Ninth Ward

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2010

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. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Sunday”

This Sunday, the first of two in Lanesha’s nine-day narrative, is her 12th birthday. She spends the day with her guardian, former midwife Mama Ya-Ya. Early in the day, Lanesha and Mama Ya-Ya cut garden flowers and make lemonade and jambalaya. Mama Ya-Ya gives Lanesha a set of sparkly pens as her birthday gift, and they have chocolate cake. Mama Ya-Ya tells Lanesha the story of her birth as she always does on her birthday. After dinner, Lanesha gives a dramatic recitation of a line from Romeo and Juliet while Mama Ya-Ya listens. Then Lanesha helps Mama Ya-Ya to bed in the upstairs of their small house; Mama Ya-Ya’s room includes a small altar of images of both Catholic saints and voodoo gods. Lanesha then goes to her bedroom, which she painted in shades of blue earlier in the summer.

Lanesha tells her story in the first-person point of view in a conversational, assured tone. While reflecting on her birthday, Lanesha reveals many important details about her life. She lives in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, a much poorer neighborhood than the Uptown neighborhood where she knows her relatives live. Lanesha’s mother was “[o]ne of them beautiful, light-skinned Fontaine girls” (5) of French heritage, according to Mama Ya-Ya; she came to Mama Ya-Ya to give birth and never mentioned the father of her baby. Lanesha’s mother died giving birth to her, and Mama Ya-Ya raised Lanesha. Lanesha was born with a caul, a membrane over her face that Mama Ya-Ya removed. Cauls are associated with supernatural perceptive abilities, and indeed, Lanesha has what Mama Ya-Ya calls “the sight” (1). Lanesha can see spirits in her environment, including that of her mother in Mama Ya-Ya’s house.

Lanesha listens carefully when Mama Ya-Ya tells her about signs, such as ladybugs meaning luck or dreams about alligators meaning trouble. Lanesha likes math because it relies on signs and numbers; she also likes Shakespeare, drawing, and writing in cursive. She does not like when Mama Ya-Ya, who is 82, talks about how old she is and says things like, “Mr. Death is losing patience. He’ll come and ferry me down the Mississippi” (10).

Lanesha does not mention the date, but as Ninth Ward begins in the days just before the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the novel likely opens on Sunday, August 21, 2005.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Monday”

Lanesha describes how she often sees ghosts, such as the ghost of a boy in her neighborhood named Jermaine. Jermaine was the victim of a shooting on a day he skipped school. When Jermaine speaks to her on the way to school, she greets him but keeps moving. Lanesha’s peers know about her supposed ability and cruelly call her “Crazy Lanesha” or “Witch Lanesha” (21). Sometimes she hides in the girls’ room at school if the teasing is very bothersome. Lanesha also reveals that Mama Ya-Ya stopped being a midwife soon after she was born; the neighborhood mothers-to-be started going to the hospital after it became known that Lanesha had a caul and another baby born premature died. Another child born around the same time as Lanesha, TaShon, had extra skin where two extra fingers might have developed. Mama Ya-Ya told the parents that was a good sign, signaling the boy’s ability to “cling hard to life” (22), but his father cut off the extra “fingers” after his birth. TaShon is in Lanesha’s English class. He is always quiet and distracted. Lanesha knows he is lonely; she waves to him in the neighborhood but does not talk to him at school for fear of calling the wrong kind of attention to him.

At school on Monday, Lanesha’s English teacher Miss Perry reviews the definition of “fortitude.” Lanesha likes the definition: “strength to endure” (25). She also likes that it has three syllables, as three represents power.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Tuesday”

In school on Tuesday, Lanesha offers math tutoring at lunchtime to Andrew, a boy whom she thinks of as “just a different smart” (28) for the way his mind processes the world. He asks questions like “How come y = x + c? Why not z?” (28). Lanesha reflects that she, TaShon, and Andrew are not in the popular groups of kids at her new middle school. She tries to show Andrew how the symbols for numbers represent how many of something, but instead of listening, Andrew talks about the air they breathe and shows her ants breathing. Lanesha high-fives him and tells him he is smart. After school, Miss Johnson stays with Lanesha for their weekly advanced math lesson. She tells Lanesha she could be an engineer with her talent for math; Lanesha begins to think about bridge building and how bridges connect land and people.

