59 pages • 1 hour read
This Side of Home
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Part 1, Chapters 1-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Summer”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
June brings rain, warmer weather, and concerns of increased violence to Maya’s Portland neighborhood. Still, the teenager insists that there has “always been something good here” that has nothing to do with the recent influx of new businesses and white families (4).
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Maya has an identical twin named Nikki, and the sisters’ best friend is named Essence. The girls have been neighbors all their lives, so they’re devastated when Essence’s landlord decides to sell the house, forcing her to move to a neighborhood 45 minutes away.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
On Maya’s last day as a junior at Richmond High, she learns that she has been elected student body president for the following year. Essence is dating a boy named Malachi, Nikki has a boyfriend named Ronnie, and Maya is dating a boy named Devin. As the six teenagers walk home together, they pass a coffee shop that used to be the home of an elderly woman named Ms. Thelma. Her grandson was killed by a stray bullet while he was spending the night at her house, and she later moved to Seattle. Maya feels that her neighborhood has become “a whole new world” in just four years (11). She worries about these changes, and she also fears that she and her twin are growing apart as they get older.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Essence’s mother, Darlene, is a single parent and has an addiction to alcohol. One day, they argue while Maya helps them pack. Essence tells her mother that she can’t wait until she can go to college and get away from her. Darlene retorts, “[y]ou hang with Maya and Nikki, but you ain’t smart like them—and you don’t have Mr. I-Have-a-Dream Thomas Younger as a father to pay for college” (16). Darlene makes Maya promise not to tell her parents that she was intoxicated. In return, Maya makes her promise to stop drinking, but she knows neither of them will keep their word.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
As the twins help Essence pack up her bedroom, Essence angrily recalls how her landlord was negligent of issues like electrical problems and mice but has now fixed up the home with the intention of selling it for a price he knows she and her mother cannot afford. When Maya tells Essence that she’ll miss her, Nikki says, “[y]ou’re acting like she’s leaving the country” (24). Nikki and Essence go to the movies with their boyfriends, but Maya decides not to accompany them because Devin is busy with the Summer Scholars program.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Devin is in a mentorship program run by Maya’s father. His parents died when he was an infant, and his aunt has raised him ever since. Devin is a “good-grade-makin’, football-all-star-playin’ brotha” who makes his whole community proud (29), but he’s so focused on fulfilling his dreams of going to college that he rarely spends time with Maya.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
After Essence and her mother move out, their former landlord completes the renovations on the house and puts it up for sale. Maya is the only Black person at the open house, and she’s struck by the cognitive dissonance of being “a stranger in [her] best friend’s home” (31). She overhears a white family with two teenagers deciding to make an offer.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
The family that Maya saw at the open house purchased the home. A boy with green eyes, brown hair, and broad shoulders moves into Essence’s old room.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Maya’s new neighbor is named Tony Jacobs. His family moved from Northwest Portland to be near Carver Middle School, where his father teaches. His mother is a grant writer for a nonprofit focused on reforming public schools. When Tony expresses disappointment about transferring from a private school to Richmond, Maya tells him that she attends Richmond. He apologizes for offending her and asks if they can start over.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Maya and Nikki spend a few days of their summer showing Tony’s little sister, Kate, around their Northeast Portland neighborhood. Maya soon grows weary of the girl, who thinks that Popeyes is soul food and asks if she can touch Maya’s hair. The twins are supposed to visit Essence, but Nikki decides to get frozen yogurt with Kate instead. Maya boycotts the new white-owned businesses because the banks refused to give business loans to Black entrepreneurs.
A senior on the Richmond High football team named Roberto Sanchez asks Kate for her number, and she immediately develops a crush on him. Kate asks Tony not to tell their father about this interaction. Tony offers to drive Maya to Essence’s house. While they’re on their way, she receives a text from her friend: “Don’t come. My mom is trippin’ today” (46). Maya and Tony decide to get ice cream together instead.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
Maya introduces Tony to a locally owned ice cream shop. She tells him that she plans to study journalism at Spelman, a Historically Black College in Atlanta. He wants to go to Stanford and enjoys hiking, making music, and watching black-and-white films. Tony would love to become a music engineer, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to pursue that dream because his father “says music is a waste of time” (50). Maya wants to get to know him better.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
Nikki decides not to go to Essence’s birthday party because Essence’s cousins make pointed comments about her straightened hair, such as, “[w]hat you trying to be, White or something?” (54). Maya tries in vain to change her sister’s mind.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
Devin, Malachi, and Ronnie are at Essence’s party, and they talk about how their usual group of six hasn’t spent any time together that summer. Nikki’s absences are partially to blame, but Devin’s time has also been occupied by the Summer Scholars program. The teenagers discuss college, and Essence’s relatives express their high hopes for her. She tries to change the subject, saying, “[l]ook, it’s my birthday. No college talk, no big dreams today. Just cake and ice cream” (58). Darlene brings out a cake that she baked for her daughter, and Maya sees her best friend make a silent wish before she blows out the candle.
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary
Nikki invites Maya to attend an event called Last Thursdays on Jackson Avenue with her and Kate, but Maya already has plans to meet up with Essence. Maya accuses her sister of no longer being a good friend to Essence, and Nikki accuses her of not truly supporting her community because she doesn’t patronize white-owned businesses that have been open for four years. Maya points out that there is a broader pattern in which “poor communities get remade and their people are forced to move” that is also occurring in cities such as Atlanta and New York (63). Nikki goes across the street to the Jacobs’ house and hugs Kate “like they’ve been friends for more than a few weeks” (63). Maya wonders why her twin doesn’t understand her or her reservations with the way their neighborhood has changed.
