The year is 1963 in Flint, Michigan, and Kenneth "Kenny" Watson thinks that his bullying older brother, Byron, is a pain in the neck who's always itching for trouble. After his misbehavior goes too far, his parents decide to spend the summer down in Birmingham, Alabama, with Kenny's maternal grandmother to make Byron shape up. However, the timing of their road trip coincides with seething racial tensions in the Deep South, which are on the constant verge of imploding.
Tropes for this book include:
- Accent Relapse: Kenny notes that his mother, Wilona, reverts to her southern accent whenever she's extremely angry (pronouncing "here" as "he-uh", "buster" as "bust-ah", etc.). When they visit Grandma Sands in Birmingham, she and her mother talk to each other so southern style that Kenny can hardly discern much of what they're saying.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Joetta (or "Joey") is this to Kenny at times, often being fussy and prone to complaining or crying. Despite this, he's terrified for her life when he can't find her in the aftermath of the bombing.
- Big Brother Bully: Byron starts off as this, being a Jerkass who's obsessed with being cool and hip, constantly picks on kids at school, and casually punches Kenny when pissed off. He gets better later on.
- Big Brother Instinct:
- Kenny runs into the church after the bombing happens to look for Joey. Joey later tells him that she saw him telling her to come out of the church, which she isn't aware saved her life at the time.
- Byron goes to check on Kenny when his little brother spends months hiding behind the couch and tries to talk to him about what happened. He acknowledges there are bad people in the world, but life will go on and Kenny will be okay in the end because he needs to "keep on stepping".
- The Bully: Byron and his friend, Buphead, are the "gods" of their school because they're the oldest and strongest (due to still being in the sixth grade after being held back), and thus bully the younger kids with impunity. Another bully, Larry Dunn, is deemed the "king" of the kindergartners to the fourth graders because he's the third-oldest and stronger than everyone else.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The book begins with comedic vignettes in Kenny's life, ranging from his newfound friendship with Country Mouse Rufus Fry to Byron's getting in hot water with his mother over lighting matches in the house. The Watsons' trip to Alabama causes the story to shift to the dramatic, culminating in the Baptist Church bombing.
- Child Prodigy: Kenny's teachers think he's this because of how good he is at reading, and used to show him off to the classes to demonstrate his capability. It gets him picked on for being a "poindexter", but he thinks the only reason he doesn't get bullied even more over it is because of Byron's social status.
- Cool Big Bro: Byron eventually matures into this. When he finds Kenny hiding behind the couch, Byron coaxes him out by telling him that he somehow saved Joey's life and that it wasn't his fault the bombing happened.
- Country Mouse: Rufus Fry and his little brother Cody, the new students at Kenny's school, are hicks from the Deep South who wear ragged clothes, speak with obvious southern accents, and shot squirrels for dinner where they used to live.
- Death of a Child: The church bombing, which kills two girls shortly after Sunday school finishes. Kenny freaks out and walks into the aftermath trying to find Joey. Then he walks home in shock, and his family is horrified that he witnessed the tragedy. His mother and father are relieved neither Kenny nor Joey was hurt, but don't know how to talk about what happened.
- Death By Newberry Medal: Some girls get killed in the church bombing, and Kenny is terrified that Joey was caught in it with them. Even after it turns out she survived (and wasn't even in the church when it happened), Kenny is very shaken when the family returns home to Flint. When Byron talks to him about it, he admits he doesn't know why someone would want to kill little girls.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Byron calls Kenny "Poindexter" to mock him for being so scholarly, which he hates. In the first chapter, Kenny's father tells the kids about how he had to compete against a guy named Moses Henderson, nicknamed "Hambone Henderson" for his lumpy hambone-shaped head, for their mother's affections in their youth.
- Innocent Inaccurate: Kenny misunderstands a lot of information about the world:
- When told by their grandmother to stay away from the whirlpool, Byron makes up a story about how she was talking about a monster in the water called a "Wool-Pooh". Kenny initially doesn't buy it, but he ends up believing the Wool-Pooh actually exists when he almost drowns and thinks he sees it grabbing his leg. Later, he thinks that the Wool-Pooh nearly killed Joey and goes into a Heroic BSoD about it.
- He also notes that the pets hide behind the couch and come out better. Kenny dubs the space behind the couch the "World's Best Animal Hospital" in the hopes of feeling better about what he saw.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Byron starts off as a self-absorbed bully who picks on Kenny constantly, but eventually reveals a kinder side. He's the one who breaks Kenny out of his depressed and miserable state after the church bombing with a much-needed pep talk.