Lanesha walks home slowly, breathing deeply, reading her sensory input, and looking at a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge that Miss Johnson gave her. She continues thinking about bridges she could build in the sky, ones that would help “people and cars cross the street, over water, or a deep hole in the ground” (35). Lanesha runs into Max, Eddie, and Lavon, three tough boys from school who are harassing TaShon and a stray dog. She boldly tells them to stop. She and Max challenge each other verbally, but Max backs down, insulting Lanesha before leaving the scene. Lanesha knows the boys are afraid of Mama Ya-Ya as well as her. Lanesha recalls how quiet TaShon was in the past, but he now is happy and talkative because of the dog, whom he calls Spot. He insists the dog is a German Shepherd, but Lanesha thinks it is a mutt. He asks Lanesha to take the dog home with her until he can start dinner at his house for his mother. She agrees.

Mama Ya-Ya calls out, “Is that Spot?” (42) as Lanesha enters, and Spot immediately lies down near her. Later, Mama Ya-Ya tells Lanesha there is a storm approaching. She also tells Lanesha when TaShon is on his way over. Lanesha knows Mama Ya-Ya has the sight, and she is not surprised when TaShon arrives a few minutes later. Lanesha and TaShon give Spot a bath with the hose in the yard. Neighbors like Mrs. Watson, Mr. Lincoln, and Mr. D. comment on the “fine pup” and Lanesha’s “new friend” (43). Lanesha notices the pastel colors of the shotgun houses, the notes of someone’s saxophone, girls playing jacks, and older people talking on porches. Neighbors Rudy and Rodriguez, laughing, request a shower from the hose, and Lanesha obliges. Lanesha also hears a TV weather report about a tropical storm “kicking up high waves in the Bahamas” (45). Lanesha is content and happy with the “sweetness to this day” (45).

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

The first three chapters provide a clear look at Lanesha’s Ordinary World (which is anything but ordinary, considering her ability to see ghosts and Mama Ya-Ya’s ability to see some future events). Rhodes reveals Lanesha’s world slowly, as if she is pulling back with a camera, widening the view one chapter at a time. First readers see a simple, happy birthday with Mama Ya-Ya spent within the safety and security of their home, an unassuming shotgun house in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. (A shotgun house is a narrow building in which the rooms align in a single row, such that if you shot a gun from the open front door to the open back door, the bullet would go right through.) Her home is a haven of comfort and interesting sensory imagery to Lanesha; she talks about cake, jambalaya, and lemonade in the kitchen, Shakespeare recitation in the living room, Mama Ya-Ya’s bedroom’s altar of saints and voodoo gods, and her own bedroom of cheerful colors representing blue skies and bright days. There is a notable juxtaposition of young versus old symbolized by the two bedrooms: Mama Ya-Ya’s bedroom evokes images of old age, death, and the afterlife, with her altar of saints and voodoo gods alongside her teeth in a glass, but Lanesha’s youthful, vibrant colors, which she painted independently, dominate hers.

As the camera scope widens, readers see Lanesha’s school world and preview her interests and talents: numbers, imagination, building bridges. Her heart and generosity come across as she tries to help Andrew. She reveals sensitivity in the face of cruelty from peers and rescues TaShon and Spot from bullies. Finally, the camera pulls back to include her street and neighbors in a scene full of imagery and details that represent the greater neighborhood of the Ninth Ward: “Grown-ups are arriving home from work. They seem like kids again, grinning silly. Their wrinkly faces go all smooth once they park their cars or step down from the city bus. Men take off their jackets like they’re slipping off backpacks, and women swing their purses like empty lunch boxes” (46). Lanesha sees and appreciates her neighborhood’s carefree, relaxed, youthful atmosphere, emphasized in the moment when two grown men request to be sprayed with the garden hose.

The first three chapters consistently foreshadow the coming events as they depict Lanesha’s Ordinary World: Mama Ya-Ya speaks of Mr. Death floating down the Mississippi and the coming storm; Lanesha daydreams of bridges that will connect people over dangerous “deep holes.” The ghosts Lanesha sees represent a variety of time periods and conflicts, suggesting that soon Lanesha will see challenge and conflict and become part of New Orleans’s history. Rhodes employs dramatic irony in the inciting incident at the end of Chapter 3; the pronouncement of the storm is introduced as a small, dismissible piece of background noise in the pleasant cacophony of a Ninth Ward evening.