Blackbird House

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary: “The Summer Kitchen”

The next owners of Blackbird House, Katherine and Sam, visit the Cape on a winter day. They’ve come from Boston, where their six-year-old daughter, Emma, is hospitalized for leukemia. The couple is struggling, barely talking to each other. Hearing the realtor talk of blueberries and gardens and sweet peas, they impulsively decide to purchase the place as a summer home. In the spring, Emma returns home, and things improve for the family. Katherine laments the loss of her daughter’s blonde hair, which is growing back in black tufts. Emma embraces it, but when Katherine looks at her daughter, she no longer sees a girl but someone otherworldly, like a sprite or a witch.

That summer, the family, including 10-year-old Walker, go to the house. Sam only sees problems: pipes that rattle, inoperable stove burners, rusty water, and poison ivy. Meanwhile, Katherine pleads with him to give it at least one summer before they consider selling. When they find baby mice in the house, Emma swoops in, saving each one in an egg cup and releasing it in the field. In fact, the girl attempts to save every creature, including spiders, and is enchanted by fireflies.

Sam returns to Boston, while Katherine remains with the children. The girls spend most of their time together, while Walker is on his own. He learns to remove ticks and avoid poison ivy, and he claims the old summer kitchen as his private fort. Soon, Katherine notices Walker’s secrecy and bitterness. Small incidents, like a smashed peach pie and laundry strewn about in the yard, begin to happen. Walker blames everything on a blackbird.

One day, Walker goes missing, and after Katherine searches everywhere, she calls the police. After the officers leave, Walker saunters up to the house. Facing his mom’s anger, the boy claims that he left a note on the front door. A thumbtack sits on the ground, and Walker deduces that the trickster blackbird stole the note. All his talk about the bird rattles Katherine, so later that week, she asks her daughter about it. Emma corroborates Walker’s story that the bird steals things, and she adds that it’s white. However, Emma has never seen the bird herself.

Miss Josephine Brooks, their neighbor, shares that Walker’s fort was once a summer kitchen, so Katherine checks it out. While there, she spots a bow and arrow, something Katherine would never let him play with, so she places it by the trash. In the morning, the bow and arrow are gone. Additionally, the garden she and Emma created has been destroyed. In a fury, Katherine confronts Walker. He insists that the bird ruined the garden and that he found the bow and arrow under the floorboards of the summer kitchen.

That afternoon, Katherine surreptitiously follows her children into the woods and watches them play princess and knight. This reminds her that Walker, despite his recent behavior, is still just a child. Later, in conversation with Emma, the topic of the blackbird comes up again, and Katherine worries about the children’s belief in the bird. Josephine Brooks corroborates the story about the white blackbird, revealing that Isaac Hadley, an original resident of the house, had the bird as a pet; he died at sea with his father at age 10. Records at town hall validate this. Emma wishes that the boy had someone with him in his final moments.

When the girls use the fireplace in the summer kitchen to make jam, Walker storms off, angry that they’re in his space. Emma urges her mother to show love toward Walker, so later that evening, Katherine visits the boy in his room to sing to him. His voice breaks when he tells her that she doesn’t have a good singing voice. Katherine agrees but keeps singing anyway.

Chapter 12 Summary: “Wish You Were Here”

The final chapter begins in Boston as Emma, who is now 30, reflects on her life. She’s recently divorced, childless, and unhappy, but although she’s lonely, she feels at home in the city. Walker, now a pediatrician, attributes her inability to have children to the chemotherapy she received as a child. Most summers, she travels the world, but this year she stays in Boston. On her birthday, her parents transfer ownership of the Cape house to her. Emma is surprised because she hasn’t visited the place in years.

Intending to sell the house, Emma goes to the Cape for a weekend with her friend Callie. Upon arriving, they see that the farm is in shambles: Part of the roof has fallen in, the summer kitchen has collapsed, and the sweet peas have run wild. Nevertheless, the women make up beds in the attic, but not before Callie runs through a patch of poison ivy to pick strawberries. When Emma goes into town to get calamine lotion, she runs into Siggy Maguire, an older woman who remembers her fondly. Siggy tells Emma that the last renters of her house ran off because they believed it was haunted and a white bird had terrified their son.

Returning to the farm, Emma discovers turnips in the field and makes a broth out of them. When she and Callie eat the broth, they begin to cry. Callie confesses that she misses her family. Fearing these “truth-telling turnips,” Emma dumps the broth down the drain, and they head into town for food. After dinner, Callie says that it’s Midsummer’s night, “‘when you become who it is you really are’” (218). They catch fireflies in jars and drink wine in the kitchen, lit only by the trapped insects. They read old adventure books and stories of whales that never forget the way home. At midnight, they release the fireflies, and Emma wishes to be who she would have been if she’d never gotten sick.

