A Taste of Blackberries

“For my best friend, he sure did aggravate me sometimes. […] [H]e didn’t know when to quit.”

This line foreshadows the tragedy of Jamie’s death. Jamie is stung after poking at the hole with bees in it, even after his friends warn him to leave them alone. He has had many close calls with danger, but until this moment, he has come away from these situations safely.

“I always hated to come away from the creek. One minute you were all secret and far-away feeling, and the next, here you were back in the real world.”

The adventures that the narrator has with Jamie encompass the joys of childhood they experience when playing together. This quote foreshadows that the narrator’s childhood will be interrupted by a very real experience of loss and grief. Additionally, the quote introduces the idea of nature as a place of escape from everything. The narrator and Jamie can escape from the unappealing aspects of life by exploring the creek; later, the narrator retreats to Mrs. Mullin’s garden to escape from his grief over losing Jamie.

“He was the oldest in his family. I was the youngest, by far the youngest.”

The dynamics in both the narrator’s and Jamie’s families are important for the shift that happens after Jamie’s death. The narrator, who is the youngest in his family, steps into an older brother role for Martha and helps take care of Jamie’s family, who are as close to him as his own. While the novel gives only a small glimpse into this change in the relationship between the narrator and Jamie’s family, the author hints at the narrator stepping in to help now that Jamie can’t.

“I didn’t breathe until the man slowed the car and began to turn. Then Jamie and I looked at each other and grinned.”

The narrator is much more cautious than Jamie, which is apparent when they hitchhike home in the rain. Jamie, however, almost always pulls them out of their scrapes, either through luck or good intuition. This is another reason why the narrator has difficulty believing that something bad could ever happen to Jamie.

“It was while we scraped Japanese beetles off of Mrs. Houser’s leaves that Jamie got stung.”

The start of Chapter 3 takes a particularly retrospective tone. From a literary standpoint, this is effective when dealing with such a sensitive subject matter for children. The author sets up a feeling of impending danger, which builds suspense but also braces young readers (or parents who are reading to their children) of what is to come later in the chapter.

“I looked back and Jamie was still putting on his act, writhing on the ground.”

In the two chapters leading up to Jamie getting stung, the narrator establishes that Jamie tends toward overdramatic and attention-seeking behavior—and that this is one of the things about Jamie that annoys the narrator. When Jamie has his allergic reaction, it’s essentially like the story of the boy who cried wolf: When Jamie actually is in danger, his friends don’t believe him.

“I felt I had a little secret pleasure. I was one of the few kids who had ever been allowed into Mrs. Mullin’s garden.”

This line illustrates the relationship of trust between the narrator and Mrs. Mullin and foreshadows their conversation in this very garden that becomes a significant turning point in the narrator’s grieving process after Jamie’s death.

“What if something was badly wrong. Naw, it couldn’t be. What could happen to Jamie the Great? He yelled a lot, but he was tough.”

Denial is the first step of the grieving process. Before the narrator even hears of Jamie’s death, he’s in denial that anything bad could ever happen to his friend. Jamie has always come out of dangerous situations unscathed, making his death even more unfathomable for the narrator.

“Did the world know that Jamie was dead? The sky didn’t act like it. It was a blue sky and white cloud day.”

One of the hardest parts of Jamie’s death for the narrator is seeing parts of the world move on as if nothing has happened. This is a difficult but important aspect of grief that the author addresses for young readers.

“I wasn’t glad the bees were dead. I was sorry about anything being dead. Especially Jamie.”

When a loved one dies, it’s natural to seek someone to blame. However, the narrator lets young readers know that he realizes Jamie’s death was an unexplainable accident and that no one is at fault. This is more effective because it’s from the narrator’s point of view, as opposed to an adult trying to tell the narrator not to blame the bees for stinging Jamie.

“The strange thing is, I wasn’t crying for Jamie, I was crying for me.”

The narrator is mourning the loss of not only his friend but also life as he knew it before Jamie’s death. Aside from his Uncle Jonah, the narrator had no experience with death up to this point. He hasn’t cried until now in the book, and he’s ready to accept the comfort of his parents.

“Mrs. Mullins was as gentle as the butterflies. They were so fragile looking, yet they could fly, some of them, like the monarch, for thousands of miles.”

