The Pursuit of Happyness

Bettye Jean Triplett, née Gardner, is, in her son’s words, the protagonist “of a kind of Cinderella story—without the fairy godmother and the […] happily ever after” (19). Similar to the fairytale Cinderella, Bettye Jean is raised in poverty in Depression-era Little Rock, Arkansas, and possesses beauty, goodness and intelligence. However, following her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent remarriage, star-student Bettye Jean receives no financial assistance from her father to go to college or practice as a beautician and is drawn to a succession of married men who impregnate and leave her. These include Gardner’s father, Thomas Turner. However, Bettye Jean’s worst disappointment is her marriage to the abusive, violent Freddie Triplett, who almost kills her and sends her to jail twice, when she threatens to leave him.

Bettye Jean uses her intelligence and common sense to try to keep her children safe from Freddie when he is drunk and violent. She teaches Gardner the powerful example of stillness, when others are losing their tempers—a testament of her endurance and dignity.

As bright and confident as she is for Gardner, telling him that he can do anything he sets his mind to, Bettye Jean and her motivations are mysteries. While Gardner initially thinks that the fear of being sent to prison is what keeps Bettye Jean with Freddie, there is the hint that she gives away her agency and permits him to return for other reasons. As she drinks to hasten the end of her life, it is clear that her heart has been broken. Bettye Jean’s fate functions as a cautionary tale to Gardner and the reader.

A “cross between Godzilla and a pit-bull,” the tall, dark, grotesque Freddie Triplett is Gardner’s loathed stepfather (21). Illiterate into his early thirties and possibly suffering from severe mental-health difficulties including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and alcoholism, Freddie is threatened by his wife and her children, especially Gardner, who he goes out of his way to taunt. He channels this insecurity violently, beating them all and chasing after them with his shotgun. Despite his mental state, there is the sense that Freddie is above all things a survivor. 

Hungry for male role models other than Freddie, Gardner turns to his uncles, whom form an instrumental part of his childhood. In the pattern of mid-century African Americans who migrated from the agriculturally-centered Jim Crow South to the industrial North, the uncles are intent on going to Canada, but wind up in Milwaukee when their car breaks down. There, they form part of a thriving, blue-collar, black community. Uncle Archie is a worker for Inland Steel and possesses the quiet, calm determination to rise through the ranks and set an example to Gardner about “tenacity and focus” (27). Uncle Willie, who is also a steelworker, suffers from delusions and shell-shock following his return from the Korean War. But for Gardner, the most prominent of his mother’s three brothers is Uncle Henry, who is “a pretty boy, single and loved by the ladies, with a lean physique and an athletic, tiger-like way of moving” (68). From his time in the military, he tells Gardner of his adventures around the world and of all the women he’s met. Gardner adopts him as a paternal figure and learns what it is to “feel love for a man […] the way that boys fall in love with their fathers and yearn to be them” (67). Uncle Henry, who dies while Gardner is still very young, functions in the narrative as an inspiration Gardner never forgets. 

Sherry Dyson is the woman Gardner falls in love with at first sight, when he sees her holding a t-shirt against herself in an army-and-navy-surplus store: “Light-skinned, with a full Afro and the most beautifully shaped breasts […] she was […] in an understated, down-to-earth way a knockout” (118). College-educated, four years older than Gardner, and from a well-to-do Virginia family, Sherry becomes a “dream woman” (118). She is good-humored, intelligent, and introduces Gardner to new intellectual and artistic experiences.

In the narrative, Sherry is an aspirational match for Gardner and represents everything that he thinks he should be aiming towards: structure, becoming cultured, and moving up in the world. However, in actuality, Sherry takes Gardner away from the wildness and spontaneity that are intrinsic parts of himself.

As the narrative is rendered through Gardner’s perspective, we never know what Sherry is thinking; however, there is sense that she loves him unconditionally because she is “destroyed” when he leaves her (175). In retrospect, Gardner considers his relationship with Sherry as one of his most important. 

Jackie is the force of nature who lures Gardner into relinquishing control of his ordered life with Sherry. To him she is “an exotic black goddess […] just oozing sexual energy,” and she proves to be sexually uninhibited and a great match for Gardner in the bedroom (171).

However, Jackie, who is training to be a dentist, also has professional ambitions and a “definite game plan” of moving on up in life (177). She wants to be part of an upwardly-mobile circle of black professionals, and for Gardner’s salary to be on par with that of her friends. Gardner is bothered by the doubt Jackie casts on both his career and paternal aspirations. She is also shown to be manipulative and vindictive through keeping Christopher from Gardner and sending the police after him just before a life-changing interview with brokerage firm Dean Witter.

Following their separation, the narrative goes quiet on Jackie and Gardner’s love-hate dynamic; however, there is the sense that she seeks to keep him in thrall with continued sexual advances. Besides learning that Jackie is happy to receive financial assistance from Gardner, when she looks after both of his children, following Jacintha’s birth, in 1985, it is difficult to gauge her perspective of events, and of Gardner.

Christopher is the son of Gardner and Jackie, conceived nineteen days into their passionate affair. Christopher is also the go-between in his parents’ marriage. His father feels an instant connection with him and the narrative suggests that Christopher bonds more intimately with his father than his mother. Inquisitive, precocious beyond his years, and calm, Christopher adjusts well to homelessness and adapts to all the new routines that are thrust his way.

Jacintha, conceived in one of Jackie’s visits to Gardner and Christopher, is Gardner’s daughter, born in 1985. The reader does not learn much about Jacintha’s idiosyncrasies as she is not part of the central narrative, but we do learn that she eventually works for her father’s company.

Ophelia is Gardner’s half-sister and childhood best friend. She is Bettye Jean’s oldest daughter, conceived in her affair with married school teacher Samuel Salter. Ophelia is smart, strong-minded and the author’s main source of information about their neighborhood. Though Ophelia’s father abandoned her, she continues to have a relationship with him when he re-emerges in Milwaukee. Gardner’s separation from Ophelia the second time, after Bettye Jean is again incarcerated and Ophelia is sent to a detention center, causes him to suffer a double sense of dislocation.

When Ophelia returns from the detention center, she is accompanied by DeShanna, her baby who was born while she was there. The circumstances of her pregnancy at the young age of twelve are left obscure in the narrative, perhaps out of Gardner’s respect for his sister’s privacy. A strong character nevertheless, Ophelia has the initiative to leave the family home with her baby when life with Freddie becomes unbearable. Once Ophelia leaves home, she and Gardner grow further apart.

The Reverend Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, is a kind-hearted, magnanimous pastor who supports Gardner practically and spiritually while he is homeless. He also does work in the community, setting up the homeless shelter where Gardner and his son are able to stay until they find a home. 

Dr. Robert Ellis, or Bob, is the surgeon Gardner works with in a San Francisco research laboratory at the University of California Medical Center and VA Hospital. He is an experimental heart surgeon and intense personality who appoints on merit, trusting Gardner with responsibility even when he does not have the formal college qualifications to become a doctor. He thus reinforces Gardner’s belief in on the job training. 

More a symbolic than a fleshed-out character, Bob Bridges is the sharp-suited driver of the Ferrari 308 who changes Gardner’s life when he reveals the secrets of his livelihood to him.

A six-foot, bespectacled Jewish man with an overbite, Marshall Geller is Gardner’s boss at Bear Stearns. He teaches Gardner the vital lesson of the sphere of influence, whereby getting the right people on the other side of the telephone makes all the difference to success in business. 

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president after apartheid, is the culmination of Gardner’s personal heroes. Gardner seeks to model himself on Mandela, who affirms the dignity and capability of black people.