Sag Harbor

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 3-4 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “If I Could Pay You Less, I Would”

Content Warning: The Chapter 4 Summary of this section includes a scene of parental abuse.

Benji gets a job at the popular ice cream parlor, Jonni Waffle, where he is paid only minimum wage but gets to eat as much ice cream as he wants. Benji excels at making the waffles on the grill during busy times, which is important since waffle cones are in high demand at Jonni Waffle, much preferred over the traditional sugar cone.

Benji rides his bike to work, taking the short cut by the beach. As he rides, he reflects on the various homes in his neighborhood, the modest bungalows as well as the Martins’ home, “A real Hamptons-style modern beach house, one you might see in a magazine when they ran out of white Hamptons houses to feature” (97). Benji’s shortcut takes him through both Azurest as well as “White Sag Harbor” (100). He tries to imagine the types of people who lived in Sag Harbor 150 years ago during the whaling boom, but the best he can conjure up are some of the Black sailors returning home.

When Benji arrives at work, he briefly mentions the vast array of ice cream vats and toppings available to the customer. He then describes one of his co-workers, Nick, who lives in Sag Harbor year-round. Benji finds Nick’s embrace of eighties Black fashion embarrassing, and yet he and his friends “worship” Nick’s gigantic radio that always gets attention (108).

Martine, the Dominican owner, hires mainly Black workers. NP speculates whether Martine is Black or not, since his race is ambiguous. NP thinks Martine is white due to his blonde hair and blue eyes, while Nick says that Martine is Black since Martine mainly hires Black workers. Nick also points to Martine’s “black walk” as evidence. When Martine pats Benji’s head, everyone notices. NP says, “Yo, Martine just patted you on the head like you were a pickaninny” (115). While NP sees it as a racist gesture, Nick interprets it as an example of brotherly approval. “‘Martine is black,’ Nick said. ‘He was just saying, ‘Good job, brotherman.’” (115). Benji says he wavers back and forth in his interpretation, unsure of whether the gesture is offensive.

Benji’s coworker Meg shows up for work, and Benji is immediately embarrassed by his stained Jonni Waffle uniform shirt. He likes Meg, especially her New Wave haircut. And Benji looks forward to, at least once a shift, when his elbow brushes her breast as they both reach to scoop ice cream. Her cousin, Marsha, also works at Jonni Waffle. The store is slow from 4-6 pm but then quickly gets busy as all types of people, tourists and locals, begin to file in and get their ice cream.

However, one night there is a storm, and then the electricity goes out during a blackout. The Jonni Waffle workers are excited when they end up getting the rest of the night off. They carefully insulate all the ice cream so it won’t be ruined by the warming temperatures. Then Benji returns to the store, claiming that he forgot his mix tape. He unlocks the freezer doors and on purpose leaves the doors open. He doesn’t explain to the reader why he does it. He seems pleased, imagining the softening of the ice cream “[as] the night grows long, the containers at the bottom of the pile start to buckle under their burden. What is inside has gone soft and weak” (144). He is fascinated by the dissolution of the much sought after ice cream, and he imagines the rainbow mess and chaos moving in a slow wave, “reaching toward me like a hand” (144).

There is no mention of the ruined ice cream when Benji returns to work, but there is a new instructions sheet posted, warning workers to make sure they keep the freezer doors shut. Benji then flashes forward a year, showing how the list still hangs there, next to a picture of Martine’s family. Martine’s brother is Black, which seems to solve the mystery of Martine’s race. Benji also mentions that he would work at Jonni Waffle for two more summers, eating so much ice cream that he would grow to hate dessert: “It’s a terrible thing to hate dessert, to remove yourself from the ways of civilized people” (144).

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Gangsters”

Benji goes to Randy’s house to hang out with Randy and NP for the day. Randy has a BB gun with copper bullets, and he shoots a bird with it. NP also wants to play with the gun. Benji wishes they could do something else and eventually leaves. “I thought we were past playing with guns” (151), he says. Bobby is the next to get a BB gun, and he invites Benji to come over. Bobby taunts Benji when Benji says he doesn’t want to play. Bobby pretends to aim the gun at Benji’s face. Bobby says the safety is on, but then he accidentally shoots a plastic bullet that bounces around the room.

The next week, Randy, Clive, NP, and Benji go to a parking lot and begin target practice with their BB guns. They place various items on a rusted old car for target practice, “a porcelain vase, a bunch of drinking glasses with groovy ‘60s designs, a Nerf football with tooth marks in it, a bottle of red nail polish, and other junk chosen for its breakable qualities” (156). Benji wants to leave, but Clive convinces him to shoot the gun. Benji can hit the radio and is praised by everyone. They put other items on the car, which Benji can hit. Benji finds himself enjoying the activity despite his earlier boredom: “I had to admit it was fun. Not the shooting itself, but the satisfaction of discovering a new way to kill a chunk of summer” (157). The day ends when Randy and NP fight over their shooting abilities, resulting in the rest of the boys breaking up the fight.

