Introduction and Chapters 1-4 Summary

The first and untitled chapter starts with a reminiscence of the narrator's mother making bread, kneading it with her brown fingers. The mother's two daughters love their mother, and they anticipate the good biscuits with fried chicken. They wait for their father to come home and ask them, 'what'd my two copper pennies do today?" (p. 3). The youngest daughter is afraid that something will happen to her father while he is working as a policeman. After a scrumptious dinner topped off with coconut cake, the youngest goes to the windows to relish the view of the Rocky Mountains. All of this is her, she says. But then the narrative says that it is all gone now.

In Chapter 1,Toswiah says that there is a song that says that "all that you have is your soul." (p. 9), and...