43 pages • 1 hour read
Chris GardnerThe Pursuit of Happyness
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006A 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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Candy”
Gardner recalls his early memory of staying at the Robinson’s house with his sister, Ophelia, and two other foster children. Their birth parents were elsewhere, but nevertheless, a beautiful woman who made candy once came to visit him and a “clean, warm, good smell that [wrapped] around me like a Superman cape” made an impression on him (15). The woman was actually his mother, who had come to visit him.
Over the years, from the accounts of different relatives, Gardner received a patchy impression of his mother’s life as a kind of “Cinderella story—without the fairy godmother and the part at the end where she marries the prince and they all live happily ever after” (19). Bettye Jean Gardner was raised in Depression-era rural Louisiana, where despite enduring poverty and racism, she was a star student at Rayville Colored High School. She wanted to become an educator, but after her mother died, her father’s new wife made sure that the money that was to send Bettye Jean to college would be spent on her own daughter. When Bettye Jean got pregnant with the child of a married man, she went to North Milwaukee, where her brothers had settled. On her journey, she met another married man, Thomas Turner, “who swept Bettye Jean off her feet either romantically or by force”(20).Gardner is the child of Bettye Jean and Turner and is born on February 9th, 1954.
Gardner maintains his father was “a figment of the vast unknown” throughout his childhood and was barely mentioned(22). Nevertheless, Gardner had a more immediate concern: his hostile stepfather, Freddie Triplett, who Gardner describes as “some ill-begotten cross between a pit bull and Godzilla” (21). Bettye Jean’s absence from Gardner’s early life was a result of Freddie turning Bettye Jean in for welfare fraud, when she tried to work while receiving assistance.
Both during his stay with his mother’s brother, Uncle Archie, and Archie’s wife, Aunt Clara, in a vibrant black community in North Milwaukee, Gardner developed a love of reading. An early favorite book was The Sword and the Stone, a medieval quest “setting up the idea that someday, somehow, I would find the destiny that awaited me” (25).
On exiting prison, Bettye Jean is reunited with her children; however, Freddie also bulldozes his way back into their lives and is Gardner’s “enemy” from the outset (28).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The No-Daddy Blues”
While Bettye Jean encourages Gardner’s interest in reading, Freddie, illiterate into his early thirties, becomes deeply insecure about it and acts out violently, often chasing the family out of the house with his shotgun.
Freddie also taunts Gardner verbally about not having a father, so that it begins to feel like a stigma. At the age of eight, Gardner makes a long-term plan, a “solemn promise I made to myself that when I […] had a son of my own, he would always know who I was and I would never disappear from his life” (35). Meanwhile, Freddie remains a challenge. On one occasion, Gardner wakes up to find his mother unconscious on the floor and a two-by-four on the back of her head. While they wait for the paramedics to arrive, Gardner cleans up because “the idea that the white paramedics and policemen will see the blood everywhere and the dirty stove as well is too shameful to bear. So my job is to clean it up, to prove that decent people live here, not savages” (37).
While Bettye Jean is saved and says that Freddie will never be allowed back, the cycle of him leaving and returning continues, “predictable as rain”(38). Gardner develops an entrenched hatred of Freddie and contemplates several methods for killing him. However, Bettye Jean has her own plan for killing Freddie. One evening, she gets all of her children outside of the house and plans to set fire to it with him inside. Freddie wakes up, stops the fire and uses her attempt to kill him to support his claim that she has violated her parole from imprisonment. Bettye Jean is incarcerated again.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Where’s Momma?”
When Bettye Jean is sent to prison, Gardner finds himself staying twelve blocks West at his Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae’s house. This time, he is without his twelve-year-old sister Ophelia, who for some mysterious reason has been sent to a detention home for girls. The experience is disorientating for Gardner: “It was as though the script I was living one day got switched and I had to jump in the next day with a new script and a whole new cast of characters, without asking any questions” (59).
Gardner finds it difficult to adjust to Ella Mae’s strict rules and notices that Uncle Willie wasn’t “quite right in the head” since returning from the Korean War suffering from a form of shell-shock (64). Uncle Willie’s fantasies are numerous and at one point, the family has to reclaim him from the luxurious Palmer House Hotel, where Gardner catches a glimpse of the grand lifestyle he aspires to.
Gardner is hungry for a male role model or substitute father at this difficult time and chooses Uncle Henry, the brother of his mother, whom he admires the most. Dapper, and a one-time military man who has seen the world, Uncle Henry is an inspiration to Gardner. He also gives Gardner his first taste of Gardner’s musical hero, Miles Davis. When Uncle Henry drowns in a boating accident, Gardner is devastated, but represses the full extent of his sadness, so that he seems stronger than he is. He tries to be equally stoic when he glimpses Bettye Jean at Uncle Henry’s funeral. Nevertheless, when he returns to Freddie’s sister Baby’s house, and catches a draught of his mother’s scent, he is overcome with missing her.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These initial chapters reveal how Gardner’s story is interwoven with his mother’s. Bettye Jean is the deliciously-scented “real, real, pretty woman” who forms the base of Gardner’s needs(15). Her beauty and goodness are conveyed through sensory images, such as the candy she makes Gardner when she visits him in foster care and “her clean, warm, good smell that wraps around [him] like a Superman cape” (15). It is as though, through her benevolence, she can give him the superpower to transcend all obstacles.
Though Bettye Jean’s life has been one of dashed dreams, beginning from her father’s refusal to pay for her college tuition, she transfers her passion for learning over to Gardner, whom she encourages be curious about the world and to read as much as possible. It is this shared love of knowledge and books that enables Bettye Jean and Gardner to rebel against the illiterate Freddie, who in turn asserts his authority through brute strength and violence. Freddie’s violence awakens Gardner’s sense of justice and also his hatred, as he devises ways to kill his stepfather. When both Gardner’s and Bettye Jean’s plans to kill Freddie falter, Freddie becomes a parasitical and undying menace that they have to contend with. Still, given Freddie’s power to beat Bettye Jean into unconsciousness or to send her to prison, Gardner is often left to handle life on his own, to “jump in […] with a new script and a whole new cast of characters, without asking any questions” (59). Thus, the beginning chapters constitute the struggle for security, happiness and advancement against the forces that seek to undermine Gardner.
With Gardner’s biological father gone and Freddie definitively not his “goddamn daddy,” Gardner develops a complex around his lack of a father figure in his life (29). Even as a young child, Gardner senses the importance of having a protective male figure whom he can model himself on. While Gardner vows to never leave his future son, there is also the sense that he is looking for male role models, which vary from his steelworker uncles to Mr. Katz, the Jewish man who sends him hustling. Still, when his beloved Uncle Henry dies, and Gardner feels the need to be strong and conceal his grief, he decides to take on the masculine role of tough protector himself.