Part 1, Chapter 15 Summary
At her boyfriend’s request, Maya decides to attend Last Thursdays with Devin, Nikki, Ronnie, Kate, and Roberto. Maya sees only one Black vendor at the event, and she buys a sankofa necklace from Ghana from him. A man named Z, who has lived in a house on Eleventh Street for as long as Maya can remember, walks around barefoot with a grocery cart. Z asks to use a restaurant’s bathroom and is told to go to a port-a-potty down the block. A customer complains, “I wish there was a way to keep crazy people from coming to these things” (70). Maya senses that the woman is only referring to the Black man, not the white people she sees riding unicycles, striding around on stilts, or walking pet pigs on leashes.
Part 1, Chapter 16 Summary
During the last weekend of summer vacation, Devin comes over to Maya’s house. He shows her a photograph of the two of them from fifth grade, and they kiss and reminisce. The teenagers usually spend time together when they are in a group of friends, and Maya has a sudden urge to get to know him more as an individual. She learns that he doesn’t share her love of Hitchcock films. Devin quickly grows bored of her questions and puts on a sports game.
Part 1 Analysis
The novel’s first part introduces Maya Younger and the changes rapidly transforming her community. Watson gives her protagonist great pride in her neighborhood and an observant, inquisitive nature. As Maya relates in Chapter 2, “[she’s] always liked asking questions, finding deeper reasons and meanings for things” (49). These qualities serve her function as the main character and narrator of a young adult novel that delves into real-life social issues. Although the novel focuses primarily on subjects like gentrification, it also contains an element of romance, as is conventional in young adult fiction. In Part 1, Maya craves an intimacy that her relationship with Devin lacks, and Watson provides hints that Mays’s budding bond with Tony could bloom into something more.
In Part 1, Maya’s most important relationships are with her best friend and her twin sister. One of the protagonist’s essential beliefs is that she, Nikki, and Essence would “do anything for one another” (5). However, this conviction comes under question when Nikki gives more of her time and attention to her new neighbor than her lifelong best friend, thus establishing one of the novel’s secondary conflicts. Race and identity play a role in these shifting dynamics. Nikki avoids spending time with Essence’s family because they make her feel like she’s “just not Black enough for them” (54). Although Kate often asks irritating and ignorant questions about race, the white girl doesn’t make Nikki feel like her Black identity is being questioned. Nikki’s fading commitment to Essence contributes to Maya’s fear that she and her sister are growing apart and to her overall apprehension towards change. Her fear of change reinforces the primary conflict of the novel, which is the change in the wider community.
Watson’s main focus in these early chapters is establishing the theme of The Complex Effects of Gentrification. Initially, Maya struggles to see any positives to the changes in her community, which began four years before the novel opens. She sees gentrification as a pattern in which people of color and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds across the country are displaced while white people enjoy greater comforts and economic opportunities. Another negative effect Maya sees is the loss of her community’s history, identity, and character. These effects are represented by one of the white-owned businesses on Jackson Avenue that she boycotts, which is a coffee shop that was once the home of Ms. Thelma: “I wonder if those laptop-typing, free–wi-fi–using coffee drinkers know that Ms. Thelma’s grandson died in that house” (11). Later in the story, the coffee shop becomes an important setting where Maya meets someone who preserves Portland’s history.
Unlike Maya, Nikki and Essence identify some positive effects of gentrification. For example, the area’s crime rate lowers, prompting Essence to lament, “[f]inally got a neighborhood I don’t have to be afraid to walk through at night, and I got to leave” (22). During the twins’ argument in Chapter 14, Nikki contends that gentrification has given them “a nice, clean neighborhood” and a plethora of new dining and shopping experiences to enjoy (62). She opposes Maya’s boycott of the white-owned businesses: “For someone who loves her community so much, you sure don’t support it” (61). Nikki’s accusation posits that Maya’s attempts to differentiate between lifelong residents and newer arrivals are invalid because they are all a part of the same community now. As the story continues, Maya gradually begins to see the changes affecting her neighborhood in a more favorable light.
Part 1 introduces the novel’s symbols and motifs. Watson uses the seasons to symbolize change. For example, June’s constantly fluctuating weather mirrors the rapid changes in Maya’s life and her gentrifying neighborhood: “But now we are going back and forth, umbrella up, umbrella down, jacket on, jacket off. Some days there is sunshine and rain at the same exact moment” (3). These fluctuations also reinforce the fact that this is a transitional period for the teenage characters who are finishing school and planning their next steps. Second, the house across the street from Maya’s home emerges as an important motif representing The Complex Effects of Gentrification. When Essence and Darlene are priced out of the house, Maya loses her close proximity to her best friend but gains a new friend and admirer in Tony. These losses and gains illustrate Watson’s stance that gentrification has both negative and positive effects. Third, Chapter 15 introduces the sankofa, “a bird with its head turned backward, taking an egg off its back” (66). This Ghanaian symbol appears on the necklace Maya purchases, and it represents learning from the past in order to move forward. She buys the sankofa necklace to show solidarity with the only Black vendor at the event on Jackson Avenue, and she doesn’t become aware of its symbolic significance until later in the story.
Z’s introduction in Chapter 15 demonstrates the tension simmering under the pristine surface of Jackson Avenue. His nonconformity to social norms is considered bothersome and even threatening: “I can tell the woman is holding on to her daughter’s hand tightly. Her knuckles are red” (69). In contrast, the white people who break social norms are deemed quirky and harmless. Adding to the double standards, the white patrons and staff make it clear that Z isn’t welcome even though he has been a part of the neighborhood longer than the restaurant from which he’s turned away. This hostile reaction towards Z foreshadows a scene near the end of the story in which Z is harassed by two white students in an incident that demonstrates the divisions within the community.
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