85 pages • 2 hours read
Kathryn ErskineMockingbird
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 32-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 32 Summary: “Dad-Oh”
Content Warning: The Chapter 37 and 39 Summaries reference a school shooting.
Caitlin and her father work diligently on finishing Devon’s Eagle Scout project. Although Caitlin does not know much of the jargon for woodworking, her father is patient with her and lets her help. After their first night working on the chest, Caitlin sneaks out of her bedroom and into Devon’s room. With the help of a flashlight, she signs SCOUT, her brother’s nickname for her, on the underside of the chest.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Group Project Including Other People”
When her teacher announces a new group project, Caitlin immediately says she wants to be in a group this time. The class goes to the computer lab; they are to research their own state of Virginia as their project. The project will include lots of drawings, and Caitlin is happy about that.
Caitlin immediately assures her group that she is “probably the best artist in the state of Virginia” (191). When Josh, who is sitting at the table next to Caitlin’s group, asks to borrow a red marker, it is Caitlin who offers one. Then Caitlin starts drawing the state flower and tree, dogwood. When she is finished, her group thinks she must have traced it; the drawing is that good. When she draws the state bird, the cardinal, her group asks her to use color to bring out the bird’s red plumage. Caitlin declines, saying, “[The world] is easier in black and white” (193).
She sees Michael in the library. She fears they are drifting apart, but Michael invites Caitlin to the kindergarten play that night; it is about the food chain, and he will be playing a pear. Michael begs Caitlin to come. Reluctantly, she agrees.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Michael’s Play”
That night, Caitlin rushes her father, so they get to the auditorium on time. Caitlin nearly panics because it takes so long. They run into the auditorium just as the play is starting. Michael sees Caitlin from the stage and gives her a big wave.
After the show, Michael thanks Caitlin for coming: “You are like my big sister” (202). On the way home, Caitlin asks her father about the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. Caitlin says he is like Atticus. Her father cautions her against staying in a pretend world: “A movie isn’t as good as real life. It can’t even compare” (204). Caitlin disagrees: In movies bad guys get punished, and if you don’t like the ending, you can change it in your head.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Monkey Bars”
Monday at school there is a fire drill. Caitlin doesn’t much like the break in the school day or the noise and confusion. While the kids wait to get back into school, Caitlin chances to see Michael playing on the monkey bars with Josh pulling at his legs. Alarmed that the school bully is picking on her friend, Caitlin rushes to her friend’s defense. In the confusion, Josh yells that he was only trying to help Michael, who seemed stuck on the bars. In between sobs, Josh asks Caitlin, “Why does everyone think I’m bad?” (206).
Caitlin again says she does not like Josh—not because he is related to the boy who killed her brother, but because Josh is mean. Michael assures Josh that he likes him; they have become friends through the reading program. Michael gently pats Josh’s back, and, inexplicably moved, Caitlin follows suit.
Chapter 36 Summary: “More Drawing”
Based on the strength of her bird drawings, the yearbook staff asks Caitlin to create original drawings to decorate the yearbook. She can sketch anything around the school. A bit overwhelmed, Caitlin nevertheless tells them she would be happy to do it. When she gets home, she carefully carves the outline of a singing mockingbird on the top of Devon’s chest. When Caitlin shows her father her carving and explains why she did it, her father tears up.
Chapter 37 Summary: “No More Virginia Dare”
The chest is done. When Caitlin tells this to Mrs. Brook, her counselor says she hopes Caitlin found some closure. She tells Caitlin the school board voted to change the name of the school where the shooting occurred. That will represent the first step toward giving the community closure. Caitlin is frustrated: So many people still need closure, including Michael.
Chapter 38 Summary: “I Get It”
Caitlin still feels sad. The chest is beautiful, but how can she help the community? Overwhelmed, she begins to cry: “I can’t stop crying. For Devon. Because of what happened to Devon. Because his life got taken away from him” (218). Suddenly she understands something: She is not crying for herself but for Devon and the life he will never get to live. That, she decides, is empathy. As she stands with her father admiring the chest they completed, she gets an idea to help the community heal: “I finally GET IT!” (220).
Chapter 39 Summary: “Colors”
Caitlin waits in the seats of the middle school auditorium. There is to be a special service for the victims of the shooting. Caitlin is nervous around so many people and lights. She spots Michael, who then sits with her. She says nothing when Josh sits down on the other side of Michael. She offers both boys gummy worms while they wait for the program to begin.
