30 pages • 1 hour read
Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Liz is twelve years old at the start of Chapter Four, when her mother befriends a man named Leonard Mohn. Liz dislikes Leonard; not only does he hate children— despite the fact that he works as a substitute teacher—but he’s also driving a wedge between Jeanie and Peter. The three of them pursue each high together, in a way: Jeanie and Leonard pool their funds for drugs and Peter makes the drug runs, often bringing Liz with him—despite the hour and his outings’ inherent dangers. Jeanie likes Leonard’s company because, like her, he’s HIV-positive. Peter doesn’t use drugs with the two of them; he does so in private.
Liz spends more and more time with Rick and Danny, and stops going with her father on his drug runs. She starts skipping school more and more, riding the subway trains. Sometimes, Rick and Danny join her and the three get into mischief, ultimately setting a shed aflame. One day, Ms. Cole, a social worker, tells Liz that she must go to school and help her mother clean the house, or else she will be taken away from her home.
Meanwhile, Jeanie starts dating a man named Brick, and takes Liz to meet him one day instead of insisting Liz go to school. Brick takes Jeanie and Liz to a diner, but Liz doesn’t like Brick. After they eat, Liz and Jeanie walk through the art gallery where Brick works, and Jeanie tells Liz that she wants to stop abusing drugs and wants to move in with Brick because, while he drinks, he doesn’t have drugs in his apartment. After Lisa graduates from the sixth grade, Jeanie and Lisa leave to move in with Brick.
As a junior high school student, Liz’s truancy worsens. One day, while home from school, she finds old photos and letters in her parents’ closet and learns that her father had a relationship with a man named Walter. When she’s thirteen years old, Child Welfare Services takes her out of her father’s apartment and brings her to Saint Anne’s Residence, a group home. There, she meets Sasha and Reina. Reina routinely gets her in trouble. Liz is placed next with a fifteen-year-old mother named Talesha. Finally, she’s released—but to Brick’s custody.
Chapter 5 Summary
Having passed the seventh grade at Saint Anne’s, Liz enrolls in the eighth grade at a local public school near Brick’s apartment. She’s embarrassed by her mother when they go to the school together. Jeanie tells Liz about her own childhood spent skipping school. She implores Liz not to do the same. Liz determines that her mother is stuck and chooses not to try to convince her to leave Brick right away.
While in class, Liz hears students laughing and thinks at first that they’re laughing at her. However, it turns out that they’re laughing because two other students are shooting spit balls. One girl named Samantha—Sam, for short—confides in Liz that on her birthday, she’s going to show up at school wearing nothing but a trench coat, with the intent of flashing all the teachers.
Liz and Sam quickly become close friends, and then start hanging out with three other students: Bobby, Myers, and Fief. Liz decides that because of these friendships, she will go to school again the next day. At Brick’s apartment, Jeanie’s health continues to get worse but Brick shows her no compassion at all. Liz is dealing with a crush on Bobby—her first crush—and spends the night at his apartment after she and Brick fight over Brick’s treatment of Jeanie.
Once more, Liz starts skipping school. She and Sam spend more time together, and she decides to take her new friend to her family’s old apartment in the Bronx, fully expecting her father to be there. When they arrive, they find a padlock on the door and a sign indicating the apartment is being fumigated. Liz feels disappointed that her father didn’t tell her that he was leaving, and is uncertain whether she’ll ever see her photographs or other belongings again.
Liz manages to graduate from junior high and introduces Jeanie to her friends and their parents. Later, Peter calls Liz and she learns that after he left the apartment on Universal, he wound up living in a shelter. Liz and Sam skip school together.
Chapter 6 Summary
A young adult named Carlos joins Liz’s group of friends, and runs a dice game at Fief’s apartment, where they all go to hang out when they play hooky. Carlos decides to take Liz out to eat, and after she learns that they have a lot in common—including his loss of his father due to AIDS—she starts to develop a crush on him. Carlos confides in Liz and tells her that when he turns eighteen, he will inherit $7,000 from his father’s estate. He promises that they’ll use the money to get an apartment where Liz and Sam can live with him, and that they can start a life together.
Child Welfare Services knows about Liz’s truancy, but she successfully intercepts messages addressed to Brick about her. One such message is about a mandatory meeting concerning her academic attendance. While Liz is skipping school, Jeanie’s health takes a sharp decline and she starts drinking more to cope with her illness. Liz cares for her and Carlos helps.
Sam starts dating a guy named Oscar who is twenty years old, and Sam and Liz talk about him during their sleepovers. Sam has been secretly sleeping over at Brick’s apartment, hiding under Liz’s bed. When Brick discovers this, he kicks Sam out at three o’clock in the morning. Liz decides to go with her because she can’t cope with Jeanie’s illness and because she can’t stand Brick anymore and doesn’t want Sam to face the streets alone.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Leonard and Brick are another two in a series of men befriended by Jeanie that Liz neither likesnor trusts. After the incidents with Ron in the first section of the memoir, Liz is ready to find fault with both men—not that she has to look hard to do so. The big shift in her relationships with the adult men in her life in this section is that Liz starts to wonder about her father’s integrity. She has always dismissed his drug addiction as something he needed in order to cope with his past, with his own father, who was a violent alcoholic. When she learns about Meredith and Walter, however, Liz starts to suspect his motivations. This suspicion is made stronger each time Jeanie tells Liz that Peter isn’t as good a man as Liz thinks heis.
Like the first quarter of Breaking Night, this section features the hope that Liz will stay in school. She’s determined never to return to Saint Anne’s Residence, which she considers a prison, yet she cannot get herself to stay in school, not even when she makes friends there. Part of the reason for this is that her friends are just as willing to skip school as she is. For Liz, why go to school when her friends aren’t going to bother either? They are, at least initially, the reason she wanted to go back.
Liz’s friendship with Sam mirrors her relationship with her parents in some ways, and represents a transference of the responsibility Liz feels toward her mother and father—especially toward Jeanie. Liz leaves Brick’s apartment with Sam in part because she feels that Sam needs to be looked after. Unable to cope with watching her mother waste away, Liz turns her caretaking nature to someone else in her life, which brings her out onto the streets. Despite this catalyst, the memoir suggests that she probably would have wound up on the streets anyway, because she refused to go back into the system and she and Brick clash more and more.
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