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.
Symbols & Motifs
Superfine
Superfine is the name of the bakery Ray and Linette own. Superfine is part of the revitalization of Beard Street in the early 1990s, the beginning of the change that will see the county schools integrated, bringing Noelle and Gee into each other’s worlds. To Ray, Superfine stands for hope and symbolizes a good future for Gee. A conversation between Ray and Robbie in the early chapters centers around a future for their children and includes Robbie’s choice to buy a house in the northern part of the county, where the schools are better. Ray dreams of buying Jade a nice house as he drives to Gee’s school the afternoon he dies, imagining the success of Superfine giving him the opportunity to give Jade and Gee the life he believes they deserve.
Ray’s death results in the end of Superfine, and it ends any hope for Gee and Jade to have a home in the northern part of the county. However, the revitalization of Beard Street continues, and Gee ends up going to Central High School with Noelle, Robbie’s daughter, just as Ray and Robbie briefly dreamed. Although Superfine—and the hope of a better life it symbolized—dies with Ray, Jade takes up the mantle of fighting to give Gee a good future in Ray’s stead. Jade pulls her life together for Gee’s sake and becomes an outspoken advocate for Gee and his peers, standing up against Lacey May and others like her during the meeting for the integration of Central High School.
Newspaper Articles
There are two newspaper articles that are symbolic in Gee/Nelson’s life, both revolving around the theme of Shared Tragedy. The first is an article that describes the death of Ray Gilbert, his father. Gee doesn’t see this article until a group of parents—who do not want kids from Gee’s side of town in their school—use it to protest the integration at Central High School. The article is supposed to represent the high level of crime in the east side of the city (where Gee comes from), but for Gee, it represents the worst day of his life. The sight of the article triggers traumatic memories of the murder, overwhelming him with emotion. To find the article in his high school while in the company of Noelle, the girl he is quickly falling in love with, makes the insult the protesting parents intended more personal than anyone could have known. This article represents hatred in two ways for Gee: the hatred of the man who committed the murder, and the hatred of the prejudiced parents of his classmates.
The second symbolic newspaper article is the one about the revitalization of Beard Street that Ray was excited to be photographed for on the day of his death. Ray gave up the opportunity to be photographed to pick up Gee from school as a favor to Jade, which ultimately led to Ray getting shot and dying. Like Superfine itself, this article is symbolic of Ray’s hope for Gee and Jade’s future, but it also represents the two different men Ray became in the eye of the public. The article on Superfine showed Ray as the baker, the hopeful businessman, and the caring father and partner that Gee knew, while the article about Ray’s murder scrubbed away any traces of Ray’s humanity, positing him as merely another victim of violent crime.
By keeping the article, Jade held on to the heart of who Ray was. By hiding this article and the rest of the shrine from her son, however, Jade robbed Gee of the chance to properly mourn and remember his father. Ultimately, this leads to adult Gee—Nelson—failing to support his wife in her grief. Nelson does not see the article until the end of the book, when he visits Jade and sees she has reconstructed her shrine to Ray, Superfine article included. The Superfine article allows them to connect emotionally for the first time since Ray’s death, leaving their story on a note of simultaneous grief and hope.
Ventura Blue House
Robbie Ventura bought a little blue house in the north part of the county for his wife, Lacey May, and his three daughters, Diane, Noelle, and Margarita, in order to give them a better life. Like Ray and his beloved Superfine, Robbie saw this house as a symbol of a bright future. As an example of Shared Tragedy, Ray’s death results in not only the loss of Superfine, but also the eventual loss of the Ventura Blue House.
After Ray’s death, Robbie develops a substance use disorder, which drives him to behave irresponsibly. When he ends up in prison, Lacey May holds onto the house, symbolizing her naive belief in Robbie’s promises of a future for their daughters. However, Lacey May is unable to keep the house afloat by herself; ultimately, she makes the decision to abandon it, taking her daughters and moving in with Hank so that they can have a warm home during the winter. The rejection of the house is Lacey May’s first rejection of Robbie, but it is not her last.
Though Lacey May and Robbie separate, they hold onto the house for the sake of their daughters; the house was intended for them, after all. Unfortunately, in order to get money for drugs, Robbie eventually goes behind Lacey May’s back and sells the house without consulting her. In an attempt to make up for this betrayal, Robbie gets the girls small presents instead—most notably, a matching pair of initial rings for himself and Margarita, as a nod to the shared aspects of their identity. But like the Ventura Blue House, Robbie fails to uphold this connection too; he loses his ring and cannot remember when or how. The Ventura Blue House, which once represented a beautiful future for Robbie and his family, becomes symbolic of the long cycle of betrayal and forgiveness that accompanies Robbie’s addiction and his relationship with his ex-wife and daughters.