Caitlin gets nervous. She wishes she could go home to her hidey-hole. The principal speaks first, reading the names of those who died in the shooting. Then the principal steps over to an object covered with blue fabric. He announces how proud the school is to accept this donation of a “beautiful Mission-style chest” started by Devon Smith and finished by his little sister and her father (227). He pulls away the covering. The chest looks beautiful and shiny and perfect there on stage. The applause is thunderous. Caitlin is asked to stand for the cheering and clapping, and she feels Devon’s presence with her.
After the ceremony, there is a reception outside with cake and lemonade. Michael, Josh, and Caitlin have cake; they laugh when the icing turns their teeth blue. As they giggle, the art teacher from the middle school, whom Caitlin met at the fundraiser, comes up to Caitlin. He is carrying a sketchbook and a large box of pastel crayons and tells her, “You gave us all something very special today so I want to give you something” (230).
Caitlin is confused. She has never used colors and reflects, “There are three different shades of orange AND lots of reds and yellows so you can make your own orange” (230). As she ponders all the colors, she sees Michael’s dad throwing a football not with Michael but with Josh. At her urging, Michael joins. Together, the three toss the ball.
Caitlin departs the reception and heads to the fields behind the school. She slips off her shoes and walks through cool wet grass until she comes to a big boulder. She puts the sketchbook in her lap. She opens the box of crayons: “I’m going to draw the whole complete picture” (232).
Chapters 32-39 Analysis
Though still learning, Caitlin has changed significantly by the time this section opens: She volunteers to be on a team and, even more significantly, offers Josh the marker he asks for despite disliking him. When, impressed by her sketches of the dogwood tree and the cardinal, her team asks her to use some crayons, she says no, but she also tries to explain her reasoning: “When you mix red and yellow it might come out orange like the sun when it’s setting but when you mix red and yellow another time it might come out like a school bus” (193-94). This unpredictability and loss of control still bother Caitlin, but the miscommunication goes both ways. If Caitlin doesn’t understand her classmates’ point of view, they also don’t understand hers; significantly, the novel uses the same phrase—“don’t Get It” (193)—to describe Emma’s confusion as it does Caitlin’s struggles to empathize.
When returning from Michael’s play, Caitlin again riffs on how her life is so like the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. Everything lines up so perfectly (for instance, Michael’s pear costume lines up with Scout’s ham costume) that Caitlin happily immerses herself in that unreal world. Her father suggests that the real world is much better than the pretend world, but Caitlin still rejects this message. She has already carved her brother’s nickname for her—“Scout”—on the mission chest.
Another tipping point in Caitlin’s education comes on the playground when she valiantly and completely wrongly comes to Michaels’ help when Caitlin believes Josh is bullying him: “You’re evil Evil EVIL” (206). The typographical emphasis and the lack of punctuation reveal how certain Caitlin is and how wrong she is, all at the same time. Josh is trying to help Michael, who appeared to be precariously hung up on the monkey bars. “Why does everyone think I’m bad” (207), says a tearful Josh. Caitlin is confused, saying, “I wish you’d make up your mind and be mean or be nice. Then I’d know how to feel” (208). Josh’s response underscores the parallels between his own situation and Caitlin’s, as he says that he acts the way he does in response to others’ cruelty; like Caitlin, he is subject to constant misunderstanding (in his case because of his relationship to the school shooter). Though characteristically blunt, Caitlin’s reaction suggests that she recognizes that her moral judgment of Josh was overly simplistic: “Oh. Well maybe if you’re nice to people they’ll be nice to you” (208).
Caitlin’s final epiphany comes when she is moved to tears thinking about how much life Devon now will never live. Although she has tried before to take other people’s thoughts and feelings into account, she has always done so through the lens of her own preoccupations; it is only when she considers what Devon is missing as Devon that she fully “gets” empathy, crying not for herself but for her brother.
In short order Caitlin accepts the applause of the auditorium audience to recognize her work with her father to complete the cabinet. The girl who once dreaded violations of her private space and avoided attention now accepts the recognition, understanding its intent. At the reception she watches as Michael, his father, and Josh toss the football—a suggestion of healing and an indication that Josh will also not have to be an outsider forever.
Caitlin is perplexed when she looks into the box of colorful crayons the art teacher gives her, finding three shades of orange alone; she has existed in a world of black and white for so long that color feels like a threat. However, she has learned much in the wake of her brother’s shooting. In these chapters, Caitlin makes her peace with colors. She prepares to engage the real world, with all its mess, contradictions, joys, sorrows, agonies, and ironies. This means abandoning her knee-jerk reaction to challenges she cannot contain or control: She will no longer seek the easy sanctuary of hidey-holes. Caitlin now understands that other people provide the only way to navigate a world that refuses to make sense.
