Chapter 2 Summary

Janie explains to Phoeby that she never knew her father and hardly ever saw her mother. Raised by her grandmother in West Florida, Janie did not even know she was black until she was six. Her grandmother, whom everybody called Nanny, worked for a white family named the Washburns and lived behind their house. Janie played with the Washburn children and wore their cast-off clothes, and because of that, the other black children picked on her. They liked to crush her with stories of what her father did to her mother, about the sheriff and his bloodhounds chasing after him for it. Worried about her, Nanny managed to get a small house of her own, so they would not have to live in the white people's back yard.

Janie thinks back to the blossoming of the pear trees, and her first thoughts of...