84 pages • 2 hours read
Tommy OrangeThere There
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3 Summary: “Return”
Part 3 opens on Opal at her job as a mail carrier for the US Postal Service. She thinks about when she first took in Loother, Lony, and Orvil—and about her life’s trajectory and the “troubled water that lives in her” (162). The day before, Orvil “left her a message telling her he’d pulled three spider legs out of a bump on his leg” (162). This does not surprise Opal much since she experienced the same thing at Orvil’s age. Opal also recently found a video of Orvil practicing powwow dancing, and this reminds her of a boy she once knew and loved named Lucas—Dene’s uncle—who recently returned after almost 20 years away “wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary” (164). He gave Opal the regalia and then passed away. The thought of spider legs brings back a memory, of her mother’s adopted brother, Ronald, with whom she and Jacquie were left after their mother’s death. Opal remembers feeling ashamed of both her new menstruation and the spider legs; she kept the secret from Jacquie, who was pregnant at the time. Ronald “started to walk by their room at night,” and, one night when he tried to “pull at Jacquie’s ankles,” Opal hit him with a baseball bat (166). The two girls ran away to a shelter. Years later, Opal returned to confirm that Ronald was still alive—a discovery that was both relieving and upsetting.
Octavio narrates a story about being very sick and going to his grandmother, Josefina, for help. She explains that he is probably cursed and gives him water to drink while recounting her own experience being cursed by her father. Then, Octavio remembers the night, while he was staying with his father, when bullets came through the house. The shooting was retaliation against his older brother and uncle who had stolen marijuana from someone. To keep Octavio safe, his dad had blocked the bullets with his body (174). That same year, Octavio experienced many new things while growing closer to his cousins, Manny and Daniel. He saw Manny beat up his own abusive father. And Octavio and Manny stole their first car; Octavio liked the idea that they “could put on someone else’s clothes, live in someone else’s house, drive their car, smoke their smokes—even if just for an hour or two” (177-78).
That same year, Octavio’s uncle Sixto was driving while intoxicated and got into an accident, killing Octavio’s mother and older brother. Octavio went to Sixto’s house intending to assault him but decided not to carry out the attack after seeing how remorseful Sixto felt. After showing Octavio his medicine box, Sixto blew some powder in Octavio’s face, causing him to fall ill.
Back in the present, Octavio goes with Josefina to make a medicine box. Josefina also makes Octavio rip a clump of fur from a badger for the box.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: Daniel Gonzales
Daniel—Octavio’s cousin and Manny’s brother—has successfully made a gun with a 3-D printer and shows it off. He thinks about Manny’s death and how “Manny wouldn’t like it that Octavio came over so much after he died” (188). As Daniel shows the gun to Octavio and his friends, he feels “in control,” but then Octavio takes it out of his hands, scaring Daniel. That night, Daniel responds to Manny’s last email, which read: “No matter what happens you know I’ll always be here for you” (189). Daniel writes a lengthy email to his deceased brother about his life, including how he has learned to code and 3-D print from YouTube videos. Daniel also explains that Octavio is going to give him $5,000 for all the guns he can print (193). When Daniel presents the guns, Octavio delivers on this promise, and Daniel decides to buy a drone and a pair of virtual reality goggles. He starts flying the drone over Oakland—including over the Coliseum where Bill tries to destroy it with a trash grabber. Daniel will use the drone camera to watch the powwow robbery remotely. Later that day, Daniel’s mom is surprised by the envelope of cash he has left for her.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: Blue
Blue, director of the Big Oakland Powwow, finally has a chance to share her story. All Blue knows about her biological mother is her name: Jacquie Red Feather. And because Blue was raised by an affluent white adoptive family, she is primarily disconnected from her Cheyenne heritage. For much of her life, she goes by Crystal, the adoptive name her parents gave her. As a young adult, Blue works for her “tribe in Oklahoma […as] a youth-services coordinator” (198). She meets a man named Paul and moves in with him almost immediately, starting a relationship that is “super unhealthy from the get-go” (198). She marries Paul in a tipi ceremony during which she receives a new name: Blue Vapor of Life, or “Blue” for short.
