After dinner, Vivian makes an announcement that shocks everyone. It was an emotional bomb for her two sons, Robin and Little Von. It was particularly devastating for Robin, a struggling teenager trying to find his way. After giving in to her alcoholism for years, Vivian comes to a conclusion—a borrowed conclusion. She has to make a personal stand now! With no ideas left of her own, and without the false comfort of illusion, she embraces the echo’s of her parents, well wishers, and even her drinking buddies who seem less effected by their drinking. Everyone has offered the same wisdom. She has to fight for her self-respect and ‘pull herself up by her boot straps’ while there is still time.
This, she feels, can’t be done while living with her parents, Elderiah and Jessie Rose’s, in their comfortable middle class home. She knows they will care for the boys while she’s out drinking. However, the responsibility wasn’t theirs. Without the constant glare of it staring back at her, the recurring binging, arguing, being sick, followed by slow recovery periods, would never change the self-loathing she felt now. With tears and the burden of her shame, Vivian lays out her bold plan to recapture life.
They are moving. She has found an apartment in the Frederick Douglass projects. Little Von, 5, is frighten by the prospect of living away from the security of his grandparent’s quiet tree-lined neighborhood. Robin, on the other hands, is terrified. He has many friends who live in the “Freddy.” Despite being a black family moving to a black housing project, he knows they have no idea how to live in the tumultuous world of project survival—a way of life he and his brother have been sheltered from. The rules of living would be completely different. Their survival will depend on learning those rules quickly. This is the 1957 story of what happens to Vivian and her two boys as they fight to keep their family together in the Frederick Douglass projects.
