What the Fireflies Knew

KB undergoes a series of revelations that bring her closer to her coming of age. With each event, KB comes to a new understanding of herself, her relationship with others outside of the context of family, and of potent forces such as sex, race, and class.

Harris uses setting to portray KB’s awareness of how race and class shape her identity. KB idealizes Bobby and Charlotte because they have all the trappings that KB has learned to associate with family through her reading of books. She engages in the same idealization when she observes the family at Pizza Land. Homes—the budget hotel where her family lived before she came to Lansing, the picture-perfect home of Bobby and Charlotte, and Granddaddy’s older home—are all spaces that reflect the variety of class positions that surround KB.

KB sees her own experience of being unhoused and her grandfather’s older, crowded home as signs of her otherness and their subordination. The interactions with Bobby and Charlotte change how she sees her class position. She understands with perfect clarity that their curiosity makes a spectacle of her suffering. Despite this realization, she is unable to find the language to express this truth until after they leave during one of her playdates.

The family barbeque also leads to multiple epiphanies for KB, and Harris hence uses this event to drive the rising action of the novel. Preparing the corn and collards are family traditions, as KB learns when she sees the similarities between her grandfather’s and mother’s ways in the kitchen. These traditions ground KB and help her to see both her mother and grandfather in a different light. When her grandfather presides over preparation for the family barbeque, he encourages KB to see herself as one of the people responsible for feeding her family instead of a child at the whim of the adults in her life.

Granddaddy’s lesson on preparing for the family barbeque leads her to revise her picture of him as an uncaring adult. She begins to see him as an elder who can teach her important life lessons, no matter his flaws. This shift in their relationship is one that allows KB to feel that she can rely on an adult to be present; her cousin’s revelation that there is something more to the conflict between Granddaddy and Jacquee almost immediately undercuts this notion of Granddaddy as a completely reliable narrator, however. In this section, Harris therefore symbiotically develops the characters of both KB and her grandfather, since her view of the world shifts in relation to the reader’s sense of Granddaddy’s reliability.

The family barbeque also helps KB to understand that she isn’t just Jacquee and her father’s daughter—she has a large extended family that is spread across the United States and Europe. She also realizes that the children she encountered at the pool are kin. Lansing becomes a place that is part of her map of familiar places as a result, yet her own sphere begins to be geographically contextualized alongside her developing sense of class and race identity.

The most shocking revelation for KB is the impact of sex and sexuality on her sister. The attention that her sister garners in the previous section during the trip to the pool only hints at the power and importance of sex, but Chapter 7 shows that sexuality is a force that has the potential to divide the sisters. The difference in their developmental stages becomes glaring in this section, and KB cannot reconcile her sister as a sexually active teen with the Nia who was formerly one of two children dealing with the challenges in their lives. KB took comfort in being a child alongside her sister and came to rely on that relationship as a source of stability.

When KB sees Nia in the bathroom with their cousin, it also disrupts KB’s understanding of her own body. What KB sees in the bathroom traumatizes her because it reveals that a body like hers is subject to penetration and that this penetration can be pleasurable. With the limited understanding of an 11-year-old, KB finds the idea terrifying. When she later suspects that Nia has disappeared with the boy at the pizza parlor, she feels a mix of anger and abandonment. She cannot go where her sister goes, literally or figuratively, because she is so much younger than Nia. Her attack on Nia later reflects the trauma of this separation and understanding.

KB’s proposition to Rondell at the pizza parlor encapsulates her effort to overcome this gap in experience, but it fails when her grandfather polices her behavior. His talk of boundaries and boys as potential violators of her boundaries is a rite of passage that contributes to her Coming of Age. The world is presented as a place where KB must view boys with suspicion because seemingly innocent interactions with them might lead to harm. This encounter with Rondell and the subsequent talk with Granddaddy serves as foreshadowing of Rondell’s behavior later in the novel.