93 pages • 3 hours read
Gennifer CholdenkoAl Capone Does My Shirts
Fiction | Novel | Middle GradeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 21-22
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part Two
Chapter 21 Summary: It Never Rains on Monday
Thursday, March 28, 1935
The next two months are dismal for Moose and his friends: “On Alcatraz there’s nothing to do, no one to do it with and nothing to look forward to either” (125). Piper has been banished to her grandmother’s for getting in trouble and “mostly [Moose is] glad she’s gone. It makes everything easier” (125).
The doldrums break for Moose in March, when Piper returns exactly the same as ever: “It’s like the last two months haven’t happened for her. Her head is full of just as many schemes as it was before” (127).
Apparently, Piper has been reading the inmates’ mail, and has learned that Al Capone’s mom is coming to visit Alcatraz and she knows the exact date and time she will be on the boat. Because it’s just a simple boat ride, there is really no way for the kids to get in trouble. Piper doesn’t think bringing Natalie along is a good idea, but Moose tells her Natalie is none of her business.
Chapter 22 Summary: Al Capone’s Mama
Sunday, March 31, 1935
The only kids on the boat are Jimmy, Piper, and Moose. Just before they reach the dock at San Francisco, they hear a sound and turn around to see Theresa with her new baby brother Rocky, wrapped in a blanket. He is crying loudly and Theresa hands him to Jimmy to calm him, but with no luck.
Finally, they see Mrs. Capone on board. Piper politely introduces herself. Mrs. Capone tries to ignore her by reading a letter. Baby Rocky’s crying grabs Mrs. Capone’s attention and she asks to hold him:
As far as she’s concerned, there’s no one else on the boat but that black curly-haired baby. She sings to him all the way to Alcatraz. When the boat docks, baby Rocky is asleep […] She hands the peacefully sleeping infant back to Theresa Mattaman. Then the light in her face goes dark (133).
Mrs. Capone walks through a metal detector that sets off a loud alarm and she is escorted away. A guard tells Jimmy to get his mother quickly because she can speak Italian. By the time Jimmy returns, Mrs. Capone has left on the boat. It turns out they strip searched her for weapons and found none, but she was so humiliated, she had to leave.
This scene bothers Moose immensely. He understands her shame and recognizes that Al Capone was a young kid once too.
Chapters 21-22 Analysis
These chapters focus on the theme of parenthood. Until now, we have only seen the parenting style of two families: Moose’s mother and father, who are doing their best to care for an intellectual disabled child, and Piper’s father, who uses the same techniques to oversee prisoners and raise his daughter. Moose is too emotionally enmeshed with both of these authority figures, so he has never considered what the world might look like from a parental point of view—until he encounters Mrs. Capone about to visit her son in prison. Because she is a stranger, Moose observes Mrs. Capone with enough detachment to really see the world through her eyes. She is loving and maternal as she tenderly soothes little Rocky to sleep—a gesture that makes Moose think about the fact that this is how she must have taken care of Al Capone when he was a baby. Moose suddenly understands that ordinary, gentle people can be the parents of violent criminals—that parents are not necessarily responsible for how their children turn out.
For Moose, meeting Mrs. Capone becomes a lesson in empathy and further humanizes the men imprisoned on the island. However, through her, we also see the opposite—how the dehumanization of the prisoners echoes out into the world. When Mrs. Capone sets off a metal detector, the prison guards treat her horrifically, subjecting an elderly woman to a humiliating strip search. She has done nothing wrong, but the assumption is that she must be punished for even trying to come to visit her son—the prison guards do not see her as a vulnerable human being, but as an extension of her criminal son. Her powerlessness in the fact of that kind of force evokes pathos.
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