What the Fireflies Knew

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes a direct presentation of sexual assault in Quote 18.

“I ain’t scream at first, when I found him there, cold. I just walked back up the steps, quiet like Momma always taught me, and pushed open her heavy bedroom door. When I told her, she screamed, so finally I screamed. Momma screaming felt heavier, scarier, more real than Daddy laying limp in that little space beneath the stairs.”

KB’s calm reaction is vital to Kai Harris’s exposition of her character: It shows that she is accustomed to acting in adult ways when confronted with trauma. Her careful attention to her mother’s emotions and her imitation of her mother’s reaction shows how powerful KB’s desire to be like her mother is in shaping KB’s identity. The death of KB’s father is the inciting incident of the novel.

“The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees. I roll the new words over my tongue slow like dripping honey. Myriad, myriad, myriad. Orchard, what is an orchard? Bridal flush of pinky-white bloom. Sometimes I try to use words like in my book, but when I do Nia teases me, saying I don’t even know what I’m talking bout. But even if me and Anne don’t look the same, we can still talk the same and be alike in other ways.”

KB quotes lines from Anne of Green Gables, showing the importance of reading books about girlhood as she tries to understand her own life. She identifies with Anne, showing her belief that race need not be an impediment in her efforts to use the book as a primer on girlhood, yet her misunderstanding of Anne’s world (such as the “orchard” setting) anticipates the intersectional ideas that Harris will approach in the novel in relation to age, gender, race, and class.

“For a second, I feel like I’m back in that rotten basement again. First Daddy, now Momma. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine myself leaving one day, instead of always being left behind. But even this makes me feel sad. I wanna cry again, but I stretch my face into a cracked smile, like Momma. I been cryin’ or trying not to cry since the day Daddy died. Not no more. If Momma can fake a smile when she wants to cry, so can I.”

When KB connects finding her father’s body to standing there as her mother leaves her, Harris portrays the impact of trauma on how KB experiences life. Harris represents a psychological flashback using the potent word “rotten,” making the experience a sensory one. Her initial refusal to display her emotions shows that she has learned some ways of dealing with trauma that the novel presents are unhealthy.