August remembers her early days in Brooklyn: her father hid the family’s poverty from his children, making sure they were fed and taking them to Coney Island for fun. However, without a maternal presence in her life, her loneliness persisted. When another woman, Jennie, moved into their Brooklyn building, she and her brother took it as a sign that their mother would return. However, their father warned them to stay away from Jennie. Meanwhile, August had to go to a salon to have her hair cornrowed. She wrapped her hair in her mother’s silk slip at night, listening to Jennie entertain men through the building’s thin floorboards.

August thinks back to SweetGrove. She and her brother had grown up in a house that was deteriorating, yet joyful: it had been in her mother’s family for generations. Clyde and her father had lacked an instinct for farming, so the bulk of the work had fallen to her mother. However, property taxes and failed crops resulted in the requisitioning of the land, and when Clyde was drafted and killed, her mother had lost much of her family’s legacy and history.