Summary

Malcolm recalls returning to the Little house from his foster home and witnessing his mother being forcibly taken into custody by social services, who declared her mentally ill and sent her to an institution in Kalamazoo. The oldest siblings, Wilfred and Hilda, are permitted to stay in the house, the others are put into foster care.

In Chapter 5, Malcolm and Earl Willis see a lynched man hanging from a tree in the Pennsylvania countryside. Malcolm wonders what the man did, and recalls his father's death, when he was six years old. It was declared an “accident,” (67) his father supposedly having stepped in front of an oncoming streetcar, but there are rumors among the Littles' friends that he was pushed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Malcolm arrives in Boston in Chapter 6, and he is taken to Ella's home in Sugar Hill, an...