44 pages • 1 hour read
Ayana MathisThe Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Cassie: 1980”
Cassie lives with her parents, Hattie and August, and has a young daughter named Sala. She also has voices in her head that speak so “naturally” (220) she could mistake them for her own thoughts. One voice—the “Voice” (221) —speaks soothingly and lets Cassie rest. The other voices—the “Banshees” (221)—urge her to do terrible things, like neglect Sala or accuse her mother of never loving anyone.
When Cassie was a child, her mother was always angry but also beautiful. Cassie’s father, who had a weakness for women in tight dresses, was often out amusing himself while her “[m]other was at home doing what needed to be done” (221). One afternoon Cassie noticed Hattie wore an uncommonly “soft and restless” (221) expression, like she yearned to put on a tight dress herself and leave the house forever. As her mother nodded to a remembered song, it occurred to Cassie that Hattie “had an inner life that didn’t have anything to do with” (221) her children.
Cassie’s parents claim they are driving her to a doctor’s appointment, but she doesn’t believe them. Gazing out the window in the back seat of August’s car, Cassie admires the autumn afternoon light. She reflects on how she always tries “to find the beauty in things” (222), although sometimes she experiences it so intensely that it overwhelms her.
The Banshees hijack Cassie’s mind again and urge her to throw herself from the car. Cassie reaches for the door, thinking, “I’ll get Sala from school, and we’ll escape. We’ll go to California or New Hampshire” (224). When August slows the car, Cassie tumbles out her door onto rough gravel. She starts running toward a distant line of trees as the Banshees “clack their teeth in celebration” (225).
A hissing sound stops Cassie in her tracks. She sees an injured cat in the roadside ditch. Although the Banshees screech at Cassie to keep running, she can’t abandon the cat. Police officers appear, and the Banshees berate Cassie, sneering, “[N]ow look what you’ve done, you stupid woman” (226). The officers lift her from the ditch, and she sees August’s car parked in a line of squad cars. An ambulance arrives. After the paramedic tucks a blanket around her, Cassie, appreciating the gesture, repeats, “I try to look for the beauty in things” (227).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Sala: 1980”
Two days before her mother was taken away, Sala came home from school “to find the lawn poked with holes” (229). Cassie was feverishly digging with a shovel. When Sala asked what she was doing, Cassie whispered that Hattie was poisoning their food, but she knew of roots that would cure them.
At sunset Cassie finally came indoors, bearing mud-stained bags. She hustled Sala into their bedroom and locked the door against Hattie and August. As she sliced the roots with razorblades, Cassie began singing “I’m in the Lord’s Army” and pressed Sala into singing along. The slicing and singing continued until Sala could endure it no longer and complained of hunger. Cassie’s “episode” finally ended and she returned to herself, but “Sala was afraid” (233).
A week after her mother’s departure, Sala is sent home from school after fainting. Hattie sits at her bedside and reflects. During the drive to the hospital, Cassie had whispered, “You never loved anything” (237). Hattie knows she’s never shown tenderness toward her children, but “they didn’t understand that all the love she had was taken up feeding them and clothing them and preparing them to meet the world [that] would not be kind” (236).
August goes to church regularly now that he’s 74 and in failing health, and Hattie tags along. She believes in God but not “in his interventions” (236), as he didn’t prevent her twins’ deaths. She now knows penicillin would have saved them. Thus, it surprises Hattie that the rituals of “church brought her great peace, [even] if she only pretended to believe” (236).
By Sunday Sala feels better and attends church with her grandparents. The preacher delivers an impassioned sermon about Job, “a righteous man” (238) whom God tested by destroying everything Job loved. Marveling at the many blessings God gave him, Job refused to curse God. Job’s losses resonate with Hattie, and she cries “Amen!”
When the preacher asks if anyone “would like to give his soul to Christ” (240), Sala steps forward. She does not feel the spirit, but Cassie does, and Sala longs to reconnect with her mother. Hattie stops Sala, pulling her back from “the ways of fraudulence” (243). As the sanctuary falls silent, Hattie thinks, “[S]ixty years out of Georgia […] and there’s still the same wounding and the same pain. I won’t allow it” (243). She awkwardly embraces Sala.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
These final two chapters delve further into the idea that categories, or labels, are counterproductive when they fossilize and prevent the recognition of complexity and change. Throughout the novel, Hattie’s children impart a consensus view of their mother as angry, remote, and hard-hearted. For her part, Cassie thinks, “Mother was never tender” (220), but Cassie is also aware that nothing is purely one thing. Marveling at how evening light changes with the seasons and how clouds turn into rain, she concludes “that everything is on its way to becoming something else” (223). She also sees “something else” in Hattie—an “inner life” at odds with her hardened exterior.
Hattie is hard and harsh not for lack of love for her children but because she believes she must maintain a critical threshold of strength to relentlessly tend to her family’s basic needs. To herself she admits “[s]he had failed them in vital ways, but what good would it have done to spend the days hugging and kissing if there hadn’t been anything to put in their bellies?” (236). Significantly, the novel’s final line suggests that with Sala, her new charge, Hattie intends to express more affection, as she pats “her granddaughter’s back roughly, unaccustomed as she was to tenderness” (243).
The narrative does not make explicit the motivation for Hattie’s change of heart regarding how she will raise Sala. Hattie and August now own a house, so perhaps Hattie feels financially secure enough to relax her guard and enjoy her time with her granddaughter. Or perhaps Hattie can no longer excuse or overlook the fact that, by rarely demonstrating her love for her children, “[s]he had failed them in vital ways” (236).
That Hattie suddenly sees Sala’s choice to surrender herself to Christ as an act of “fraudulence” points to more profound reasons for her resolution to raise Sala differently. As Hattie’s reflections during the church service reveal, Six did become a preacher but also “a womanizer and an imposter” (242). Hattie herself now regularly attends church because it “brought her great peace, and if she only pretended to believe, if she was a fraud, well, that was the price she had to pay for comfort” (236). As Sala rises to accept Christ as her savior, Hattie realizes her granddaughter is “already so broken” (242) that she is blindly grasping at this panacea for comfort. God did not intervene when Hattie’s twins were dying and has not otherwise shown Hattie mercy in any measurable way. By preventing Sala from taking the “mercy seat” (242), Hattie signals that she will take responsibility for “saving” her granddaughter.
