37 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline WoodsonIf You Come Softly
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Jeremiah is at his dad’s home thinking about kissing Ellie. Even though his dad has people over and asks Jeremiah to come out and say hello to them, he doesn’t want to. He eventually does, but then heads back to his room where he remembers the kiss with Ellie. He wants to tell someone how “strange and perfect it all was” (118). He can hear kids playing outside. He thinks back to how basketball has been a part of his life and how it feels to be at one with the basketball. Jeremiah remembers what it feels like to handle the ball, to feel it “leave his hands” and “sail into the basket” (119). He remembers helping one of the neighborhood kids, “Little Ray from down the block,” learn how to do this and what it felt like to pass that feeling on to someone else (119).
Chapter 13 Summary
Marion tells Ellie that Anne has called for her, and that she’s heard about Anne’s ceremony as well as Ellie’s boy. Marion wants Ellie to talk to her about things and assures Ellie that they can “be close” (122). Ellie thinks it’s too late for their relationship, but she doesn’t know how to tell Marion. Instead, she just assures her mother that she’ll talk when there is something to talk about. Watching Marion wash the dishes, Ellie thinks her mother looks lonely.
Chapter 14 Summary
When Jeremiah and Ellie begin their relationship officially, Jeremiah observes how “no one at Percy said anything” (123), and no one looks at them. He wants to bring the relationship up to his boys so he has someone to talk to. Jeremiah spots Black girls at school looking and talking about them. One day, on the steps of the school, Jeremiah and Ellie remain unnoticed, but another student asks to take a photo of them. The student snaps the photo and then the morning moves on “as if this moment, the moment of him and Ellie, had always been here” (125).
Chapter 15 Summary
Ellie remembers back to when Anne would talk to her about love when they were younger. She told Ellie there were different kinds: some that “happened slowly,” some that were like a “quick-fix binge,” and then, “perfect love” (126, 127) Perfect love has “no reason for it, no need to explain” (127). Ellie thinks about how when Jeremiah holds her hand, she thinks of nothing else. She hears a voice in her head saying, “Take this moment and run” (128).
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
Chapters 12 to 15 reveal the internal aftermath of Ellie and Jeremiah’s kiss and depict the ways that it has changed their understanding of the world around them. Ellie and Jeremiah continue to be consumed by the thought of each other and the surprise of this beautiful love. Ellie considers it to be a kind of perfect and unexplainable love that has changed her life for the better and prompts her to capture its goodness while it lasts. The note that the relationship might have an ending point is Woodson’s way of preparing the reader for the novel’s dramatic ending; already her characters consider the relationship with a sense of finality.
Jeremiah feels his love’s perfection the same way he feels the perfection of handling a basketball and sinking it into the net. He observes that even though some people take note of them together, most of the world just continues to move on as if the reality of him and Ellie together had always been there and will always be there. Both Ellie and Jeremiah privately examine the ways this relationship has changed them for the better, which demonstrates how a relationship like this can impact not just the way you exist in the world, but also the way you look at and understand the world around you.
These chapters also reveal some of Jeremiah and Ellie’s respective relationships and ambitions apart from one another, giving the characters depth and realism. Jeremiah feels passionately about basketball and poetically describes handling a ball. His descriptiveness suits his character as both the son of a writer and the type of boy who would memorize and recite a poem. We see him breaking traditional schoolboy stereotypes: He is both an athlete and a sensitive, introspective intellectual.
Ellie’s perspective centers on her family members. She is clearly close to her sister, as she internalizes Ann’s advice on love and reveals her feelings for Jeremiah to Ann before anyone else. Conversely, Ellie sees her mother as a kind of enemy, and she actively resists having a relationship with her. Though we never see this mother/daughter conflict resolved, in the Prologue, Ellie’s mother is sympathetic about Jeremiah’s death, and Ellie confides her dream to Marion. We can infer from this encounter that Ellie and Marion do, in fact, become closer after the events of the novel.
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By Jacqueline Woodson
