53 pages • 1-hour read
Swift River
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.
Prologue-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism, death, bullying, and sexual content.
When Diamond’s father, Pop, goes missing after leaving his house and family on July 1, 1980, the only clue he leaves behind are his sneakers, found on the banks of the Swift River where the family used to swim. Men drag the river looking for Pop’s body but do not find any sign of him, even when they expand their search to the surrounding area.
Diamond starts fourth grade that fall. She is the only Black person in the school, and now, with her father missing, the only Black person in the entire town of Swift River. The students are reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and “call [her] dad ‘N***** Jim’ because: he’s Black, he’s somewhere in a river, and he has no shoes” (2). Stories about what happened to her father, including Diamond’s and her mother’s (“Ma”) potential role in his disappearance, proliferate.
The narrative jumps back to a time before her father’s disappearance, when Ma, Pop, and Diamond were taking a drive in their Volkswagen Beetle, which had a hole in the floor. Pop joked about leaving and never returning, but Ma did not laugh.
The narrative flashes further back again to a time when Black people lived in Swift River. Diamond remarks, “In one night, they’re gone. Those were my people” (4).
Chapter 1 Summary: “1987”
Diamond decides to abandon her bicycle, her sole option for transportation, outside the CVS while she picks up her mother’s prescriptions. Her size makes it difficult for her to pedal the bike anymore, and she wants to start driver’s education classes rather than to continue to rely on the bike, hitchhiking, and walking everywhere as she and her mother do now. Diamond has been working at the Tee Pee Motel—the same job her mother had when Diamond was young—to save up the money for driving classes. After the bike is taken, Diamond suddenly feels sad that she did not first remove the basket, which had ribbons wound in it by her maternal grandmother, Sylvia, who has passed away.
Diamond walks home. On her way, she stops to rest in a phone booth and finds her father’s name in the phone book: “Right next to it someone has scribbled, NIGER. I pull a pen out of my purse and finish the sentence—The third longest river in Africa!” (12).
When Diamond gets home, she tells Ma that the bike was stolen, hoping she’ll react. Ma does not rise to the bait, but rather finishes making Spam and gravy and mashed potatoes. Ma talks about how one day they will have money from Pop’s life insurance, something Ma counts on to solve their problems, including foreclosure on their home. Diamond’s dream is to get her driver’s license and escape Swift River. Her bedroom wall “is covered with pictures of places [she] want[s] to visit: the pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge in England, the redwood forest, the New York Botanical Garden” (16).
In her room, Diamond finds a letter and a package from Lena, a cousin of her father.
Chapter 2 Summary: “June 15, 1987”
In her letter, Lena apologizes for being absent from Diamond’s life but says she wants to make a connection now. She tells Diamond about the family business, Newberry Fine Fabrics in Woodville, Georgia, and explains that she decided to write after finally going through her mother’s belongings. Lena’s mother, Sweetie, raised Diamond’s father, Robbie, for the first seven years of his life. Lena and Robbie were cousins, and Lena is Diamond’s second cousin, but she encourages Diamond to call her “Auntie Lena,” saying that that is the usual way to address relatives regardless of their technical relationship.
Lena says that Sweetie was heartbroken when Robbie’s father took him away from her to move back to Swift River, a town that the family hated ever since The Leaving, when the town’s entire Black population left in one night. The only Black resident who remained behind was Clara, Sweetie’s older sister. Diamond’s father was transferred to Clara’s care, and that is how Diamond came to be born in Swift River, away from the rest of her family.
Chapter 3 Summary: “1987”
Diamond examines a picture Lena sent of Pop and Ma on their wedding day, drenched in rain and with only Clara and Grandma Sylvia in attendance. Diamond recalls that she was told that there was clear weather the morning of the wedding but that they had to postpone the ceremony, waiting for a relative from Georgia to arrive. Diamond realizes that it was Aunt Lena that they were waiting for and wonders why Lena did not come. She feels sad that her parents looked so lonely on their wedding day, not surrounded by a larger group of family and friends.
Ma wants to have a celebration of life for the seven-year anniversary of Pop’s disappearance. She wants to buy nice clothes at the Goodwill and go to the Swift River and light a candle. They hitchhike to town with a woman Diamond nicknames the “Elf Lady” based on her appearance. The next day, in their Goodwill clothes, Diamond and Ma walk to Mrs. DeStefano’s house to get a ride to the lawyer’s office, part of the process of having Pop declared legally dead and claiming the life insurance money. Mrs. DeStefano is not home, however, and in great frustration, the women set off walking to the lawyer’s office, knowing that they will be late, tired, and hot by the time they arrive. Diamond becomes too tired to continue walking, her weight impeding her ability to keep up with Ma. Ma takes a shopping cart for Diamond to ride in and pushes her the rest of the way.
Jerry Polaski, the lawyer, says that he does not have much time for them since they were late and insists that there is paperwork that Ma needs to complete before he can move forward with her case, including witness statements and a death notice in the newspaper. Jerry mentions that people still claim to see Pop sometimes, and Ma is frustrated that the town’s racist residents think that any Black man could be her husband.
Back at home, Diamond writes to Aunt Lena.