Benji then has a flashback to when he was younger and a French boy at school made fun of his race. He says of the uncomfortable moment, “Tony Reece reached over to my face, dragged a finger down my cheek, and said, ‘Look—it doesn’t come off’” (162). The incident doesn’t bother Benji too much, but when Benji’s mother tells his father what has happened, Benji’s father asks Benji why he didn’t fight back. His father replies for him, “You were afraid he was going to hit you back” (163). His father then proceeds to hit Benji over and over, asking him repeatedly, “Can he hit you harder than this?” (163). When Benji finally says, “No,” his father stops and tells him that there is nothing to fear from fighting back. The moment is pivotal for Benji, but not in the way his father intended: “The lesson was, Don’t be afraid of being hit, but over the years I took it as, No one can hurt you more than I can” (164). The next day Benji goes up to Tony Reece and punches him hard.

One night, the friends decide to plan a BB gunfight. They establish ground rules for the fight: “I said we should all wear goggles just in case, and to my surprise they seemed to agree” (177). Another rule is that Randy is limited in the number of times he can pump his rifle since pumping five times would break the skin, as they discover when they test this out on Marcus. Benji insists that Randy pump no more than two times. Benji worries about Reggie getting hurt, so he plans for the fight to occur when Reggie will be working at Burger King.

On the day of the fight, Reggie gets his shift covered so he can participate. Benji tries to get him to stay home, but Reggie refuses. As they set up teams, Reggie chooses to side with Bobby, and Benji is surprised that he is no longer automatically teamed with his brother. No one else notices this. When Benji reminds everyone to wear goggles, they all refuse. During the fight, Randy hits Benji near his left eye. Reggie worries about Benji and wants to take him to the hospital, but Marcus worries that doing so will get them all in trouble. Benji is happy to hear his brother worried over him, but he tells Reggie that he doesn’t need to go to the hospital. They go home.

The next morning, Benji decides to get the bullet out. Reggie goes to the store to get razor blades. Reggie, worried, says, “I don’t want anything to happen to you” (190). Benji reassures him, as he tries to squeeze the BB out. He is unable to cut the bullet out. Benji worries about what will happen when his parents get home. When the parents get home, they don’t even notice. The adult Benji tells us the BB is still lodged under his skin.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Benji is 15, a pivotal age as he transitions from childhood to adulthood. While he is excited about some aspects of growing older, such as being seen as more mature, cooler, and more popular, he is anxious about losing his childhood as well as losing the boundaries that have governed his upbringing, which are starting to disappear. He is excited to have a job, enjoying many aspects of Jonni Waffle, especially the chance to work in close quarters with girls. He jeopardizes his job when he intentionally leaves the freezer door open during a blackout, ruining all the ice cream. Benji is at a loss to explain his actions, which is notable because he is usually very good at explaining all of his actions in great detail.

The underlying motivation for Benji’s actions at work could be interpreted as revenge for Martine’s patting him on the head earlier that week. NP interpreted the gesture as racial, saying that the boss treated Benji as a “pickaninny” (a racially offensive term to refer to a small child) while Nick assumes the pat was an innocent gesture. Benji says that his own interpretation kept changing, but on “the day our electricity went out, I inclined toward NP and his vision of eternal, unending race warfare” (117). Perhaps ruining the ice cream is a way to get revenge without getting in trouble.

Martine’s patting of his head recalls when Benji punched someone for doing something similar:

I had punched a white classmate or two or three, some boys and a girl, in the stomach or the eye, during my early elementary-school years for inappropriate ‘Fro-touching. […] I punched them according to my father’s lessons (116).

While Benji is often depicted as mild-mannered, anxious, and often timid, his father has taught Benji to always fight back against any racial insult. In a particularly brutal scene, Benji’s father punches Benji three times to teach him not to be afraid of fighting back when he assumes Benji is scared of fighting. Benji’s father wants him to be hard:

You were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood, the state of your erected self. Word on the Street was that we were soft, with our private-school uniforms, in our cozy beach communities, so we learned to walk like hard rocks (176).

Benji has absorbed his father’s lessons about being a young Black man.

Benji’s “hardness” can also be seen in the fact that he is extremely rulebound. Benji appreciates the clear, hard rules at home and work that dictate his life. He worries when people don’t follow the rules and become unpredictable. He fears the chaos that lurks beneath the surface, since he is aware of strange, inexplicable forces at work that create an epidemic of “other families,” fathers who divorce and disappear, no longer returning to Sag Harbor like NP’s dad. He is also fearful of other seemingly trivial but to Benji no less disorienting changes, such as the replacement of Coca Cola with New Coke, a shocking change for Benji that results in Benji’s hoarding and eventually attempting to steal a six-pack of Classic Coke that he discovers at a party, going against his firm convictions against stealing.

Yet, while Benji insists on keeping inside the hard outlines of his known world, at the same time he is drawn to the inexorable force of change and chaos, wanting to touch the edges of the vortex without falling in. He describes in detail his fascination with the melting of the ice cream:

It’s dark, and no one can see it but me, I can see it, the rainbow calamity on the tile, the green mint and bloodred sherbet and other assorted plenty in a cookie-clotted sludge oozing out across the floor, marshmallows floating like broken teeth, all this in a slow and ugly wave, reaching toward me like a hand (144).

He is fascinated by the power inherent in such softness. His description of the “ugly wave” recalls his earlier experience in the ocean in Chapter 2, when he is in the water with friends and suddenly can no longer touch the bottom. He panics that he is caught in an undertow and will be swept away to Europe until Clive reaches out a hand to bring him safely in.