Chapter Synopsis
The narrator runs away from home and heads to the East Coast. Ba finds a new job mowing lawns and one day he digs a trench in someone's lawn without permission. The narrator returns one night, and Ba reveals he is in trouble.
Important Elements of Chapter Four
Specific Quotations Regarding the Father's Character:
Page 100: “It was my father who taught me how to do this, how to keep moving even when a bone in the leg was broken or a muscle in the chest was torn.”
Page 107: “The year I left home, my father and I would sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and pass the silence back and forth, like smoke.”
Page 108: “Where he would go in his mind, I don’t know.”
Page 122: “Between us now there hangs the familiar smoke . . . He made himself small, so that in the world there was very little left of him, even while within me his hunger grew.”
Specific Quotations Regarding Language:
Page 112: “He listened to his English-language tapes . . . ‘Hello,’ he said to a bag of flour.’”
Page 114: “He used to walk around the house and mutter the spelling of his name in English...”
