up a story of the Wool Pooh, whom he says is Winnie the Pooh's evil twin brother:

"What he does is hide underwater and snatch stupid kids down with him."

Clearly, Byron is creating a fictional monster out of the whirpool and the strong currents that there are in Collier's Landing. However, in spite of these threats, Kenny goes and starts paddling in the water by Collier's Landing. At first he tries to catch some fish, then as he makes a grab for a big turtle, he loses his footing and finds that he can't make his way back to shore. When he gets really scared, that is when Kenny sees the Wool Pooh, who is:

...big and grey with hard square-looking fingers. Where he should have had a face there was nothing but dark grey. Where he should have had eyes there was nothing but a darker colder-looking colour. He grabbed my leg and started pulling me down.

As he fights with the Wool Pooh, Kenny imagines that he sees an angel who looks like Joey who encourages him to fight for air. Then he realises that Byron is in the water with him, fighting the Wool Pooh for Kenny. Finally, Byron wins, and drags Kenny out of the water. Kenny then vomits up lots of water and food and Byron cries in relief.

Kenny is the middle child of the Watson family and as a result feels left out because all the attention is received either by his older brother, Bryon, who is a rebel and constantly getting into problems at school, or by his younger sister, Joetta. It is clear that he has few friends at school. The only friend he did have only used to play with him because he could steal dinosaurs, which Kenny considers to be a "fair trade." Kenny has two problems at school that unfortunately mark him out as a target to be bullied and shunned.

Firstly, Kenny is very good at reading and enjoys it a lot:

Teachers started treating me different than other kids when I was in the first grade. At first I thought it was cool for them to think I was smart but then I found out it made me enemies with some of the other kids.

The most humiliating moment for Kenny comes when he is forced by a teacher to read in front of Byron's grade to set them a good example of what they could achieve. This intelligence makes Kenny get bullied a lot, and the other kids of the school call him Pointdexter.

Secondly, Kenny has a "lazy eye," which, in spite of many efforts to correct it, still remains looking in a different direction from Kenny's good eye. The result of this, in addition to his intelligence, means that Kenny is a natural target for being bullied, in spite of having the protection of Byron:

I still had to fight a lot and still got called Cockeye Kenny and I still had people stare at my eye and I still had to watch when they made their eyes go crossed when they were teasing me.

Thus we can infer that Kenny is a sensitive boy who is ostracised socially at school because of his intelligence and his eye. As such he is lonely and spends lots of time by himself.

Kenny's nickname for the family is the 'Weird Watsons.'

In the novel, Kenny is ten years old. At the beginning of the story, all five members of the Watson family are wrapped up in blankets against the cold of a Michigan winter's day.

Mr. Watson turns on the television to get his family to forget about the cold. Unfortunately, the newscaster informs viewers that the weather is likely to get colder as the night approaches. Undefeated, Kenny's father tries to tell a funny story about his wife's former suitor, Moses 'Hambone' Henderson. His humorous story-telling style has the kids in stitches.

However, Mrs. Watson says that she should have listened to Moses and stayed in Alabama, where life is slower-paced and the people friendlier. Her husband contends that black people still live under the Jim Crow laws in Alabama, but Mrs. Watson counters that, in Alabama, 'people are more honest about the way they feel' and 'folks there do know how to respect their parents.'

Eventually, Kenny's father decides to contact Aunt Cydney to ask whether they can spend the night at her house. Accordingly, Aunt Cydney just had a new furnace put in, and her house is always warm. All five go outside to get the family's 1948 Plymouth (nicknamed the 'Brown Bomber') ready for the trip. Kenny's father assigns the boys to scrape ice off the windows of the car. Both Kenny and Byron (By) quibble over the work they have to do. For himself, By isn't too interested in cleaning off the windows.

However, Kenny soon realizes that something is wrong when By calls for help in a funny way. When he turns to look, Kenny realizes that By's lips are stuck to the mirror on the side of the car. Aside from Mr. Watson dissolving into bouts of uncontrollable laughter, no one quite knows how to extricate By from his unfortunate predicament.

Kenny states that this incident, which involves all of his family members crying in the driveway on a cold, winter's day, is the reason why all the neighbors dub the family the 'Weird Watsons.'

It’s no wonder the neighbors called us the Weird Watsons behind our backs.There we were, all five of us standing around a car with the temperature about a million degrees below zero and each and every one of us crying!

Written by American children’s author, Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 was published in 1995 and is his first novel.

Kenny is the eleven-year-old narrator of the story. He is the middle child of an African-American family. In chapter fourteen, Kenny is at home in bed whilst his five-year-old sister, Joetta ("Joey"), is attending Sunday School in the local church. When a bomb hits the church, Kenny runs to the site with his family and neighbors.

It looked like someone had set off a people magnet, it seemed like everyone in Birmingham was running down the street, it looked like a river of scared brown bodies was being jerked in the same direction that By had gone, so I followed.

Whilst his family is searching for his sister, Kenny finds a shiny black shoe under the rubble. It is like the one Joey was wearing, and when he pulls at it, there is a foot inside.

Kenny takes the shoe and returns to his Grandma’s house. As he is sitting on his bed, Joey appears and talks to him from the doorway. But, Kenny thinks that she is dead and that this is her spirit coming to say goodbye to him. It is only when he looks at her and notices that she is wearing both of her shoes that he realizes that she is not dead after all.

Joey tells him that she did go to Sunday School but had gone to stand outside, as it was too hot inside the church. Joey says she had then seen Kenny across the street wearing different clothes and had followed him back to their Grandma’s house. They are both confused, as this could not have been Kenny. Kenny then leaves the house and heads back to the church to tell his family the good news.

Kenny’s middle name is Bernard.

Kenny’s full name is Kenneth Bernard Watson.  When he tells his mother that Byron was frozen to the car, his mother says his full name when she asks him what is going on.

“Kenneth Bernard Watson, what on earth are you talking about?” (ch 1, p. 13)

As in many cases, Kenny’s mother calls him by his complete full name when she is upset or mad at him.  It is a way of signaling to him that he is annoyed.  In this case, it is actually Byron she should be annoyed at.  He is the one who got his lips stuck to the car mirror.

Kenny doesn't go to a separate church than his family. However, when he hears that Joey's church has been bombed (page 183), he goes into a daze and is the only one in the family that doesn't run immediately to the church. When he does get there, he ignores his family, goes into the church, and among the smoke and the ruins, sees a shoe that looks likes his sister's. It's only later that he finds out that Joey had in fact left the church before the bomb went off. She tells her brother that someone that looked like Kenny had waved to her from across the street and, as the church was so hot at the time, she ran toward the stranger to say hello.