On the surface, this line is a simile intended solely for the character of Mrs. Mullins. However, on a deeper level, the author is describing her young readership. She wrote A Taste of Blackberries for an audience that many adults deemed too fragile for its content, but the author knew that, like Mrs. Mullins, and like butterflies, children are stronger than we realize. Not only can children handle the subject matter, but they’ll also likely be stronger because of it.

“Honey, one of the hardest things we have to learn is that some questions do not have answers.”

This line is, in essence, the book’s thesis. The author does an excellent job of navigating the topic of death realistically and doesn’t try to present children with an answer to an unanswerable question.

“Everyone was talking, eating, moving—just like things were the same. Somehow I couldn’t let things be the same.”

The narrator doesn’t eat until after Jamie’s funeral. He worries that if he does, he won’t be fully acknowledging his friend’s death. He feels conflicted about how to move on as a living person when his best friend is gone. This coincides with coming to terms with loss, and it supports the theme of The Five Stages of Grief, aligning with the bargaining stage.

“Besides, it didn’t seem fair to remind Jamie’s mother that I was alive.”

At this point in the book, the narrator is especially aware of how Jamie’s death will impact Jamie’s family. What he’s feeling in this line is survivor’s guilt: guilt that he survived the bee swarm and Jamie didn’t. What he doesn’t realize yet is that Jamie’s mother actually needs the narrator now more than ever.

“No matter what we wished, or hoped, it was real.”

After going through the other phases of grief, the narrator eventually reaches the final stage: acceptance. He accepts that Jamie is gone, and he knows that he must continue to live life to the fullest, even without his best friend by his side.

“She didn’t understand enough to cry, maybe that’s what they meant. Or maybe she didn’t understand about funerals. Well, I didn’t understand either.”

The narrator notices that Martha, Jamie’s little sister, isn’t present at the funeral. When he learns why, he acknowledges to himself that even though he’s older than Martha, he’s young to be facing the death of a friend and attending a funeral. This line supports the book’s theme of A Child’s Perception of Mortality.

“Never until this very minute had I wondered what the two of them might have said about me.”

The shared friendship with Jamie is a large component of the relationship between the narrator and Heather. With Jamie gone, a huge part of that dynamic is suddenly missing. This supports the theme of The Impact of a Death on a Community, which is present throughout the book.

“The cemetery surprised me. We had passed it lots of times, but I had never paid much attention unless we were thinking about ghosts.”

Until Jamie’s death, the narrator had little reason to ponder mortality or feel a connection to the cemetery. As a child dealing with the loss of a friend, the narrator perceives many things differently for the first time.

“Jamie would be the last one to want me to go around sad and starving.”

Although A Taste of Blackberries centers on a tragic subject, the book ends on a hopeful note. Once the narrator reaches the acceptance stage in the grieving process, he knows that finding happiness in life and moving on, including enjoying things like eating, isn’t a betrayal to Jamie’s memory. Instead, it’s necessary, and it’s what Jamie would have wanted.

“Suddenly I thought about blackberries. They’d be ripe now.”

One of the final moments in A Taste of Blackberries is a callback to one of the first: The narrator picks blackberries for Jamie’s mom. At the beginning of the book, the berries weren’t ready to be picked, a symbol that foreshadowed the narrator not being ready to move on without his best friend. At the end of the book, the blackberries are ready to be picked, symbolizing that the narrator has come to terms with Jamie’s death.

“Boy, look at those big ones, Jamie. I’ll take your mother the best ones.”

When the narrator goes to pick the blackberries, he starts to enjoy it again. Even though Jamie isn’t there, the narrator keeps his memory alive when he picks the berries. He knows now that helping out with Jamie’s family won’t be a harsh reminder to them that the narrator is alive when Jamie isn’t. Instead, Jamie would want the narrator to stay in his family’s life.

“I shook my head, ashamed that they could so easily forget. Ashamed, too, that my own feet seemed anxious to run and jump and play.”

The narrator has reached the acceptance stage of grief, but he’ll continue to have mixed feelings about Jamie’s death. This is crucial to the story to teach young readers that the processes of healing and grief aren’t linear or clear-cut.