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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Bitches’ Brew (side a)”
When Bettye Jean is released from prison, she is reunited with her children, including Ophelia, who had her baby, DeShanna, in the detention center. How this pregnancy occurred is not discussed, or perhaps even known, by Gardner. As Freddie continues his pattern of leaving and then coming back and being violent, Gardner wonders how much agency his mother has and why none of his uncles will help. Garner continually harbors rage towards Freddie, feeling “like a volcano” ready to erupt (80). Ophelia, who is not able to endure the violence, leaves the house with her baby. There is the sense that she and Gardner grow more distant, when they had once been very close.
Although money is tight, Bettye Jean finds the funds to give Gardner the trumpet lessons that he hopes will make him a future Miles Davis. Gardner practices hard, but he also joins a gang and is often drawn into confrontation. When he gets sent to jail for shoplifting, it is Bettye Jean’s “disappointed expression” that corrects him. (85) She reveals that all the fights she has with Freddie, including the violent ones, are about Gardner, and warns him to behave himself.
Now a teenager, Gardner reaches the “dawn of (his) consciousness as a person of color” and experiences firsthand that the world “isn’t all black” (88). When he and a few of his friends are bused to a white school in East Milwaukee, he experiences prejudice. He reacts to this by attending several marches for minority rights, including one in 1966 organized by Father James Groppi, a Catholic priest. The marches are a way of meeting girls, which is important now that Gardner is raging with teenage hormones and feeling “like [he] woke up one day and owned a high- powered expensive sports car [he] didn’t even ask for” (95).
As Gardner begins to contemplate his attractiveness to the opposite sex, he initially feels disadvantaged because the preference of his community and the girls he likes is for lighter-skinned black men with ‘whiter’ features, such as Smokey Robinson. However, spurred on by the Black Power movement, which celebrates black beauty and culture, he embraces his “tall, muscular, dark-skinned, nappy-haired” physicality and grows a full afro (90).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Bitches Brew (side b)”
Feeling volatile and in need of money, Gardner and his friends break into a home-and-garden show, where they steal transistor radios and tape decks. Gardner decides to sell the electronics to three suspicious-looking men prowling his building. One of the men returns, initially pretending that he has some money for Gardner. He then asks Gardner to masturbate in front of him and when he refuses, pulls a knife to his throat and anally rapes him, twice. Gardner is deeply ashamed and decides to tell no-one about the incident while vowing to find and kill his rapist. At a later point in the chapter, Gardner tracks the man down and knocks him out by dropping a cinder block on his head.
Life at home with Freddie follows the now-predictable cycles of violence. Gardner fails to kill Freddie when he tries to drop a refrigerator on him. Freddie however, seems invincible, calling himself the “Great White Hunter of the Ghetto” because of his propensity for catching game (106).
At school, Gardner feels restless, especially when his football coach makes him a linebacker, instead of quarterback, possibly for racially-motivated reasons. Gardner is far more enthused by his activism and his band, The Realistic Band, which is in the style of James Brown. He is also carried away by his first sexual experiences with a succession of bright, sexually-liberated, young black women. However, he truly falls in love in the summer of 1971, when he sees Sherry Dyson, a college student four years his senior, who is from a well-to-do Richmond, Virginia family, holding up a t-shirt to herself in a military surplus store: “One look and I just fell in love. Shot through the heart” (117). They begin a long-distance relationship. Gardner runs up a 900-dollar phone bill talking to Sherry and has to repay it by working at a retirement home, cleaning bedpans.
After high school, and motivated by Uncle Henry’s tales of seeing the world, Gardner enlists in the navy. At this stage in his life, he realizes that he can no longer protect his mother and goes off in the pursuit of his own happiness. Bettye Jean sends him off with “her signature smile that could launch 1000 ships” (121).
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Chapters 4 and 5 relate Gardner’s experiences of coming of age as a young black man at a time of significant social change.
As Gardner realizes that his mother’s relationship with Freddie is more complicated than he initially thought, and that Bettye Jean’s own motivations are a mystery to him, he shifts his attention from his mother to himself. While Gardner is still angry and hurt, he realizes that there is little he can do to protect his mother and so sets his sights on civil rights activism and dating women.
Whereas Gardner’s childhood was in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly black, as a teenager he is made conscious of his city’s diversity and how people who look like him have been stereotyped and disadvantaged. He experiences this firsthand at his white high school, where, despite his intelligence, he is treated “like a dangerous Black Panther outlaw” (121). This spurs him to go on marches and gain inspiration from figures such as Malcolm X.
Gardner’s sense of being born at “the perfect time” also comes from the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the climate of permissiveness that surrounded this (114). While his first reported sexual encounter, the anal rape by the intruder in his building, is traumatic, Gardner is later able to enjoy his sexuality with young black women who have both sexual and intellectual confidence. Although he credits his girlfriends’ intelligence, the main attraction was their physicality and sexual availability: “Her behind was spectacular, shaped like a basketball,” he says of his third girlfriend, Belinda (115).