Soon, Paul starts hitting Blue. Eventually, she decides to leave Paul and go back to Oakland. She asks her coworker Geraldine for a ride. When Geraldine picks Blue up, Geraldine’s brother, Hector is “laid out in the backseat, passed out” (200) from alcohol and pain medication. After some time driving, Blue falls asleep. When she wakes up, Hector is reaching over Geraldine for the wheel, and the car crashes. Blue turns her phone on to call an ambulance, but Paul is calling her. She panics that he knows where she is and so texts him a lie about her whereabouts. She runs to the Greyhound station and hides in the bathroom. Blue hears Paul come into the bathroom, but a woman in the next stall tells him there is no one else in the bathroom. Paul leaves, and when Blue emerges from the stall, she asks the woman to help her get onto a bus to Oakland.
Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary: Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank, formerly the janitor at the Indian Center in Oakland, has been invited to drum at the Big Oakland Powwow. When he was born, Thomas’s father predicted he might be a drummer because of his arrhythmic heartbeat. Thomas joined the drum group Southern Moon on Thursday nights at the Indian Center. Although he liked the drumming, he had trouble with the singing.
As Thomas travels toward the Coliseum, he reflects on his life. He thinks about how people see him: “six feet, two thirty, chip on your shoulder so heavy it makes you lean, makes everyone look at it, your weight, what you carry” (215). Thomas also reflects on getting fired because of his drinking. That day, there was a bat in the Indian Center, and when he was asked to get rid of it, the bat bit him. He then “brought [his] hands together and […] crushed the bat in [his] hands” (220) in front of a large crowd.
Thomas arrives at the Coliseum and has to go through the metal detector several times. After finally getting waved through, he realizes that the issue was his steel-toed boots. As the drum circle prepares to open the powwow, Thomas “clear[s] a way for a prayer by thinking nothing” (225).
Part 3 Analysis
Many of the characters in There There struggle to feel in control of their lives. Opal, for example, “lives by a superstition she would never admit to” (160), organizing her spoons in specific ways and always starting her postal deliveries with odd numbers instead of even. Through her superstitions, Opal is able to “take back some sense of control” over the world around her (161). Other characters deal with these feelings in different ways. Daniel uses his internet relationships to craft a personality that differs from his real one, carefully choosing what he types and how he presents himself. Both Opal and Daniel escape their lack of control by managing their surroundings and how others view them. In contrast, Thomas gains a measure of control through escape—specifically, through alcohol. Thomas is able to deaden his body by drinking, which helps him feel better physically (218). The futility of each character’s coping strategy highlights the impossibility of controlling one’s world.
The relationship between masculinity and violence is central to the developing tension in Part 3. The characters reflect on the violence they witness or experience at the hands of the men in their lives. First, Opal is forced to protect her sister from Ronald, who at one point is “on his knees about to pull Jacquie to him” (166). This early incident is the catalyst that causes Opal and Jacquie to live separately through the foster system, which eventually leads to Opal taking care of the three boys. Octavio, Manny, and Daniel also experience violence frequently in their lives; in particular, Daniel is scarred by witnessing his brother’s death. Daniel feels that there had been a “tension building in [Manny…] like he’d been moving toward that bullet […] way before he got there” (189). The constant presence of violence creates a palpable tension for Daniel. Despite his sadness about his brother’s death, the loss also serves as the impetus for his creating the 3-D-printed guns, which will bring more violence.
To counteract the violence, characters reach for healing and ceremony. Multiple characters tap into traditional modes of medicine to deal with difficult situations. When Octavio is extremely sick, his grandmother has him make a medicine box, just as she did for herself as a child. Similarly, Blue regrets losing the medicine box Paul’s father made her. Orange’s novel deals explicitly with modern disconnection from tradition, and so each of these characters’ medicine boxes represents a legacy of ceremonial healing that can act as a critical intervention to Western society. Thomas seeks such intervention when he considers his participation in the drumming circle: On his first day at the community center, he hears “old songs that sang to the old sadness [he] always kept as close as skin without meaning to” (212). Despite his prior disconnection from traditional practices, Thomas immediately connects to these “old songs.”