- Justified Title: Kenny's mother Wilona writes "The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963" on the cover of the notebook she uses to record all her plans for the trip.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Played with. Larry is The Bully, steals Kenny's gloves for himself (and paints them black to poorly hide it), and beats him and Rufus up by rubbing their faces in with snow, so it seems fitting that he gets bullied himself by Byron as "punishment" for stealing Kenny's gloves. But the way Byron punishes him is so brutal (he repeatedly throws Larry across the ice at a chain-link fence, and because Larry is wearing sneakers with no traction on the ice, he gets slammed face-first on the fence to the point of getting a bloody nose) that Kenny just feels sorry for Larry, and goes home with Rufus because he can't stand to keep watching it.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Is the Wool-Pooh real? And if so, was it trying to kill Joey, or did it save her? Kenny thinks that the Wool-Pooh was trying to kill Joey since it was holding her sock, but she says that she saw a vision of Kenny telling her to leave the church. Plus, as Byron puts it, there's no such thing as a Wool-Pooh. So if it wasn't a monster, who told Joey to get out of the church?
- Miniature Senior Citizens: Kenny describes Grandma Sands as looking like his mother Wilona, if she were shrunk down by five sizes and had all the juice sucked out of her.
- Morality Pet: For all his abrasive and unpleasant behavior in the beginning, Byron has a soft spot for Joey and is never as mean to her as he is to Kenny or to other kids in general.
- Noodle Incident: When telling Byron that he's going to stay with Grandma Sands to get straightened out, his mother lists off multiple incidents of misbehavior from him. While some of them are shown in the book (skipping school, lighting fires, exploiting his parents' food payment deal at the grocer's to scam free food out of it, getting a conk hairstyle) and others are self-explanatory (stealing change from his mom's purse, getting in fights, setting mousetraps, joining a gang), she mentions him having a "problem" with a girl named Mary Ann Hill that's never elaborated on.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Larry Dunn's idea of disguising Kenny's stolen leather gloves as his own is painting them black with shoe polish, which backfires when the polish inevitably gets washed off by snow.
- Parent with New Paramour: Wilona isn't very happy to learn that her mother, Grandma Sands, is now "best friends" with a man named Mr. Robert.
- Pet the Dog: When Byron accidentally kills a mourning dove by hitting it in the chest with a thrown cookie, he wipes the frosting off of it and buries it in a makeshift grave in the alley (complete with a pair of tied-together popsicle sticks for an improvised headstone). Kenny, however, sees it as Byron being a Hypocrite because of how much of a bully he is to other kids:Leave it to Daddy Cool to kill a bird, then give it a funeral. Leave it to Daddy Cool to torture human kids at school all day long and never have his conscience bother him but to feel sorry for a stupid little grayish brown bird.
- Pyromaniac: Byron enjoys lighting matches to set little parachutes made of toilet paper on fire and then flushing them down the toilet, all while pretending he's making a movie called Nazi Parachutes Attack America and Get Shot Down Over the Flint River by Captain Byron Watson and his Flamethrower of Death. His mother, being a survivor of a house fire in her childhood, does not take kindly to this after having warned him several times in the past over lighting matches in the house, and gets ready to do what she threatened him with before if he did it again—namely, burn him. She tries, but after Joey blows out her match five times in a row, she gives up and lets her husband deal with him.
- Terrible Artist: Wilona is apparently one, if her sketch of a bee and a flower on the cover of the notebook she recorded the plans for the family trip in is any indication. Kenny mistakes the bee for a fat bird and asks her why it's trying to land on a flower.
- Tongue on the Flagpole: In the first chapter, Byron gets his lips stuck on the frozen car mirror while he and Kenny are supposed to be scraping ice off. His father makes fun of him for trying to kiss his reflection and cracks up over the fact that Byron's tongue didn't get stuck, meaning he didn't get "too passionate with himself". Kenny's mother is not amused, and after using hot water doesn't work, she has to free Byron by ripping him off of the mirror (which means he wears tons of Vaseline on his mouth afterwards). Kenny learns that an easy way to get back at Byron is to remind him of the incident by calling him the "Lipless Wonder".
- Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Kenny sees his Big Brother Bully Byron meeting the cantankerous Grandma Sands for the first time in years as this, anticipating a massive fight between them (and even likening it to Godzilla versus King Kong). Needless to say, he's disappointed when Byron immediately submits to Grandma Sands and obeys her.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Byron vomits in front of Kenny after accidentally killing the mourning dove. He blames it on food poisoning from the apples he ate, but Kenny sees that he later made a grave for the bird (indicating that it was from guilt and disgust with himself).
- With Friends Like These...: Before Rufus's arrival, the only kid Kenny regularly played with was a boy named LJ Jones who kept stealing his plastic dinosaurs. Kenny initially tolerated it because he had no one else to play dinosaurs with, but cut ties with him for good after LJ tricked him into letting him steal half of his entire collection (namely, by telling him they needed to bury the dinosaurs because they were "radioactive" in their game about playing a war between American dinosaurs and Nazi dinosaurs, then going back late at night to dig up the dinosaurs from their mass graves).
- Would Hurt a Child: Kenny ends up witnessing the aftermath of the Baptist Church bombing, which killed four little girls, and is traumatized by it for months.
