56 pages • 1 hour read
Naima CosterWhat's Mine and Yours
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “November 1992”
Six weeks after Ray’s death, Jade is struggling to get through each day. She sets up a shrine to his memory and talks to him through it, but becomes worried about what her grief will do to Gee, so she eventually takes it down. During a visit to Linette, Linette notices how tired Jade is and suggests she get a pregnancy test. Jade considers Linette’s words and even looks at the tests when she takes Gee to the grocery store, but doesn’t get one. While Jade and Ray had wanted a child of their own, she knows she cannot afford to have another child now. Despite the child belonging to Ray, she knows the best choice would be to not have it.
Jade looks back on her relationship with Ray, recalling how she couldn’t find a sitter for Gee, so they ended up taking him on their first date. Jade felt that Ray was Gee’s father from their first meeting.
In the present, Gee asks if “daddy” had other children; he tells her that his babysitter told him Ray wasn’t his real father. Jade is furious and tells him that Ray was his father in everything but blood. She calls Linette and tells her what the sitter said, and Linette offers to babysit Gee, but only if Jade will take a pregnancy test. Jade agrees. As she and Gee eat dinner, Jade thinks about Ray and believes she hears his voice, comforting her. She cries, and Gee reaches out to her, but Jade tells him that Ray would’ve wanted them to move on and puts his hands down instead of embracing him. Later, Jade has a doctor at work run the test for her. It is negative. Despite her resolve not to have another child, Jade is grief stricken by the news.
Chapter 5 Summary: “July 1998”
Robbie is due to come home today, so Hank has planned a trip to the beach. Robbie arrives as Hank makes breakfast, causing excitement among the girls. Hank insists on the beach trip, pushing everyone into the car and enduring a difficult drive with four moody girls. At the beach, Hank begins to ask Lacey May to marry him, but is interrupted when a dog attacks Diane and their own dog, Jenkins. Hank rushes to Diane’s rescue, and then asks Lacey May to marry him, and she accepts. At the house, they tell Robbie, who begs Lacey May to come back to him. Lacey May explains that it’s not about love, but about practicality.
Lacey May arranges for a realtor to appraise the house Robbie bought for her and the kids, planning to sell it as part of their divorce. Ruth Green comes over and apologizes for turning Lacey May away when she asked for help, and tells her that a developer is trying to buy up the property around them. She asks Lacey May not to sell. Lacey May goes through with the appraisal, disappointed the realtor didn’t offer more than what she and Robbie paid.
Lacey May returns home to find the girls excited after a visit with Robbie. Margarita tells Lacey May that Robbie sent flowers for her; Lacey May recognizes the flowers from a quarry where she and Robbie had one of their first intimate moments. She goes to the motel where Robbie is staying, and they become intimate. Afterward, however, Lacey May doubles down on her decision to marry Hank. Frustrated, Robbie goes to a bar and sleeps with a couple of girls. The next day, he is passed out when Lacey May drops off the girls, so the girls wander off to find the taco stand Robbie took them to the day before. On the way, Noelle and Margarita get into a fight and aren’t paying attention when Diane falls and hits her head on a stone.
Lacey May returns to the motel to pick up the girls and discovers they aren’t there. She and Robbie search the area but have no luck. When they return to the motel, they find the girls there, wet and bruised. Lacey May sends them to the car and turns on Robbie, telling him this is why she cannot be with him anymore.
Chapter 6 Summary: “August 2002”
Jade and Gee attend a meeting at Central High School shortly before the beginning of the new school year. The districts are integrating the city and county schools. Gee is being transferred to Central High School, the county school, as is his friend Adira; at the meeting, she gives a speech about how excited she is for the opportunity to attend a good school: “It hurts to know I’m not welcome here, at a school that’s only fifteen minutes away from my house, all because of the color of my skin” (114). Many parents express concern over the changes, their arguments ranging from a change in grading standards to the loss of college opportunities to potential violence in the classroom because of “bad kids” being brought in. Jade gets up and embarrasses Gee by expressing a desire for Gee to have a better chance at a good life, which she has worked hard to give him, unlike more privileged families: “We haven’t had our lives handed to us, like some of the people in this room” (115). Jade is followed by Lacey May, who is angry about Jade’s speech. She tells the whole room that she is planning a protest and encouraging other parents to join.
Gee rides home with Linette, with whom he and Jade now live. He is angry with his mother’s insistence on speaking her mind no matter how embarrassing it might be for him. He’s also angry that she disappears often at night for reasons he doesn’t understand. Gee thinks about Ray, recalling how he had to testify at the trial of the man who shot him, but Gee can’t remember the actual shooting or much of the trial itself. He’s grown into an anxious boy who grits his teeth so hard that he has already broken one and has been warned he might break another. In the car, Linette advises Gee to let other people in; Gee brushes her off.
At home, Gee has a photograph of Ray—the last remnant of the shrine that Jade took down. As a child, he had bad nightmares; they’re rare now, but Gee still has trouble with physical reactions to stress. To relax, he masturbates to thoughts of various women.
