Fire from the Rock

The story is told from the point of view of 15-year-old Sylvia using dialogue and a third-person narrator. The author uses italics throughout the text to denote Sylvia’s thoughts. The Patterson family is Christian and religious, but Sylvia, her brother Gary, and Aunt Bessie question whether religion and faith are enough to fight the dangers of racism in 1957. While Sylvia’s mother reminds them that “patience comes to those who wait” (11), Aunt Bessie, Sylvia, and Gary are tired of advice from the “Amen corner” and fed up with nothing changing in Little Rock. Aunt Bessie’s comments about how Lester will do no more than pray on the problem suggest that he shares Leola Patterson’s belief in leaving vengeance to God. This tension will continue to rise as Sylvia and her community must decide the best way forward in combatting racism.

In the bucolic breakfast scene, Sylvia demonstrates her growing interest in boys, her desire to be treated as an adult, and her excitement at the thought of attending high school in the fall. Gary pushes the envelope on school integration when he knows doing so will only upset his parents. Both parents recognize that Gary is ready to be an activist and break racial barriers, but they worry about his temper and his safety. Sylvia sides with her brother on the debate over school integration, which has technically been legal for three years, since 1954. Gary drops the news about the Crandalls’ dog, and his sister suspects that he killed it. The fact that Sylvia believes her brother might be capable of this violent act foreshadows later events in the book, when she learns what people are willing to do to right the wrongs of racial injustice.

This sections also introduces Sylvia’s friend Rachel, who is Jewish and white. Historically, the Jewish community and the African American community have both suffered discrimination at the hands of non-Jewish white people. This similarly manifests here in a kind of solidarity and mutual respect, evident in Sylvia’s description of how her mother will only shop at Mr. Zucker’s grocery store because he is the only white man who shows her any respect. Sylvia and Rachel have also enjoyed an interracial friendship since early childhood, suggesting that both families supported this relationship.

Sylvia and Rachel’s interactions offer a lens into the social differences between the races in Little Rock in 1957. They read different magazines, listen to music by both white and Black artists, and dream of marrying someone of their own racial or ethnic group, though they blame this restriction on their parents’ generation. Rachel talks of how her parents want her to marry a nice Jewish boy, and Sylvia pointedly asks what would happen if she brought home a Catholic boy or a “colored” boy. Rachel remarks that neither would be tolerated. This is an important distinction—that even though the families of each of the girls supports their interracial friendship, both believe that marriage should not cross those racial lines. This point sets up further tension regarding how Rachel’s family might feel about racially integrated schools. If cross-racial friendship is ok, but marriage isn’t, where will school integration fall?

Sylvia and Rachel are young adolescents coming of age at the end of eighth grade. They are thinking and talking about boys, current events, and their fledgling understandings of sexism. They notice how they don’t think their mothers are ever happy and that their lives don’t match the images in their magazines. Together, Rachel and Sylvia offer a representation of the world of 1957 American life.

At the end of each chapter, Sylvia writes a diary entry in which she shares her insights from her day. In these entries, she often includes information about important historical context. In this chapter, her entry includes the fact that Mr. Zucker is a German Jew who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and fled the Holocaust by escaping to America. He has experienced first-hand the devastating consequences that are possible when unchecked hatred of a group is allowed to flourish in a community. He still wears the infamous tattoo on his arm.

Oppression takes many forms, and according to Sylvia’s experiences, it can happen based on race, religion, and gender. People lose their lives because of hatred, like the Jews in the Holocaust, and her own grandfather, who was lynched. She also mentions the famous lynching cases of Leo Frank and Emmett Till. Sylvia shares the gory details of Emmett Till’s death and adds that his executioners were not convicted of the crime. This outcome, according to Sylvia, was expected by everyone in her town. Her journal entry shows just how terrorized she feels as a young Black girl living in Arkansas in 1957.