Make Lemonade

In Make Lemonade, the two principal characters, teenage girls LaVaughn and Jolly, both grow up in a depressed urban environment, and their surroundings have a substantial impact on their personal development and the choices they make. Wolff illustrates the challenges of growing up surrounded by poverty and violence, but also shows how these teens can overcome their circumstances and work toward a better life.

Throughout Make Lemonade, Wolff never specifies LaVaughn or Jolly’s ethnicity, so poverty rather than racism becomes the main force holding these two girls back throughout the novel. Early on in life, LaVaughn realizes that her family’s lack of money could keep her from achieving her dreams: when she’s only in fifth grade, her mother tells her they don’t have “college money” (10), and LaVaughn will have to earn it herself. LaVaughn wants to graduate from college so badly precisely so she can escape her poor community—she believes that after finishing college “you get a good job and you live in a nice place/with no gangs writing all over the walls” (9). This mythical “nice place,” which LaVaughn fantasizes about throughout the novel, forms a stark contrast with her current home: an apartment building where not a single tenant has gone to college, and where “every girl in the building” (15) has to take a self-defense class to stay safe. LaVaughn’s own father died as the accidental victim of a gang shooting when LaVaughn was young, so she is very aware of the irreparable damage that a violent community can cause.

LaVaughn’s poverty also forces her to juggle the responsibilities of school and a job, as she feels she must work to save money for college, while at the same time trying to keep her grades up. LaVaughn’s search for a job leads her to Jolly—and through her work and personal relationship with Jolly, LaVaughn is exposed to poverty and lack of opportunities even greater than her own. From the first time LaVaughn visits Jolly, she notes that her building “was broken-down looking” and “even a worse place than where we live” (6). LaVaughn sees Jolly dealing with violence and abuse—she is attacked by a former acquaintance, her face cut up, and she’s fired after being sexually harassed by her boss—and she learns how difficult Jolly’s childhood has been. After her foster mother died, Jolly lived on the street in a refrigerator box, dropped out of school, and became pregnant. Now Jolly must support not only herself, but two children, who also suffer from the family’s poverty. These children must grow up in a dirty, unsafe apartment, without medical care, and at times Jolly can’t even afford to buy them diapers.

While Wolff is unflinching in her portrayal of urban poverty and, in particular, it’s effect on young people, she also shows that resources exist to help young people rise above their surroundings. LaVaughn receives encouragement from her teachers to work hard in school and attend college, and her school even offers a self-esteem class that inspires her to believe in herself. Once Jolly joins the Moms Up program, she also gains self-confidence and valuable life skills as she works toward her GRE, while her children receive day care and medical attention. These programs can’t solve all of LaVaughn’s and Jolly’s problems—in Jolly’s case, “it’s like a plug got stuck in the sinking ship” (178), giving Jolly a bit of breathing room so she can work on making more lasting change.

Most of all, LaVaughn’s school and Jolly’s Moms Up program give these teens hope for the future. As Jolly learns from a story she’s told in school, the two girls can “make lemonade” (173) from the lemons in their lives. Despite leading lives of poverty, violence, and few opportunities, both Jolly and LaVaughn realize that through hard work and faith in their own abilities, they can create better lives for themselves and, in Jolly’s case, for her children as well. 

At one point in Make Lemonade, LaVaughn pictures herself, Jolly, and Jolly’s two children walking together like “a family from the continent of I don’t know what” (91). Throughout the novel, LaVaughn wrestles with the fact that neither Jolly’s family nor her own fit within the ideal of a traditional family unit. By the end of the novel, LaVaughn must find a way to transform “the continent of I don’t know what” into a new definition of family, one that acknowledges both the limitations and the strengths of unconventional families like those she witnesses in her community.

LaVaughn’s own father died when he was caught in the middle of a gang shooting, and LaVaughn was so young at the time that she only remembers him “in little tiny pieces” (46). LaVaughn thinks of her father’s death as her one “burden”—a “big one” (53). She wishes that she could share just “one conversation” (181) with her dad, could ask him if he’d help her pay for college and if he thinks she should pursue a teaching career. Clearly, LaVaughn feels that without a father in her family, something is missing, and so does LaVaughn’s mother. After her husband’s death, LaVaughn becomes a “big mom” (82) who has to fill the roles of both parents, which often leads her to be strict and demanding with LaVaughn. While LaVaughn’s mother certainly inspires her daughter and contributes to her success, LaVaughn has lost out on the softer, happier mom she catches glimpses of only in an old photograph of LaVaughn, her mother and her father appearing happy together.

While LaVaughn believes her family is missing a piece, her burden seems smaller when she considers that “Jolly’s burdens is probably too many to count” (53). For much of the novel, LaVaughn believes that Jolly has no family at all and spent her childhood in a box behind a hardware store, with other young “Box Guys and Box Girls” (52)—a group of homeless children who form their own ragtag attempt at a family. However, Jolly later reveals that she once lived with a foster mother she called Gram, and experienced a real sense of family that was ripped away when Gram died. Jolly recalls Gram taking care of her and teaching her how to work in the garden—how to accomplish something, how to make something grow—but now Jolly laments the fact that she “‘couldn’t go back and see [her Gram], ever’” (158). As an adolescent, completely adrift with no family to guide or support her, Jolly makes a series of bad decisions that lead her to become a teen mom and high-school dropout.

As a result of these decisions, Jolly now finds herself in charge of a different sort of family, as she is responsible for two young children. Jolly understands the importance of this family—she states that “my babies only got one thing in the whole world/and that’s me” (20)—and she avoids doing anything she fears might cause her to lose her children, such as accepting welfare. However, once LaVaughn becomes the children’s caretaker and, in a sense, becomes a part of Jolly’s family, she often considers how Jolly’s children would benefit from a traditional family unit. When Jeremy plants the lemon seeds LaVaughn has brought, LaVaughn thinks that for a moment “he looks just like those picture books./Where Mom wears an apron, Dad comes home from work […] and everybody has those NO PROBLEM/looks on their faces” (96). Of course, this image is a far cry from Jeremy’s real life in a dirty apartment, where Jeremy’s single mom can’t even afford dish soap. LaVaughn realizes that because of their unconventional, less-than-ideal family unit, Jeremy and his sister will face greater challenges throughout their lives.

However, by the end of Make Lemonade, LaVaughn sees that Jolly and her children are a family, and when it comes down to it, Jolly—like LaVaughn’s own mother—will do whatever it takes to keep her children safe. When Jilly nearly chokes to death and Jolly saves her life by performing CPR, LaVaughn will “never forget” (183) the way Jolly tells her daughter to breathe, with a voice “so clear I never heard a word so clear in my life” (188). In that moment, Jolly uses absolute focus and dedication to save her daughter, and LaVaughn sees that while Jeremy and Jilly might not have all the opportunities they would in a traditional family, they do have a mother who loves them.

As Make Lemonade ends, LaVaughn again wonders “how it would be for Jeremy/in another place […] where he’d have new clothes/that would go together in their colors and a dad” (199). Though she doesn’t say so, the reader has to suspect that LaVaughn is thinking about her own dad as well.