Lacey May is fighting against the change at the school because she feels as though she gave up too much to keep her kids in the county schools only to have them filled with city kids. She’s making signs at the kitchen table when Noelle comes in and expresses disgust at what her mother is doing. She goes out with her boyfriend, Duke, whose parents are deacons at a local church and support Lacey May’s protests. They go to a club together and dance, but Noelle’s stomach is upset. Noelle believes she is pregnant.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapter 4 returns to the tragedy of Ray’s death, showing how Jade has been forced to grow up and become a single parent. Illustrating the theme of Strong Women Fighting for Their Futures, Jade pulls herself together and focuses on Gee, determined to make sure Gee has every advantage that Ray would have wanted for him. Jade no longer goes out drinking or dwells on her past, but focuses on making a good life for her son. At the same time, Jade struggles with her own grief, choosing to hide it to protect Gee. Jade’s choice comes back to haunt both her and Gee, as it prevents Gee from learning healthy coping mechanisms. In Chapter 6, he is already shown to have difficulty dealing with his own emotions; he has unhealthy physical habits like grinding his teeth, and he is unhappy with his mother, showing that they have grown further apart, not closer, in the aftermath of Ray’s death.
Motherhood is the focal point around which many of the novel’s themes revolve, and Coster explores it from several directions in these chapters. Jade is fully aware of how society looks at women of her age and her race having a small child. She knows that if she has another child, she will not be able to count on anyone to help her and that her community will look down on her for being a single mother, just like they did when she had Gee. Yet Jade’s grief is so profound that just the idea of having a small part of Ray growing inside of her offers her hope, something to cling onto as she tries to reassure herself and Gee that they will get past Ray’s death. That hope is quickly stolen away when she learns she is not pregnant. Though she knows she cannot reasonably manage a second child on her own, she is crushed by the disappointment anyway, a moment that serves as the catalyst for her steady loss of hope as the novel progresses. Ray’s death and the loss of their potential future shape the woman Jade becomes, and that in turn shapes the man Gee becomes, continuing the theme of Shared Tragedy.
As Jade struggles with the loss of her partner, Lacey May’s husband returns. Although Lacey May expresses a desire to reunite with Robbie, she has grown less naïve and more bitter over the two years he was in prison. Lacey May loves Robbie, but she has come to value practicality more; thus, even though she is intimate with Robbie, she ultimately refuses to risk the safety of her daughters just for the sake of love. Like Jade, Lacey May is a strong woman who is fighting, in her own way, for her family’s future.
Coster explores the different facets of humanity through many of her characters, especially Robbie and Hank. Although Hank’s character was disparaged in Chapter 2 and is again in Chapter 5, he proves himself reliable where Robbie is not. Coster presents two situations in which Diane nearly comes to serious harm—once in Hank’s care and once in Robbie’s—to juxtapose their differences. Where Robbie was once devoted to his family and full of optimism, he now seeks out other women when frustrated with Lacey May, struggles with addiction, and fails to supervise his daughters, leading to Diane getting injured. In contrast, though Hank was initially introduced through his manipulations of Lacey May—and is still clearly possessive over her to an uncomfortable degree—he rushes to protect Diane from the dog attack. He also promises not to kick Lacey May and the girls out of his house even if Lacey May refuses to marry him, a promise of stability that Lacey May will not turn down. Neither is presented as strictly “good” or “bad” men; however, since Lacey May feels that Robbie is no longer reliable, a future with him has become impossible.
Chapter 6, which occurs four years later, introduces the city and county school integration that finally brings the Ventura and Gibson families into each other’s orbit. While Robbie and Ray envisioned their families being fast friends like them, in truth, Jade and Lacey May clash immediately. It is at this point that Lacey May reveals herself as the openly racist antagonist of the story. Lacey May has denied her daughters the chance to explore their Latin heritage, making her a major factor in their struggle to understand their identity, which was briefly shown in Noelle’s adulthood chapters. At the school meeting, she argues against Jade’s statement about inequality:
If your husband wanted the best for your son, he should have done what I did and moved him into this district fair and square. I made sacrifices to get here. […] And I’m not just going to give it up so you can get handed what you think you deserve—that’s not right, and that’s not American (116).
Lacey May believes that people’s struggles—such as getting their children into good schools—are “mostly the result of people’s own doing” (122), an ironic viewpoint given her own history. She berates Noelle when Noelle expresses disgust at her behavior, accusing Noelle of assuming a good future is “guaranteed.” The friction between mother and daughter offers insight into their future estrangement, and Noelle’s rejection of her mother’s ideals explains Inéz’s comments about Noelle’s lack of passion in adulthood. When Noelle reveals the possibility of her pregnancy at the end of Chapter 6, it is clear that Coster is creating a comparison between Noelle and Jade, foreshadowing a different result that speaks to Jade and Noelle’s separate backgrounds.
