57 pages • 1 hour read
Russell BakerGrowing Up
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A 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 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Lucy moves Doris and Baker to a second-floor apartment on West Lombard Street in Baltimore across Union Square from Aunt Sister. Aunt Sister marries Harold Sharp, who Lucy calls “a good man,” shortly after the Bakers arrive. Harold introduces Baker to the work of H. L. Mencken, who lives two houses down. Harold speaks reverently of Mencken’s work, though Baker does not believe Harold has ever read it.
In 1917, Harold, an uneducated country boy of fifteen, joined the Marines. He fought in France during World War I and stayed in the Marines for sixteen years, eventually leaving to marry Aunt Sister. He works for a cemetery cutting grass and digging graves. This increases his “romantic aura.” Baker is becoming fascinated with “the Gothic aspects of death” (124). A young relative of their landlord is an undertaker who uses their parlor when his establishment is full. Walking through the parlor to his apartment, Baker often sees embalmed corpses in their coffins.
Baker admires Harold. He wears “suits pressed to razor sharpness” and is a famed liar (125). In response to his embellished stories, Aunt Sister repeatedly tells him, “for God’s sake, Harold, quit telling those lies” (125). Though he is entering a skeptical age, Baker is inclined to believe Harold’s outrageous tales—of being shot between the eyes during WWII, of almost being buried alive, and about Franklin Roosevelt (Baker’s hero) compelling White House visitors to pay to speak with him. Baker’s mother laughs when he repeats the story and dismisses Harold as a liar. As Baker loses his credulity, his awe of Uncle Harold becomes appreciation for Harold’s imagination. Baker comes to see that Harold uses stories to make life more interesting and remembers him as the man who taught him the value of storytelling.
Aunt Sister smokes cigarettes, chews gun, and curses. She has little patience for Harold’s romantic flights of fancy—his stories and gifts of perfume and lingerie. She rules Harold as Ida Rebecca ruled her family. They have no children, and when the Bakers lived in New Jersey, they hosted Doris during summer vacations. They also arrange a reunion with Audrey in Baltimore. Tom and Goldie keep their promise that Audrey know who her birth mother and siblings are. Doris is initially overwhelmed by her younger sister’s beauty and elegant clothes but warms to Audrey’s sweetness. The sisters become friends for life. Harold understands Doris’ need to feel beautiful and to have nice things and gives her an elegant bathrobe, earning her lifelong affection.
Chapter 11 Summary
Baker’s mother finds a job selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door on commission. Uncle Hal’s lumber company dissolves. He shows up at Lucy’s apartment with plans to sell magazine subscriptions and sleep on their sofa. Uncle Charlie returns to Belleville unable to stand the parade of coffins in the parlor. Uncle Hal leaves shortly after, chasing better opportunities down South.
Baker struggles to survive in the big city and fails to notice his mother is also struggling. His classmate Pete beats him up. The boys are called to the principal’s office, and he threatens to expel both boys. Baker spends his time trying to avoid Pete. He develops an interest in building model airplanes and imagines himself engaged in “aerial combat” (135). When he turns twelve, his mother gets him a job delivering newspapers. One edition must be delivered before dawn on Sundays. The newspapers at that time are usually filled with stories about Europe and predictions of war, but on a cold December morning, the story is about a dismemberment in the city. The victim’s head has not been found, and the killer remains at large.
Leaving his building in the dark, Baker passes a mourner asleep in the parlor beside an open casket. As he hurries through his route, he hears footsteps and sees an elegantly dressed man walking towards him. He quickly takes off in a different direction. At first, the man does not appear to follow him, but then he reappears and begins walking with Baker. He invites him to a party where there will be girls “who let you do things to them” (139). Baker ignores him and heads for home, with the man following. At the door of Baker’s building, the man tries to grab him. Baker hits him with the strap of his bag then darts into his building, locking the door behind him. He decides not to tell anyone what happened and never sees the man again. When the killer is later caught, he is not the man who accosted Baker.
Baker’s income is three or four dollars a week. His mother receives a monthly check from Willie and an income from selling subscriptions but struggles to make ends meet. Baker doesn’t realize how much they are struggling until his mother asks him and Doris to bring their wagon on a grocery trip. They go to a warehouse to collect government food, an act considered shameful in their neighborhood. Baker helps his mother hide the wagon’s contents under their coats so no one will know they are receiving government assistance.
Baker’s mother buys him a suit, marking his passage out of childhood. She also surprises him with a bicycle for Christmas. He accidentally finds it stashed in her room and practices feigning surprise for Christmas morning. When the bicycle is not there, Baker assumes she had to take it back. When she brings it out later, his surprise and joy are genuine.
Chapter 12 Summary
In 1939, when Baker is fourteen, his mother marries Herbert “Herb” Orrison, a fireman for the B&O Railroad. Consumed by an adolescent preoccupation with girls, who both attract and terrify him, Baker does not realize Herb has been courting Lucy and is shocked when they marry. Baker calls the day Herb moves in “the day the Depression finally ended for us” (154). A phone is installed, the family’s first, because Herb’s job requires he be reachable at all times.