The next morning, Emma buys groceries and, surprisingly, a can of paint. She calls her mom, who tells her how much Emma loved the summer farm as a girl. Additionally, she shares that Siggy Maguire always believed that Emma was special. Emma laughs at this, claiming to be a witch. When Callie’s poison ivy worsens, she decides to go home. Emma stays. After her friend leaves, Emma picks more turnips to concoct a chutney that she and her mom never had the chance to make.

As she boils the turnips in the hot kitchen, Emma feels a chill and sees a shadow cross the foggy window. Going outside, she expects nothing but instead runs into a blond boy who appears to be about 10 years old. She muses that he’s both quick like a coyote and cautious like a blackbird. When the boy asks what she’s making, she wonders who he is. For a moment, she wonders whether he’s the ghost of Isaac Hadley, but then Emma learns that he’s Siggy Maguire’s grandson, hanging around while his dad clears the remains of the summer kitchen. Emma sees something in his eyes that “she used to feel herself and had forgotten about until this exact moment” (224), so she invites him inside to learn how to make the turnip chutney.

Chapters 11-12 Analysis

The blackbird motif is woven into the final chapters of the story like a beacon guiding through difficulty. When small accidents arise, Walker blames everything on the blackbird. In fact, “Katherine hadn’t been thinking much about Walker. Nobody had, as a matter of fact, until he started to talk about the blackbird” (193). As Emma mentions later, Walker doesn’t feel loved. The blackbird’s pranks mark the beginning of when his mother pays attention to him. Therefore, the motif signals Walker’s way: His mother’s noticing him is the first step toward overcoming his loneliness. Furthermore, even though Emma believes Walker without question, he’s the only one in her family who actually sees the creature. This details links Walker to Isaac Hadley, who originally found companionship in the bird. Whether Walker sees a ghost or an actual blackbird, he, too, connects with the animal. The motif continues in the final chapter, bringing the story full circle: When an adult Emma meets the boy who is as “cautious as a blackbird” (223), he’s described much like Isaac. The blackbird is a reminder of not only the sorrow experienced by all who lived here but also the hope and joy that living on the farm brings. Thus, the motif ultimately works to reinforce the theme of Resilience Resulting From Adversity.

Another detail that helps bring the narrative full circle is the use of the word “witch” to characterize Emma. As a child, when Emma’s hair grows back in black tufts, her mother notes that when she glimpses the girl, she’s surprised: “[T]he child no longer appeared to be her daughter, that good-natured blonde girl nothing could harm. She was someone different now, the little girl who knew more than she should, a shadow, a sprite, a witch, a queen” (191). Although this sounds negative because Katherine sees something scary rather than her daughter, it’s empowering. Instead of blonde hair, evoking the innocence that most parents hope their children retain as long as possible, Emma is wise beyond her years because of her battle with leukemia. This, paired with her black hair, makes Katherine think of her as a “witch.” However, instead of a dangerous, taboo vision, Katherine pairs the word with “queen,” indicating that she now sees a beautiful strength in her daughter. This builds on the earlier characterization of strong females that undermines stereotypes of witches and women. Furthermore, when they arrive at the Cape house for the first time, Emma is described as a “little witch” who saves spiders and marvels at the beauty of fireflies. This vision of rescue and life and wonder directly contradicts the perception of witches as evil and destructive.

Elements of magical realism reappear at the novel’s end, effectively punctuating both its thematic material and its circular structure. Specifically, Walker and Emma believe in the white blackbird, which is likely a ghost. Furthermore, in “Wish You Were Here,” Emma makes turnip broth that brings both her and her friend to tears. The “crying turnips, truth-telling turnips, [were] sweet, but somewhat difficult to eat. Emma had the feeling that if she took another spoonful she’d soon be under some sort of spell” (218). The broth acts more like a truth potion than a nourishing meal. Furthermore, Emma’s friend mentions the magic of Midsummer’s Eve as the time to become “who it is you really are” (218). The mystical element of this idea reinforces Emma’s acceptance of herself: She ultimately realizes that the night isn’t what makes you who you are but rather the place that allows you to be that person. In this way, the text employs magical realism to bring resolution to The Power of Place in Shaping Lives as a theme. The story ends with a moment that blurs the lines of reality and magic as well: When Emma encounters the boy, who seems eerily like Isaac Hadley, “she saw something there she used to feel herself and had forgotten about until this exact moment” (224). Emma is nostalgic because of where she is: Blackbird House. The similarity between her younger self and the boy unites them, highlighting the impact of place. Emphasizing this power is the moment when Emma learns that whales were thought to “chart the way home through centuries, even when the landscape changed […] For them, the map remained the same” (219). The whales’ homes are a metaphor for Blackbird House and its pull on each of its inhabitants: The map that remains that same over time is this place, which is part of each person’s identity, as Emma and others learn.