that falling in love with something as strange as a wedding will get her into a world of trouble. She holds Frankie in her arms and they talk quietly for a long time until suddenly all three of them begin to cry for separate and unnamed reasons.

Later that evening, Frankie dresses up and goes to Sugarville, the Black section of town, to have her fortune told by Big Mama, who lives with Berenice. John Henry, dressed in a gaudy costume dress, follows along. Big Mama tells Frankie that she will go on a trip and return. Frankie is unsure about the fortune since she doesn't plan to return. When she's leaving, she sees Honey, Berenice's nephew, who Big Mama says God never quite finished in making him. Honey has a great deal of intelligence and potential but often gets into trouble drinking and partying. As Frankie leaves Berenice's house, she tells Honey he should move to Cuba where he could pass as Cuban and leave behind his Black identity. She sends John Henry home alone and she goes to the Blue Moon where the red-haired soldier is waiting for her. He is drunk and makes sexual innuendoes that Frankie doesn't understand and cannot respond to. He leads her up to his room where he begins to kiss her. Shocked, Frankie bites his tongue and hits him over the head with a pitcher before escaping down the fire escape. She gets home worried that the Black Maria, the police van, will pull up to her house any minute and drag her off to the police station as she knows it does in the Black section of town when people are suspected of crimes. Nothing happens, though, and she goes to bed confused and afraid.

The next morning she gets on the bus along with her father, John Henry and Berenice and they travel to Winter Hill. Frankie is disappointed that Winter Hill is further south from her own home town and that the towns they pass along the way are successively smaller and uglier. At the wedding, nothing goes as Frankie had planned. She never gets a chance to talk to either her brother or Janice about her plans to go with them on the honeymoon. When the couple get ready to leave, Frankie comes out with her bag. When they tell her she cannot go, she gets into the car and hangs onto the steering wheel. She is pried away from it and left crying in the dust as the car pulls away and leaves her alone. She cries all the way home on the bus, hating everyone who witnessed her humiliation.

That night, she decides to leave home alone and she writes her father a note, picks up her suitcase, takes her father's pistol and some money out of his wallet and leaves the house. Once outside, she doesn't know where to go. She doesn't have enough money to buy a bus ticket and she doesn't know how to hop a freight car. She sits on her suitcase in an alley and holds the gun to her head for a few minutes. Then she puts the gun away and goes back to the Blue Moon, thinking that if the red-haired soldier isn't dead, she will marry him and leave town with him. She's not there for long when the sheriff comes in and says they have been looking for her. She's not sure why she's being captured at first and is disappointed when she finds out she is only being captured for having run away.

Part 3 opens when Frankie has turned thirteen. She is standing in the kitchen making sandwiches for her new friend Mary Littlejohn. Berenice is sitting slumped at the table disapproving of Frankie's choice of a Catholic for a friend. In the time since she ran away, Honey has been caught breaking into a store and put into jail. Berenice has tried everything she can to get his sentence reduced but to no avail. During the same time, John Henry died of meningitis. He was tortured with the pain of it for days before he died and Berenice has lost her sense of justice in the world. Frankie and her father are moving in with John Henry's parents in a new house in the suburbs and Berenice is leaving their employ. Frankie has been humbled by John Henry's death and Honey's incarceration, but she is in the throes of euphoria over her new girlfriend who will spend the night with her and ride out to the new house with her in the morning. The two girls plan to grow up and become world travelers together.