The Watsons Go To Birmingham

6 Pages 1515 Words

The Watsons go to Birmingham is a novel about a family named the Watsons living a very cold life in Flint, Michigan. The mom in dad have two boys Byron,14 and Kenny,10 they also have a daughter named Joetta(they call her Joey for short) . The dad is a Flint native and the mom is from Birmingham,Alabama. Whenever something bad having to do the cold happens the mom would go on about how she should have listened to her mom and got married with Moses “Ham bone” Henderson . The dad would then start talking about him by telling his kids about how he got his name Ham bone. He would say that was the shape of his head, a ham bone. He would tell his kids that they were lucky that they’re mom didn’t marry Ham bone Henderson because they would be little hambonnets. Everyone laughed at the dad jokes but Byron. He was almost 15 and felt he should be more mature and should act like an adult instead of a kid.
A really funny part of the book was at the beginning of the story when the dad asked the kids to go out and scrape the car windows.
Byron and Kenny went and did it. The car which the family calls the brown bomber had a bar in the middle which separated the car into halves and they used that to separate the sides so they boys would have the same amount they would have to scrape. Kenny was scraping his side but Byron wasn’t doing his share of the scraping. Kenny thought that Byron was going to try to get his way out of doing his share of the car. Kenny kept telling him he was only going to do his side of the car and go inside the house. Byron was just ignoring his brother and started saying things to himself like don’t know how a woman and a man so ugly would have a child as beautiful as me. When Kenny was about halfway through finishing his side of the car Byron started lightly saying Kenny’s name over and over again. Kenny just ignored him because he thought that this would just be another plan of Byron’s to tr...