44 pages • 1 hour read
Kai HarrisWhat the Fireflies Knew
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapter 8-Part 3, Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “July 1995” - Part 3: “August 1995”
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
KB’s grandfather goes on his annual fishing trip with Charlie. KB is hurt when Nia leaves to party with her friends. KB finds Charlotte and Bobby and initially thinks of inviting them into her house, but she is ashamed of how old it is. She instead leads them to a field so that they can look at the flowers and caterpillars, the place where her grandfather showed her the fireflies.
KB tells them the whole truth about her family and why she and her sister live with their grandfather. They respond awkwardly, even though Bobby tries to shush Charlotte, who insists on asking more questions. KB is so upset by this encounter that she asks Charlotte for her bike so that she can run away. KB first goes to the library. When her family first lost their house, they spent all day in the library. Staff members eventually forced them to leave or asked if they needed space in a shelter. The hotel came later.
KB goes back to the pool, where Rondell lures her to an isolated spot that he claims was his safe place when his late father had his rages. When he mentions playing on a junior varsity team, KB challenges him because that implies that he isn’t 11. He sexually assaults KB with his hand. KB freezes in the moment and goes limp. She watches as flies buzz around them and ignore a wounded fly nearby.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Despite her physical pain, KB bikes home. She keeps Charlotte’s bike, intending to return it the next day. Nia doesn’t return until the next morning. Their grandfather returns later that day to celebrate Nia’s birthday, but Nia chooses to go out with friends instead. While Nia is out, KB and her grandfather talk. He explains to KB that the Bible is simply a set of stories that people read to get through their lives. He share scriptures about the importance of relying on others in times of trouble.
Nia returns and confronts Granddaddy. The cousins at her party told her that her father sold the family home to purchase drugs. Nia is angry that her mother and grandfather kept this secret from her. Granddaddy admits the truth. The two girls are so wounded that they retreat and open up to each other about their own secrets. Nia tells KB that before their father died, classmates teased her about his substance abuse. When Nia confronted her father, he struck her. KB tells Nia that Rondell sexually assaulted her. KB realizes that the secrets they share are painful ones. Being together feels good, and she must savor that feeling. Slowing down in this moment is like slowing down to catch fireflies.
Charlotte’s mother accuses KB of stealing the bike when KB returns it. Charlotte’s mother yells that theft is just what one would expect when one comes from a family like KB’s. KB realizes that Charlotte and Bobby shared the secrets that KB told them. Neither comes to her defense, and Charlotte repeats the lie about KB stealing the bike. KB’s grandfather stands up for her and tells Charlotte’s mother that children need not repeat the mistakes of a racist past. KB realizes that her grandfather was right about racism in the neighborhood.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary
Now that Nia and KB are talking again, they share more secrets that they’ve been keeping. KB tells Nia where their mother really is and shares her plan to reunite the family. Neither manages to share the plan when they talk with their mother on the phone. During the phone conversation with KB, Jacquee encourages KB to see adults, even those on whom she relies, as imperfect. They will make mistakes, but what they do after determines whether these mistakes are ones they can move past.
Jacquee then reveals the full truth about her estrangement from Granddaddy. When Jacquee showed him the headshot, he accused her of trading sex for the headshot and struck her. KB believes that Granddaddy lied by omission in not including these details, and he admits as much when he takes the sisters out to dinner later. She forgives him because she agrees with Nia’s belief that “daddies make mistakes” (262). She tells him her plan for reconciliation, and he agrees to try it. Nia later gives KB Amazing Grace, a book in which a Black girl uses her imagination and intelligence to deal with racism when she is denied the chance to play Peter Pan in a school play because she is Black.
The next day, Jacquee shows up to pick up her daughters. Jacquee and Granddaddy aren’t quite ready to reconcile, so Granddaddy instead gives Jacquee a down payment to buy her own house. This resolution isn’t what KB’s reading has led her to expect. Even Anne had to go back home to help Marilla after Matthew died, however, so maybe the new house is a happy enough ending enough for KB’s family. KB sets Fuzz free so he can make his own life outside of the jar in which she placed him.
