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Betsey Brown Study Guide & Notes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 98 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Betsey Brown.
This section contains 1,298 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Betsey Brown Study Guide

Betsey Brown Summary & Study Guide Description

Betsey Brown Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains For Further Study and a Free Quiz on Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange.

Betsey Brown Plot Summary

Preview of Betsey Brown Summary:

Set in 1959, Betsey Brown tells the story of a black thirteen-year-old as she confronts racial identity and inequality, developing sexuality, and family life in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of St. Louis. The novel opens by introducing the family and describing the rambling Victorian house where they live. The Brown family - including parents Jane and Greer, grandmother Vida, four children, and cousin Charlie - get ready for a day of school and work. Betsey, Jane's oldest and favorite daughter, practices a poem by the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dun-bar for an elocution contest at school. As the chaotic morning ends and the children go off to their all-black school, Vida airs her disapproval of the rising integration movement and cherishes the fact that her family lives in its "own world."

Betsey arrives at school and overhears two girls talking about Eugene Boyd, an older boy Betsey has...
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This section contains 1,298 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Betsey Brown Study Guide
Copyrights
Betsey Brown from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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