49 pages • 1 hour read
Jason ReynoldsThe Boy in the Black Suit
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “516”
The morning after Thanksgiving, Matt oversleeps. He calls his father to apologize for not visiting, but his father says it’s a good thing Matt did not visit because the rehab’s Thanksgiving dinner made him sick; he was up all night with digestive difficulties. Matt dresses for work, but when he finds Mr. Ray outside on Mr. Ray’s stoop, he learns there is no work that day. Mr. Ray tells Matt he is not angry about seeing Candy Man on the news, and he's sad to see Candy Man that way. Mr. Ray is now mellow after the upsetting circumstances of the holiday: “Well, after yesterday and last night, I think I’m just gonna sit right here and enjoy the sunshine” (210). Matt joins him, but soon Love texts and invites him over.
Matt meets up with Chris on the way and introduces him to Love when they arrive at her building. Chris smiles charmingly and shakes Love’s hand, then goes on to the barbershop. Inside, Love serves orange juice and tells Matt he must be happy to be off work. He says he likes work, which leads to a discussion of his emotional healing when he attends others’ funerals and sees mourners going through grief like him. He admits to watching her at her grandmother’s funeral, and how she behaved differently than other grief-stricken mourners he witnessed: “I guess I saw some kind of peace, or something. Like you were somehow more together about it all” (218). Love does not have a vocal response to this but leads into the story of why she cannot “do” Valentine’s Day.
She shows Matt a photo of her mother and herself. Matt sees the building’s address in the background: 516. He recognizes this as Chris’s building. Love explains that she and her mother lived in that building when she was young. Love is sad when she tells Matt that because her mother disliked having her photo taken, it is the only photo she has of her mother. The man who took the photo was her mother’s killer. On Valentine’s Day when Love was seven, her mother planned to stay home and have a mother-daughter night with Love; she also did not want to see the “crazy dude” who currently was interested in her. Love recalls frosting cupcakes with her mother when the man began banging on the door. Her mother left the apartment to talk to him. Their argument was loud in the hall and stairwell. The man accused Love’s mother of seeing another man as the reason for not seeing him on Valentine’s Day. He then shot and killed her.
Matt is shocked. He realizes that Love’s mother was the victim of the crime he and Chris witnessed when they peeked out Chris’s door at their sleepover on Valentine’s Day when they were seven. The child he remembers crying was Love. He is shaky with the realization that their paths crossed before; he tells Love, “[…] now I need to tell you a story” (223).
Chapter 14 Summary: “My Side of the Story”
In this brief chapter, Matt and Love walk to the park where the only bench available gives them a direct view of a couple kissing extravagantly. Matt tells Love that he was in 516 the night her mother was killed, and he and Chris inadvertently witnessed the murder. Love is upset and tearful but insists he finish the story. Matt wants to hold her hand as he tells it, but he only touches her hand once briefly.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Simple What?”
Days later, Matt and Love decide to try a real date. Love takes charge of the planning. They take a cab to the destination, which Love keeps secret on the ride. Matt is nervous on the trip because the cab driver drives dangerously and distractedly, looking for Bob Marley songs on the out-of-date car stereo. Matt is surprised when they arrive, and Love reveals the destination as the Botanic Garden. Matt likes the serene, removed atmosphere of the Garden, which felt like they “entered some new dimension—some secret land where drama didn’t exist. Only flowers” (232).
When Love explains how her grandmother brought her there often after her mother was killed, however, Matt admits that he doesn’t understand why people give flowers to others only to watch them wither: “It’s like they’re these things that everybody waits to grow into something beautiful, and as soon as they do, they die” (232). Love says she can see that side, but she takes out a Polaroid camera and explains how her grandmother encouraged her to take photos to hold onto special flowers. She encourages Matt to find a flower he thinks is especially beautiful and capture its image. She seems disappointed when he cannot find one, so he points the camera at Love and takes several photos, calling her “the most beautiful flower [he has] ever seen” (236). Love is flattered and gives Matt a quick kiss. Matt is disappointed that it is only a “peck.”
Love shows Matt a flower that he does find truly special: Sempervivum. Love tells him, “It’s like the toughest of all plants. The survivor” (237). Matt takes a photo of it. Back at Love’s they share a longer kiss. Love takes several photos of Matt as he walks away, the way he did of her in the Botanic Garden.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Forward”
Matt stops at Chris’s on the way home, and Chris walks up the block with Matt to Matt’s building. Matt tells Chris that he and Love kissed, and Chris says that because Matt closed his eyes while kissing her, Matt must love her. Matt sees Mr. Ray sitting outside talking to passersby and asking a neighborhood boy, Brownie, to sing oldies for him. When Chris leaves, Matt tells Mr. Ray about the date, and Mr. Ray asks if Matt learned anything. Matt says yes but does not elaborate. Mr. Ray tells Matt about the funeral they will host the next day; there will be no church service, and the mother of the deceased wants only a brief, simple gathering. Matt asks Mr. Ray if he learned anything that day, and Mr. Ray tells him that watching the people walk by reminds him how priceless life is.