Part 2, Chapter 8-Part 3, Chapter 10 Analysis
The development of the themes of Learning to See Adults as Flawed, Secrets and Lies, and Coming of Age culminate in this section. KB comes to a better understanding of her life and other people as a result of all that she learned that summer.
Throughout the novel, KB struggles to get the adults in her life to tell her the truth about events and people who have shaped her life. At the start of the novel, KB believes that all adults lie, and the series of revelations in these chapters bear out this truth. KB learns that Granddaddy lied about the contents of his fight with Jacquee in what constitutes the novel’s denouement speech. This lie by omission prevented KB from understanding the fraught relationship between her mother and grandfather; she realizes that having only partial knowledge led her astray in her attempts to force a reconciliation between her mother and grandfather. This realization provides the climax of the events of the novel.
Harris constructs the measure of KB’s Coming of Age when KB doesn’t get angry about this particular lie. When she agrees with Nia that “daddies make mistakes” (262), she is expressing her new understanding that adults are imperfect. With this understanding of adult imperfection, KB is able to forgive her grandfather and move forward. Mothers also make mistakes. Jacquee’s full disclosure of why she doesn’t get along with Granddaddy helps KB to understand the undercurrent of tension that prevented her mother from reaching out to Granddaddy earlier. KB’s memory of staying in the library all day after the family lost their home shows that the family’s needs were dire. The library both reflects KB’s sense of books as a refuge and Harris’s use of setting to highlight race and class difference, since the family were eventually forced to leave the library and move to a hotel.
KB’s fraught relationship with Nia also eases when the two girls reveal the lies that they have been telling by omission. Nia’s revelations expose the deep impact of their father’s substance abuse on the girls’ wellbeing. KB earlier intuited that there was something off-kilter about Nia’s reaction to their father’s death. When Nia reveals that her father struck her, that knowledge helps KB to see Nia’s anger as a form of acting out and grief. The cousins’ truth about the girls’ father selling their home to pay for drugs is more evidence of the power of his addiction. KB also shares that Rondell sexually assaulted her. This sharing begins to establish the falling action of the novel: It helps KB to begin the process of healing and to gain the care she needs from her sister.
Another important lie is the one that Charlotte tells about KB. Part of the reason KB feels betrayed is because Charlotte and Bobby didn’t keep her secrets. When Charlotte lies to her mother about loaning the bike to KB, Charlotte reinforces the harmful notion that Black people and people with few financial resources are inherently immoral. The bike provides another example of childhood paraphernalia that makes this scene particularly poignant: something usually associated with play becomes associated of the racism that KB experiences at a young age. This accusation is one that Granddaddy refuses to let stand. When he names this lie as racism and condemns it, he provides a powerful example of how to respond to white supremacist lies. Nia’s gift of Amazing Grace also gives KB a new text for understanding the impact of racism on Black girls and Black people generally.
These final chapters in the novel show what KB does once she is able to cut through the secrets and lies in her life. She comes of age within the parameters of the text; the falling action, and the presence of the older Nia, suggests that there is more growing to come. Harris presents KB’s coming of age through her actions. When KB tells Nia about Rondell’s assault, she is reaching out for help with feelings that she knows she cannot process alone in comparison to her solitary processing earlier in the novel. When KB releases Fuzz the caterpillar back into the wild, it is because she recognizes that keeping him in captivity creates constraints that he would never choose. Harris uses this action to show KB’s more sophisticated understanding of structural forces like class inequality on the particularities of her own life.
KB’s recognition of these larger forces helps her to lay down the burden of thinking that she is responsible for fixing what ails her family. Granddaddy’s steadfast care for her, his slow and low-key approach to parenting, and his financial means give her the stability to learn these lessons. Because of her relationship with him, KB, like Fuzz, is ready to emerge as a child who understands her own strengths but also knows that she cannot always take on adult responsibilities. Harris’s protagonist allows her to present Black, working-class childhood in America as a rich and complicated experience.