Though he grows to like and respect Herb, Baker resents being displaced as “the man of house” and actively excludes Herb (157). Herb tolerates Baker with “saintly patience” and invites Baker on outings that he repeatedly declines, claiming to have too much schoolwork (157). He caricatures Herb to his mother, and she is furious. She tells Baker Herb is “a good man” and deserves to be treated with respect (158).
It is Herb’s second marriage. His first ended in divorce because his wife “liked a good time too much” (156). He survived a “Spartan childhood” (156). At the age of five, he saw his mother burn to death. Relatives took him in but pulled him from school at age ten to work in the fields. His dream was to become an engineer, the next step up from fireman. He becomes one shortly after marrying Lucy. He is gentle and lets Lucy lead, calling her “the Madame” (161), Herb enjoys Washington Senators baseball, occasionally betting on horses, and infrequent nips of whisky, convinced of its medicinal benefits.
At Lucy’s insistence, Baker attends an accelerated program at City College High School that will earn him a year’s worth of college credits, though he does not have money for college. His mother hopes “something may come along” (150). A girl called Laraine enthralls him, until his mother calls her a “cafe trotter” (148). Unfamiliar with the term, Baker recognizes it is negative and becomes disillusioned. At school, he is self-conscious about being tall and skinny, especially when his class is forced to swim nude. He never learns to swim but does well in school and develops “intellectual arrogance” (150). His mother continues to help him with his schoolwork, but Baker sees he is outpacing her and makes sure she knows it.
The first time Baker lets Herb teach him is when the family is playing cards. Baker’s mother is losing and furious about it. During a brief interlude when she has excused herself, Herb advises Baker to let his mother win because “[i]t’ll make her feel good” (161). Baker sees the wisdom in this. In the summer of 1940, at 46 and 43 respectively, Herb and Lucy have a baby girl, Mary Leslie. Lucy insists it is time to buy a “home of their own” (162). In 1941, Herb purchases a four-bedroom house for $4,700. It has a bathtub and shower. Baker is sixteen and in his last year of high school.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Chapter 10 begins with the line: “Uncle Harold was famous for lying” and recounts one of Harold’s many outrageous stories (123). He is so renowned for them that someone is “always telling Uncle Harold for God’s sake quit telling those lies” (123). Baker comes to learn that Harold understood, despite his lack of education, that fiction rather than reporting creates art. Seeing a body in the parlor of Baker’s apartment building, Harold launches into a story about someone who was almost buried alive, which becomes a story of how he was almost buried alive. From “a single thread of fact,” which Baker mentions in Chapter Eight, Harold could spin a fantastic yarn (99). Storytelling runs in the family, whether by blood or by choice.
At first, Baker is in awe of Harold’s stories and more inclined than not to believe them. As the truth—Harold’s stories are mostly, and perhaps even intentionally, fictions—sinks in, Baker realizes that for Harold storytelling makes life more interesting. Baker sees himself in Harold’s sense of mischief and play, and they come “to a silent understanding” that they are “two romancers whose desire for something more fanciful than the humdrum” cannot be understood by comparatively “unimaginative” Aunt Sister and Lucy (128). Harold teaches Baker that there are worse things to do with one’s life than to “spend it in telling tales” (132).
Chapters 11 and 12 continue to present sketches of memorable experiences, both as they relate to Baker’s mother’s influence and his growing sense of separation, a necessary step in growing up. As he has done throughout, Baker focuses on telling details and crafting scenes. Chapter 11 describes Baker figuring out how to avoid becoming prey to bullies. With Pete, it requires stealth, but the unnamed man demands confrontation. Lucy’s influence continues to loom large in Chapter 12. She again arranges a job for Baker and gets him a suit. Having finally realized the gravity of their financial situation, he marvels that his mother finds the money to buy it and even objects (fulfilling a traditional “man of the house” role) until his mother explains they can use a payment plan.
In Chapter 12, the superiority he began to feel for adults in Chapter Nine deepens, especially as Baker’s education begins to outstrip his mother’s. He takes pleasure in letting her see it by asking her to help with a Latin translation he knows is beyond her skill. Yet his superior education has been her aspiration. She has always insisted that Baker “make something of himself,” her repeated refrain, and pushes him to attend City College High School, where he begins to mingle with cultured, high-performing, and ambitious students. His arrogance manifests with Herb as well, though it is driven by resentment at being displaced. Herb is the kind of “good man” whom Lucy admires. He has worked his way up to his dream job. He achieves it through hard work and persistence, things Lucy wants Baker to learn.
In Lucy’s time, a woman’s best chance for financial security is marriage to a “good man,” and Lucy has achieved that. Chapter 12 ends with the culmination of one of her goals—a home of her own.