Chapter 4 Summary: “July 11, 1987”
Aunt Lena writes to Diamond about her regret that Diamond has been separated from the rest of her family. She notes that Pop “struggle[ed] to show [Diamond] who [she was], scared to death that [she’d] get lost without knowing [her] Black family” and once wanted Lena to take Diamond for the summer (50). Lena was afraid that she would not be able to take good care of Diamond and declined, and is now disappointed in herself.
To make up for her absence in Diamond’s life, Lena wants to share the family history, writing, “[O]ur story is gonna fill you up, make you stand straighter. It’s a good one” (51).
Chapter 5 Summary: “1980”
At age eight, Diamond begins to keep secrets from Pop with Ma, such as the time she wet herself at school after the teacher would not give her a bathroom pass. Diamond tries to entertain her father with funny stories, and he teaches her a secret language called Nostralis, which involves flaring nostrils. He and Aunt Lena used to use this secret code to make plans without adults knowing what they were up to. Pop argues with Ma about Diamond needing to be around other Black people and the rest of her family, but Ma insists that she and Diamond are Pop’s family now and that they do not need the rest of the Newberrys.
Pop is facing a wrongful accusation at work, which has a negative impact on him when he comes home: He “crumbles into his chair. He shoos [Diamond] away if [she is] playing too close to him” (56).
At school, a boy calls Diamond the n-word. She doesn’t know the word but understands its intent. Ma urges Diamond not to tell her Pop about the incident, while Grandma Sylvia recommends calling him a nasty name back. Ma suggests calling him “fish belly,” but when Diamond uses this insult, the children simply start to call her “Fishbelly.” Diamond never mentions the incident to Pop.
Just a few weeks later, the same boy plays with Diamond and they pretend to be “making love.” They lie on each other and share a stiff, awkward kiss. Diamond’s father catches them, and as Diamond is leaving, the boy insults her father with a racist slur. Diamond refuses to tell her Pop what she was doing with the boy and is sent to her room until she is willing to explain. A week later, Diamond still refuses to explain and instead yells, “I want to [,,,] [s]tay here in our house. I don’t want to give it back to Grandma. I don’t want to be sent to the brown family” (63). This brings tears to Pop’s eyes, but Diamond manages to apologize by being playful with him.
Prologue-Chapter 5 Analysis
The beginning of the novel sets up some of its primary conflicts, including The Intergenerational Harm of Racism. The racist slurs used openly against Diamond and her father indicate that Swift River is not a safe place for either of them. Diamond and her family do their best to resist this racism. Diamond, for instance, mocks the misspelling of the n-word next to her father’s name in the phone book by adding, “The third longest river in Africa!” in a show of both her intelligence and the writer’s ignorance (12). However, as the conflict between Diamond and her mother illustrates, the racism that the Newberrys experience causes tensions within the family as well; Diamond’s desire to leave Swift River stems largely from her recognition of just how dangerous the environment is, but Ma, who is white, does not fully understand Diamond’s perspective and prefers for them to stay together in Swift River.
Diamond’s bike, a symbol that is revisited at the end of the novel when Ma purchases a pair of bikes, illustrates these divergent viewpoints. While Diamond’s bike allows her to travel to town and to school, it cannot give her the freedom to leave town, which is why she ultimately abandons the bike and searches out driver’s education classes. Diamond hopes her mother will comment on the bike’s “theft,” as doing so would involve tacitly recognizing Diamond’s frustration with Swift River; however, Ma ignores the comment and thus her daughter’s desperation to escape.
Racism similarly inflects the family dynamics in the 1980 storyline. For instance, with Pop trying to contend with his unjust firing from the mill and unsuccessful job search (problems that are themselves related to racism), Ma and Diamond try to shield him from the problems that Diamond encounters at school with classmates and teachers, demonstrating the link between racism and another of the novel’s major themes: The Pain of Family Secrets. Ma justifies shielding Pop from hearing about the challenges Diamond has at school by saying, “Imagine that meanness making cuts all over his body that his clothes cover up, […] Sometimes you can accidentally bump into a sore spot and not even know it’” (56). The pain of racist attacks, overt and covert, in his daily life has beaten Pop down to a point where he seems to be fading from Diamond’s life. However, the secrecy exacerbates the problem, as Diamond observes: “When I am eight years old, Ma and me start to keep secrets from Pop. He is leaving us in slow drips. In six months, he will disappear” (53). Pop thus starts to fade from the family long before his physical disappearance. The symbol of Pop’s sneakers, which opens the Prologue, immediately demonstrates the impact of Pop’s missing presence in Diamond’s life, not least because he was the only connection she had to the Black side of her family.
Lena’s letters are also key in developing the theme of secrecy, as they explicitly aim to lay bare the causes for Diamond’s isolation within Swift River and her estrangement from her father’s side of the family, which she did not understand before. Lena’s letters provide the context Diamond needs to understand that she is not alone and that she is not the first to experience the racism of Swift River. Moreover, while Lena is not physically present in Diamond’s life, the items she sends, like the quilt and later on the baseball, help Diamond feel connected to her family and their history in ways she did not have access to before. The epistolary element also allows Chambers to present information about the Newberry family past piece by piece throughout the novel, encouraging readers to identify with Diamond, who is learning the same things at the same time.
Unlock all 53 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs