Chapter Summary

Willie is strong and confident and has a beautiful voice. When Willie goes to her father's union meeting, she draws people with her singing voice. Willie meets Robert Clifton in the union meeting she sings at, who she marries. When they are 20 years old, she gives birth to Carson, her son. However, a sad event strikes soon after Carson's conception, and Willie ends up losing both of her parents. Furthermore, Willie suggests that they leave Pratt city and relocate to New York, where Robert can find a new job, and she can find a singing job because Robert is dissatisfied with his job as a store employee. 

Later, Joe Turner, the schoolteacher in Harlem, greets Willie and Robert after arriving in New York. Willie starts to realize her skin complexion is why her husband us unable to find work. Further, complications regarding Willie's skin color arise and affect her and her light-skinned husband, who is presumed white. When Willie finds a job at a jazz nightclub, she feels that this is her chance to prove herself and her voice. However, she receives the unfortunate news that the only chance of her getting a job at the jazz club is through becoming the cleaning lady because the club's white owners prefer light-skinned singers. After that, Willie accepts the job as a cleaning lady but faces sexual assault from Robert in the men's bathroom. When she encounters Robert in the washroom, things escalate after encountering two white men, one of whom forces Robert to initiate a sexual encounter with Willie while he masturbates. Eventually, Willie's marriage ends because after Robert complies with the white man's request to assault her sexually, he leaves the marriage because of his embarrassment and shame. 

Furthermore, the chapter shows Willie's rejection of Joe's marriage proposal, which, later on, she moves out of his residence and gets herself and Carson, who is distressed by order of events, an apartment to live in. Although the series of events are painful for Willie, she finds comfort in the church, eventually marries Eli, the poet, and conceives Josephine, their daughter. Despite Eli and Willie's son's affectionate bond, Eli does not offer Willy much, but Willie finds comfort with Eli. Moreover, without singing, Willie starts attending the church's rehearsals as she finds peace with the church choir after Eli disappears, leaving her with Josephine alone. Some time afterward, Willie meets Robert while walking with Carson and witnesses Robert with a blonde white woman, but Willie smiles realizing she has moved on. At the end of the chapter, Willie regains her confidence and strength and returns to singing. 

Character Analysis

Willie

Willie is H and Esthe’s daughter. She grew up in Pratt city and met Robert Clifton who came to the union meeting with his father. Willie pushes Robert to the ground after hearing him say that her father was “old as dirt,” which shows her closeness to her father. Later, she marries Robert, has a son who they name Carson, and they together move to Harlem in New York. She stays strong even though she experiences a lot of racism. Her husband, on the other hand, is light-skinned, so he doesn’t have any trouble and ends up passing. For example, she goes to the auditions and they tell her she is too “dark” for a stage role; instead, they offer her a cleaning job. She witnesses a racist act on stage where the three actors pretend they are picking cotton and the audience, full of white people, have a good laugh at them. At the club she worked at, she decided to divorce her husband after the bathroom incident and left with Carson. She has to leave her son alone for hours while she goes to work because there is no one to look after him. She meets Eli, who was a poet and marries him. Josephine is her daughter with Eli. Moreover, their place was evicted three times and she was still determined to find a job that would aid her situation with her kids, even if she had to leave Josephine alone with Carson. Despite the troubles she had with her ex-husband, she forgave him and began to do what she truly loved to do, and that was singing her heart out. 

Robert

Carson

Carson is Willie and Robert's son. He resembled Robert a lot while growing up and that was the one thing Willie hated. Willie is forced to leave him, at first with a woman in their building, then all alone, because she needed to work. He accepted Eli and did not have any kind of hatred towards him. 

Joe Turner

Joe Turner is Joecy’s son who Willie and Robert knew when he was “Lil Joe.” He gave them a place to stay before moving to New York. He listened to Willie when she wanted to talk about how it is unfair that Robert is getting all the nice opportunities because he passes for white. After Robert abandons Willie, Joe asks Willie to marry him, but she could not bear it and leaves. 

Eli

Major Themes and Symbols

Segregation 

A major theme discussed in this chapter is the Segregation Willie experiences in New York because of the shade of skin. This is made noticeable to her when she first sees her husband as children. However, the difference in their skin tone grows more prominent when they move to Harlem, which, contrary to their expectations, is a northern city that is much more racially segregated than their hometown of Pratt City in Alabama. Willie and Robert quickly realized that Robert’s ability to pass as white can bring him better opportunities, which is what first establishes the distance between them. In the beginning, there is a sense of acceptance and sacrifice for her child, as “she would have to learn to live with” feeling lonely and separated from her husband and her dream of singing, refused to her because of the darkness of her skin (209). The chapter places clear, yet invisible lines on the segregation within the city of New York. We can see this in the family Willie works for, which settled “as close to the white folks as the city would allow” (211). Similarly, there are streets that mark the boundary between where Willie can go as opposed to where Robert can. In this city, Willie was made to feel “too dark” to ever achieve her dreams, “too dark” to find a job beyond cleaning, and “too dark” to walk in certain areas (211). 

Marriage 

Another major theme in the chapter is Marriage, Willie and Robert  grow apart due to their difference in skin tone, lack of communication, and contradicting life goals. Willie’s passion was to sing while Robert wanted to use his ability to pass as a white person to climb the ladder of social status and success. Although they agreed with each other’s goals prior to their migration to Harlem, there seems to be a growing distance between them as we witness Robert’s increasing absence and Willie’s stifled development in her singing career. At first, Willie equated their relationship to a “game of make-believe” (214), until she felt that “she has not recognized him” both metaphorically and physically (215). This shift in the story poses the question of what constitutes knowing someone, and what is it that changes a person to unrecognizable. To Willie, it is the fact that she was no longer able to know “the things that he could not yet let himself know” (215), which could be his once usual feelings of anxiety around new experiences that he no longer shared with her, or the reduced time he spent at home with his wife and child. In addition to that, Robert’s dialogue and presence also begins to decrease along the chapter, until he completely withdraws from the story that leads the reader to think of him as just another memory in Willie’s life. 

Passing  

Another major theme in the chapter is that of passing. We witness both Willie and Robert struggle with the privileges that Robert has simply for looking white. Similar to Quey, Robert has internal battles and guilt associated with his light-skin, as he was made to choose between his black identity and the uncharted advantages and immunities as a white man. This internal battle highlights that race is a social construct. The “gray suit” and “blue suit” exemplify this notion (216), as their ideas about Robert immediately switch as soon as they associated Robert with blackness, regardless of whether it was only the blackness or his wife or also that of his own. Still, his light-skin affords him advantages that Willie never has such as living in the “white” part of town and getting a job where he wears a suit. 

Brown Paper Bag

The shade of Willie’s skin appears as a prominent motif with the repeated use of color-specific adjectives to describe the people around her. Being compared to a paper bag was perhaps the most striking comparison of skin color to inanimate objects. The paper bag is a key symbol; Willie’s skin being darker is the only reason she is rejected from a singing role. That this is the business of entertainment, it highlights what was thought to be visually acceptable and beautiful, contributing to notions that dark skin is not. Early in the chapter, Willie appreciated the very different shades of skin color people can have: “mahogany-colored woman,” “man the color of milky tea”, “tree-bark woman” (202). However, the more oppression she faces as a result of the color of her skin, the less she associates these adjectives with positively connotated, vibrant colors. Later in the chapter, we see her exchange them with the simple “white” and “black,” highlighting the centrality that segregation has on her life. 

Pratt City and Coal 

A repeated motif is the reference to Pratt city, and precisely, Willie’s father’s occupation as a coal miner. Throughout the chapter, Willie applies comparisons between the northern city of New York and Pratt city in the South. Just as the physical distance between them, Willie feels that their ways of life were worlds apart. Yet, Willie attempts to tie both cities together. She aligns her craft of singing with coal mining that she grew up watching her father do: “she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out” (203). This comparison sets a parallel to how passionately she views her career in singing, equating it to that of  the energy exerted at a coal mine. 

The Spot of Mold on the Ceiling 

One prominent symbol in the chapter on Willie was the growing spot on the ceiling under which they sleep at night. At first, Willie “thought the spot looked beautiful” (208), indicative of her positive mindset when they first moved to New York. Later on, as her struggles with her husband started to worsen, she begins to envision the now larger spot as a “falling ceiling” (213). The spot seems to be foreshadowing her fears or predictions of her marriage with Robert. 

The Jazzing

The Jazzing was a significant symbol in the chapter on Willie as it marked the beginning and the end of her marriage with Robert. Willie felt the need to lie about getting hired at the Jazzing right around the same time that Robert started to come home late. For example, he once stated that she should quit working altogether: “We’re doing all right, Willie. We can get our own place soon, even. You don’t need to work” (212). Therefore, Willie sensed that Robert would not understand the desperate measures she chose to take, just to possibly get a chance to live her dream of singing. Seeing the depictions of black people as barbarians on the stage in the Jazzing left Willie deciding to not want to reduce herself by singing on that same stage. Willie’s journey with Robert also ends at the Jazzing, where they both were victims of sexual assault done by “grey suit” and “blue suit” (216). The assault is what ultimately led to her never seeing Robert again, but she also “shuddered” every time she passed by the Jazzing and loses her desire to sing, even years later (219). 

The Streets of New York

The walk that Willie takes with her son Carson, or “Sonny”, is another major motif that set the symbolic boundaries between black people and white ones. Willie did not dare challenge these restrictions herself, which is shown when she chooses to turn back around after reaching the “intersection” that separates the white neighborhood from the black one (221). Even with affluent black families that manage to achieve social mobility against all the odds, such as those that Willie herself experienced in the job market, they are still only “allowed” to teeter the line between the two regions separated by race. However, Willie managed to find herself within those boundaries. The church on West 128th between Lenox and Seventh is where she had started going to church, which led her to Eli (the father of her daughter Josephine); it is also where she allowed herself to sing for the first time ever since her assault, finding her voice through forgiveness. 

Key Quotations

Robert came back to the apartment. He had been to the barber, his hair cut close. (208)

Robert shaves his hair so that he could hide the texture of it, which would help him appear more white, enabling him to pass and therefore help him find a better paying job.

Being here meant they no longer walked together on the sidewalk. Robert always walked a little ahead of her, and they never touched. She never called his name anymore. (208)

This happens after Robert gets denied a job solely for the reason of being Willie’s husband, that is, because Willie is a black woman. Rob is thus discriminated against because of who he is associated with. This is the moment  they stop walking together to avoid being seen as associated with one another. It also marks the beginning of the physical separation, which culminates in Robert leaving and never coming back. This is important because the north was supposed to be less racist, and yet, “here”, in the northern city of New York, the two face much more discrimination than they ever did in the southern city of Pratt in Alabama.

He would not tell her exactly what he did for a living, but he came back home to her smelling like the sea and meat, and he made more money in a month than she had ever seen in her entire life. (210) 

Here we see the drift in Willie and Robert’s relationship. As she does not know where her husband works and he does not tell her either. We do not get to learn where Robert works, but we know that it is somewhere where it smells like the sea, and later on we learn that he wears a suit to work. 

In one of the shows, an actor had pretended to be lost in an African jungle. He was wearing a grass skirt and had marks painted on his head and arms. Instead of speaking, he would grunt. Periodically, he would flex his pecs and pound his chest. He picked up one of the tall, tan, and terrific girls and draped her over his shoulder like she was a rag doll. The audience had laughed and laughed. Once, Willie saw a show through the shield of her work that was meant to be a portrayal of the South. The three male actors, the darkest Willie had ever seen in the club, picked cotton on stage. Then one of the actors started complaining. He said that the sun was too hot, the cotton too white. He sat on the edge of the stage, lazily swinging his legs back and forth, back and forth. (212)

Here we see that though Willie was not allowed to perform in the Jazz club because she is black, they do allow darker actors to perform in specific shows. These actors are only men and they are depicted in extremely racist and stereotypical scenarios that misrepresent the actual life of people living in Africa. That the actors only grunt and that they play lazy slaves grateful for their masters feeds into the discourse of racism, race-based hierarchies, and myths of whites being more civilized. The novel therefore highlights the major problem of representation. For readers, this scene stands out as an anomaly as the book shows how people in Africa, and in particular, in the Gold Coast, had cultures, languages, civilizations, social structures, rules, traditions, economies, and trade agreements.

