There Will Be No Miracles Here

Chapter 10 begins with Tashia giving Gerald the news that their mother’s check didn’t go through and her account was suddenly closed. This prompts Gerald to reflect on the experience of his mother being gone for so long that he comes to a point of “anti-hope” (153).

Tashia, however, locates their mother at a halfway house in Saint Louis. Granny, Casey, and Tashia make the nine-hour drive from Dallas to Saint Louis with the expectation of returning immediately (no hotels) for financial reasons.

When they arrive, their mother is not there, or else she refuses to answer the door. Angry and hurt, they begin to return but stop at a hotel. Gerald follows this experience with a brief paragraph honoring his Granny and the strain she carried, tending to her disappeared daughter’s children.

By the time Tashia and Granny locate Gerald’s mother, his anger has hardened into disdain. He notes minor differences in her appearance, such as 10 stitches on her nose. Gerald then expresses the depth of his anger and hurt toward his mother in a grizzly fantasy of forcing her to make apologies beyond all reason.

Though these imagined apologies do not manifest in real life, Gerald’s mother does attend his high school graduation. Then, his father reappears and offers to drive him to Yale in a U-Haul. The whole family makes the drive, and Gerald writes that “for that entire, surprisingly pleasant journey, we pretended that we were not a group of people who had destroyed one another, but a family. Maybe there is no difference between the two” (161).

The chapter closes with the lyrics of the gospel song, “I Told Jesus.”

Then Gerald includes what he calls “An Interlude for My Friend,” which introduces Gerald’s friend Elijah, whom he meets at Yale. Elijah commits suicide the year before Gerald writes this book, and Gerald recounts a dream in which he sees his friend. Elijah seems to answer a question Gerald has been struggling with—how to tell the events from his arrival at Yale forward. Elijah says, “We did a lot of things that we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do” (163).

In closing the interlude, Gerald writes, “if you catch it from the right angle, a boy picking himself up by his bootstraps looks just like suicide” (163).

This chapter briefly recounts Gerald’s culture shock upon arriving at Yale. He attempts to follow the suggestions of the orientation speaker (such as “never eat alone”), but they fail him.

Other students find the way he talks funny, and he struggles to change it. His clothes are way outside the norm. He even struggles to identify with James Baldwin when his class studies Baldwin’s work. He realizes, “there ain’t a single person on this campus that sounds like you” (169). Even Daniel, a Black student from Gary, Indiana, does not seem to understand Gerald.

Gerald dresses in Yale-emblazoned clothes to avoid trouble. He most identifies with the prisoners he sees in New Haven, who tease him for going to Yale. By the end of his freshman year, Gerald treats Yale like jail. He is nonetheless committed to making the changes needed to thrive.

Chapter 12 describes an incident, probably in the summer of 2006, when Gerald is back in Texas with his mother, his sister, and his sister’s baby. The door is broken in by two men, who proceed to tie up the adults with tape. Before he is tied, Gerald cowers in a bedroom, thinking only of escape. He then finds himself tied up on the floor with a gun to his head, prepared to die.

The incident is apparently caused by a money issue with Tashia. It is not clear whether the intruders find the money supposedly in Tashia’s possession, and the police are no help when they arrive. So ends Part 2.