The Beginning of Homewood Summary & Study Guide

This Study Guide consists of approximately 35 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Beginning of Homewood.

The Beginning of Homewood Summary & Study Guide

This Study Guide consists of approximately 35 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Beginning of Homewood.
This section contains 401 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Beginning of Homewood Study Guide

The story opens as the narrator tries to explain how the story came into being. It began, he says, as a letter to his brother, which he "began writing on a Greek island two years ago, but never finished, never sent." Addressing his absent brother, he then proceeds to tell "the story that came before the letter," the story about his great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens and how she escaped slavery and settled in Pittsburgh in what is now known as Homewood.

At his grandfather's funeral, the narrator had heard the elderly aunts talk of Sybela and the beginnings of Homewood. Through the intervening voices of his aunt May and Bess, the narrator relates the story of Sybela's "escape, her five-hundred-mile flight through hostile, dangerous territory."

Having been a slave on a plantation near Cumberland, Maryland, Sybela escaped one night with her two small children and Charlie Bell...

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This section contains 401 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Beginning of Homewood Study Guide
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Gale
The Beginning of Homewood from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.