No Promises In The Wind

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1970

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-11

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The story opens on a chilly October morning in 1932. Fifteen-year-old Josh Grondowski rises early to deliver newspapers in his Chicago neighborhood. The small amount of money he makes from the paper route helps his struggling family. Josh’s father, Stefan, has been out of work for eight months, and the family’s savings were lost when the banks failed. Josh’s sister was just laid off from her clerking job. Besides Josh’s newspaper money, the family’s only income comes from the meager earnings his mother makes ironing clothes at a laundry.

Josh has a gift for music and plays the piano. He even composes his own pieces. He inherited his musical talents, as his mother, Mary, used to play piano—and taught it until no one in the neighborhood had money to pay for lessons. Stefan once loved music too, and his parents were musicians in Poland. However, he now shuns music as an extravagance that he can no longer indulge in during these hard times. He experienced poverty during his childhood and blames Josh’s grandfather for not putting aside his music for practical work. He tells his wife, “These hands, Mary. […] These are a man’s hands. They’ve become calloused and they’ve been split sometimes, and bleeding. But they’ve never dawdled over a keyboard while you and the children suffered” (4).

Josh enjoys making music with his friend Howie, who plays the banjo. Howie lives in a fatherless home, and his mother drinks. At school, the two boys play for their teacher, Miss Crowne. She appreciates their musical talents and tells them, “You two all but make me forget the breadlines for a few minutes” (12).

When Josh sees his younger brother, Joey, feeding milk to a starving alley cat, he scolds Joey for wasting a nickel on a cat. Joey is a slender and fragile boy who was prone to illness when he was younger.

Josh’s father is bitter over his inability to find work and takes it out on Josh. The two clash often over Josh’s practicing the piano and other issues. At the dinner table, Josh asks his mother if there are more potatoes. His father lashes out at him, telling Josh that his “paltry little job” (17) doesn’t give him “special privileges.”

When Josh complains to his mother about the way his father treats him, his mother tells him that she has no choice but to side with her husband for the sake of her marriage and the family. Josh then tells her that he wants to set out on his own. She reluctantly agrees that opportunities for Josh at home are scant, and that since he’s “a strong boy” (19), he might find something better elsewhere.

Josh feels excited about leaving Chicago and goes to meet Howie outside the drugstore.

Chapter 2 Summary

When Josh tells Howie that he plans to leave Chicago, Howie says he wants to go with him. Howie suggests that they can use their music to make money: “We’ll find some place—a speakeasy, a restaurant, a dance hall—some place where people will pay to hear the kind of music we make” (22). Josh likes the idea and proposes that they go to small towns. Howie agrees that smaller towns make sense, and he suggests that they go west and maybe south as well.

Josh’s younger brother, Joey, pleads with Josh and Howie to let him accompany them. At first, Josh says no, but Joey convinces him.

On their first day on their own, the boys try their luck at panhandling. Joey sings while Howie plays the banjo. They find that the combination of Joey’s young face and sweet voice and Howie’s banjo playing is a hit with passers-by, and they collect 78 cents.

The boys plan to hop aboard a freight train. Josh asks a hobo about the railroad detectives, known as “bulls,” and about the dangers of train hopping. The hobo tells Josh that he has seen bulls forcibly remove people from the trains but has also witnessed free riders and bulls riding together and chatting. He describes the dangers of freight train hopping, noting that he has seen both kids and men killed. Shifting loads can crush riders, and accidents can occur when riders misjudge the speed of trains as they try to hop aboard.

Josh decides that hopping aboard a moving train is too risky. Instead, the boys decide to board an open car and hide until it gets under way, hoping that the bulls don’t see them. Their plan works out, and they ride through most of the night. However, as morning nears, a bull spots them and kicks them and the other free riders off the train.

After they exit the train in the dark railroad yard, a hostile mob of men with clubs and pitchforks approaches them. One of the men yells, “Don’t take another step this way. […] You can take your empty bellies to another part of the country. We’ve enough of your kind to feed already. Take another step and we’ll club you down like dogs” (31).

To escape the situation, the boys take the hobo’s advice and decide to hop back on the train when it starts moving again. As they do, a passenger train approaches on the opposite track. The hobo lifts Joey onto the train, and Josh also boards safely. However, Howie hesitates to throw his banjo to Josh. As Howie is trying to board, the passenger train speeding by in the other direction hits him and throws him down the tracks. The men on the train prevent Josh from jumping off in what would have been a dangerous and futile attempt to save Howie.

Chapter 3 Summary

Josh and Joey mourn Howie’s loss. They’re so grief-stricken that they refuse a meal that one of the train hoppers offers them. They sleep in a ravine under a bridge.

The next morning, they set out through a meadow and come to a run-down farmhouse. The place seems abandoned, with broken-down furniture and cracked dishes in the yard. The only soul around is a white rooster. They cook and eat the rooster.

The couple who own the house return. They’re not upset when Josh tells them that the boys spent the night there. The house was vacant since tenants moved out of it. The couple offer the boys a meal. “We can give them one meal, Ben,” the woman says. […] “I guess we can share a meal with two boys” (42). The woman serves the boys a meal that consists mostly of biscuits and what’s left of the rooster.

Her husband talks angrily and bitterly about the hard times. He reminds Josh of his father. However, when Joey sings for the couple, the man’s expression relaxes. Before they leave, the man hands Joey a bag with six potatoes.

While they camp in the woods that night, they decide to roast one of the potatoes. A group of older boys attacks them and steals their bag of potatoes, the one they’re roasting, and their blanket.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Several incidents in the opening chapters vividly illustrate the psychological impact of the Depression, particularly on the male characters. First, Josh’s father, Stefan, who has been unemployed for many months and lost his bank savings, lashes out at Josh. Stefan’s angry tirades lead Josh and Joey to leave home. However, they can’t escape the Depression-induced wrath. In the first town they stop in, a group of pitchfork-wielding men descends on them, screaming for the train riders to take their hungry mouths elsewhere. The boys encounter bitterness and anger even in some of the people who are kind and generous toward them. A down-on-his-luck farmer rants about how the hard times have ravished the farm economy even as he and his wife feed the boys a meal.

In addition, Josh and Joey must deal with the devastating loss of their friend Howie. Howie’s death in a train-hopping accident underscores the perils of the vagabond transportation system that the Depression has spawned. Josh and Joey will soon meet several other characters who have endured the loss of people close to them.

In these chapters, Hunt introduces the rules and altered norms of the Depression era. Josh and Joey don’t think twice before trespassing at an old farmhouse and killing a rooster in the yard for food. When the owners of the house arrive, they don’t scold the boys for trespassing or for roasting the rooster. Instead, they feed them—but make it clear that the boys will get just one meal. This is when Josh and Joey are first introduced to the one-meal rule for tramp children, which they will become accustomed to as their travels progress. The boys soon learn that people who can afford to give charity often ration it.

The major role of food in the story starts to emerge. Josh decides to leave home after his father angrily chastises him for asking for more potatoes at the family’s sparse dinner table. Potatoes, which historically symbolize poverty, reemerge in the story when the farm couple give Josh and Joey a bag with six potatoes, and a group of older boys later attacks them and steals their potatoes.

Finally, the boys see early signs that their musical abilities could provide meal money for them despite the Depression’s destruction of disposable income. On their first day on their own, they collect 75 cents panhandling, with Joey singing and Howie playing the banjo. When Joey sings for the angry owner of the farmhouse, Josh notices that the man’s face grows “quieter and less angry-looking” (44). This reaction indicates that people benefit from the soothing effects of music as a salve to treat the psychological pains of the Depression.