In the new apartment Willie had no Bess to leave him with, and so she left him by himself on days she went to work, making sure to shut the windows and lock the doors and hide the sharp things. At night she would find that he had put himself to sleep, the mattress soaked with his ever-present tears. (216)

At the time Robert had left Willie so she had to find a way to get money to feed and raise her son, therefore she had to work. She did not have enough money to get a babysitter or know anyone well enough to trust them to babysit Carson. Bringing him to work with her was not an option either; therefore, she had to leave him and hope he would be safe enough on his own to go work for another family, cleaning their house and raising their child.  

Her whole body was stiff like a piece of wood. Robert reached for her, and it took her a second to realize that she still controlled her body. (215)

This happenes after Robert rapes Willie in front of his work colleagues. She had braced herself to the point that her body was stiff. The trauma caused her to feel like she did not have control over her body, that she could not run or fight him back. She had completely shut down physically and mentaly, with no way to leave the situation. The scene exemplifies the recurring theme of the objectification of black women’s bodies. 

The fire of God is fallen from Heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. (216)

Even though fire is a major motif in this novel, this is the only mention of fire in this chapter. This comes as a reminder of the fire that happened in the start of the book that Effia’s mother set to run away from the Fante village which led her to the Asante village where she had Esi who is Willie’s great great-grandmother. 

Historical Context & Additional Resources 

This chapter of the novel starts around 1903, when the Great Migration of African Americans started. The great migration started in the year 1900 where around six million African Americans, both African born and US born, started migrating from the south to the north (Tolnay, 2003). Research shows that African Americans who lived near Georgia and South Carolina tended to migrate to cities near New York, Boston, and Philadelphia (Ballard, 1984).  In the novel, Willie and Robert move from Pratt City, outside of Birmingham,  to Harlem, which is a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. In this small area, African Americans were able to live and work; however, they were not welcome in the predominantly white neighborhoods in Manhattan. African Americans left the south, where there was racial violence, to the north, where they believed they would have better opportunities, economically, educationally, and in terms of living conditions for themselves, their families, and their children. Though that was not true for all those who moved north, in his paper about African American communities in the urban north Robert L. Boyd states that “The African Americans who migrated to northern cities during the early years of the Great Migration faced many obstacles as they struggled for a foothold in their new environment.” He also mentions that, there, they “confronted prejudice and outright hostility from the larger society.” This is shown in the chapter when Willie struggles to find a job and Robert is not offered any jobs when he is seen with her or being associated with her. Robert is later able to find a job because he looks white, and so is able to pass. He gets the treatment of white people.

Another important historical moment of this chapter is jazz music in the early 20th century. Though jazz music is very popular amongst all races , it actually started as African American folk music. In his research essay, “Jazz: A Bibliographical Essay,” William Kenney states that “jazz began in Afro-American folk culture and vocal traditions: the work songs, field hollers, song sermons, and ring shouts of the slaves and later the blues, spirituals, and instrumental musics of the freedmen.” The roots of Jazz music started with the oppressive practice of slavery and in the songs they sang in churches. African Americans used this form of art, a part of African American folklore, to express their emotions as well as experiences as enslaved people all the way to the many different moments of being made “free.” Research shows that the art of jazz started in the city of New Orleans in the year 1819, and with time, with the increase of the popularity of jazz, New York City became the capital of jazz music in the 1930s (Gennari, 1998). The connection jazz has to African American culture highlights the connection Willie has to singing and wanting to perform jazz music. Unfortunately, because of the prejudice in the north, she is unable to. The novel mentions Duke Ellington, who was a popular African American jazz musician. Ellington is a legacy in jazz music, and he has the largest amount of recorded jazz songs. He collaborated with numerous composers, and many artists studied his music and discography (Tucker & Ellington, 1995). In the novel, he is mentioned as performing a few marquees multiple nights a week. Sadly, Ellington and many other African American jazz artists lost their popularity by the end of the 1930s due to economic reasons (Knox, 1971). Jazz is mentioned multiple times again later on in the novel, which shows its importance to African American culture and roots.

Works Cited