Inside his apartment, Matt listens to a message from his father, who is in a good humor and is asking for “real food.” Matt hangs his suit carefully and sets out his mother’s recipe booklet, intending to make an omelet in the morning. He wants to place the Sempervivum photo beside the one of himself crying at the beach with his parents but is surprised to find in his pocket a photo of himself smiling instead; Love switched out the photos when he was not looking. He likes the look of his smile in the photo and writes “First date with Love” on it. Matt dreams that night of his mother and himself at her funeral talking and sitting together; this time, no one else is there.
Chapter 17 Summary: “One Step at a Time”
The next day, Matt works to set up the funeral for Andre Watson. Matt is surprised to realize that he was the young man who Love chastised and embarrassed at the Cluck Bucket, telling him they were out of chicken. Cork is a pallbearer along with Matt. Matt sees that Cork is sorry for what happened to Matt’s father, and he forgives Cork. The funeral attendees number only 15 or so, most of them young people loyal to Andre’s gang. Andre’s mother implores his friends to “end it,” referring to the violence that killed her son, and requests that no one seek any revenge for Andre’s loss. Matt watches closely, anticipating the moment when Andre’s mother’s pain causes the “explosion” of grief with which he can identify, but Love texts from outside the funeral home, asking Matt to step outside. She is urgent about it, so he goes, inadvertently pulling everyone’s attention as the door shuts too hard.
Outside, Love gives Matt a potted, young Sempervivum. In exchange, Matt promises to make more cookies for Love. He intends to do more cooking for her as well. The other pallbearers bring the casket out without Matt’s help, and he tells Love who died. She recalls the boy from the Cluck Bucket and is surprised. Matt missed the moment of hard grief he calls “the explosion” in Andre’s mother, but as he watches the mourners walk from the funeral home and looks at Love, he thinks of his mother. He feels a similar sense of comfort that the funeral “explosions” gave him, “but it was different this time. It was for a different reason” (254-55). He reaches for Love’s hand as the funeral cars depart.
Chapters 13-17 Analysis
In these culminating chapters, more ironic circumstances foreshadowed by Matt’s introduction to Candy Man (the man Mr. Ray blames for the loss of his basketball career) evolve and expand with greater consequence. Mr. Ray alludes to knowing why Love finds Valentine’s Day so upsetting, but he explains that it is a tale Love must tell when she is ready to do so; ever the mentor, Mr. Ray is teaching Matt a lesson in patience. Matt finds Mr. Ray’s gentle refusal to tell frustrating, but he shows maturity in taking it calmly and letting Mr. Ray know that he understands. Early in the novel, and closer in the timeline to his mother’s passing, Matt showed less patience with others; for example, he had a difficult time understanding his classmates’ discomfort around him. Now, however, he shows greater empathy, patience, and perspective: “Dang. Mr. Ray was right. We needed to talk, plain and simple” (212).
He is rewarded when Love recovers from her sudden emotional reaction to Matt’s question about Valentine’s Day, and she takes the initiative to tell him the whole story. Because Mr. Ray allowed the story to come from Love, the ironic crossing of paths affects Matt with the maximum impact. He demonstrates in front of Love his most genuine, emotional reaction and concedes to the need to tell her immediately that he was an indirect witness to the violence and trauma that will forever impact her life. Matt shows interpersonal and intrapersonal skills with the way he tells Love what he saw (his tone is serious, direct, and empathetic) and the way he self-analyzes the irony of fate afterwards:
There’s only one of two things that could’ve happened after a conversation like that. Either we could’ve decided to never speak again, both totally freaked out by what I guess was fate, or a hell of a coincidence, or whatever, or we could’ve decided to see it as a sign to at least go on a real date (227).
The date is not without awkward moments—Matt’s paranoia of accidents and danger in the cab is clear, and Love is initially frustrated that Matt cannot appreciate simple beauty the way she does—but ultimately Matt has the breakthrough moment when he sees importance in the plant that shows the elusive quality he has been striving for: a steady, calm survival mode. Once he sees it, Matt and Love feel fulfilled in each other’s company, and the date is a success. When Love gives Matt a Sempervivum of his own to raise, it seals his recognition of the beauty in life, the foundation for which was set by Mr. Ray the evening before when he tells Matt there is much to appreciate about life.
Matt shows progression through the grieving process in these chapters because of his experiences with Mr. Ray and Love. He prepares to use his mother’s recipe booklet more often, and when at night, he no longer uses Tupac’s song to help fall asleep. Most notably, he dreams of his mother sitting with him at her funeral again, but now they are alone—the noise and distraction of funeral guests’ weeping is gone, so Matt sees her in an atmosphere of calm memory, not against a background of others’ grief. This prepares him to receive “the warm feeling” the next day when thinking about his mother at Andre’s funeral, a reaction he has thus far gotten only when witnessing the “explosion” of emotion from those mourning at funerals. These reactions reveal change in Matt’s character and demonstrate a coming-of-age narrative grounded in both grief and beauty.
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