51 pages • 1 hour read
Marlon JamesThe Book of Night Women
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Nightwomen”
Part 3, Chapter 20 Summary
It is October, which means it is crop time at Montpelier. That means five months of work that will kill one-fifth of the enslaved people working in the field and worry everyone else.
While delivering Isobel’s breakfast, Lilith sees Isobel’s clothes for a man and dirty boots on the ground when Wilson asks to come in. Lilith hides the clothes for Isobel and then continues to clean the clothes and polish her boots every night. She sees Isobel pour a flask into her tea and smells something more than alcohol in the flask and on her clothes. Lilith hears Wilson reject Isobel’s advances, and Isobel says she is no better than a whore and she at least wants some pleasure. Wilson starts to avoid Isobel’s room.
Lilith comes upstairs one morning to Quinn and Homer eating together. Quinn says that he will take Lilith to live with him.
Part 3, Chapter 21 Summary
The chapter begins with the narrator describing all the horrifying actions of white people. Then they describe how naturally the people receiving the abuse get tired of it and fight back. In 1784 they tried to rebel and trapped Jack Wilkins in a swamp, but he killed both men who tried to kill him. He rapes one’s sister, and after the bloody birth that killed the girl, Wilkins feels guilty, so he strikes a deal with Circe and Tantalus. Circe would be almost free if she kept Lilith.
After that, the enslaved people were rebellious in small ways and Wilkins convinced the master that they needed to be taught a lesson. He took a 16-year-old girl and tied her to a tree trunk and set her on fire. They were forced to watch because the other men pointed guns at the back of their heads. After that they were docile, but the fire is still there and waiting for kindling.
Part 3, Chapter 22 Summary
Lilith cleans Quinn’s house and cooks dinner while he’s away. He brings her to his bed after and has sex with her. She likes the feeling despite herself. He calls her lovey during the sex.
Lilith wills herself to hate him, trying to remember the scars he left on her back with the whippings, but she struggles. Homer notices this when she asks about their sex and says that hate and love are closer than like and dislike. She tells Lilith they are meeting in the cave later that night.
After Homer tells Lilith that it will give her power, Lilith blows Quinn that night because. She is amazed at how Quinn responds, moaning and arching his back. She goes to the cave to meet the six women and they do a ceremony with a pot wherein they sing. Lilith tries to understand what they are planning, and Homer says no Black woman is safe while white men live. Homer finally explains that they are going to kill them all. Lilith goes back to Quinn’s house and he spoons her.
Part 3, Chapter 23 Summary
Lilith feels like something is wrong with her because she cannot manage to hate Quinn. She feels like she is betraying her race by feeling anything positive toward him.
One night he leaves for the night because of crop season, and the same yellow-haired man comes into their house and traps Lilith as she screams, trying to rape her. Quinn comes back and shoots him in the ass and shoos him away. He tries to talk to Lilith and says she has nothing to be afraid of. He explains that before he could not protect her but now he can. He shows her his book The Faerie Queen and she pretends she does not know how to read. That night she sneaks out to see Isobel ride by and Quinn finds her. He grabs her neck and yells at her, saying he should have left her to the man who tried to rape her. Then Isobel rides by and Quinn takes off on his horse. When he returns in the early morning, he tells Lilith not to tell anyone about Isobel.
Part 3, Chapter 24 Summary
Gorgon tells Lilith they have a meeting that night. Isobel receives a trunk in the mail with clothes in it and gives some old ones to Lilith. Quinn gets home late and is too tired to have sex, so they just talk. Lilith realizes, however, that he is still mad at her. That night Lilith does not attend the meeting, staying with Quinn instead.
The next day Homer is angry with her because she skipped the meeting. She tells Lilith to stop feeling soft for Quinn because all day he’s out in the field whipping and killing her people. Homer reveals that she killed Circe because Circe was going to tell Wilson about their plan and she knew the other enslaved people at Coulibre did not set the fire. Homer sees something more in Lilith—she has already killed several white people. Lilith says she didn’t do it on purpose. Homer threatens to reveal Lilith set the fire if she does not attend the next meeting.
Lilith shatters a plate after seeing the night woman during the day. Quinn comes home yelling at her, but when she begs him not to kill her and to buy a new one, he softens and says it’s alright.
Isobel does not like that Lilith is living with Quinn and she begins asking about their sex, saying that Black people are bestial and bottomless and they bewitch white men. Isobel says they are cut from the same cloth because Isobel is from the West Indies, and she slips into talking like they do. Isobel says she practices Obeah.
The next day Homer tells Lilith that Quinn yelled at Wilson about Isobel’s request to move Lilith back into the house to wait on her. Lilith keeps seeing the woman and wonders what she wants from her—is she urging Lilith to do something or warning her something will happen?
Two days later the harbor at Kingston is set on fire.
Part 3, Chapter 25 Summary
Quinn rants about how wrong it is that Wilson is marrying Isobel, saying she manipulated him. Quinn asks Lilith to call him Robert instead of massa within the walls of the bedroom. She says she can’t and then he orders her to. She wonders why white people always act kind just to take it away.
Isobel takes Lilith to Kingston and Lilith sees a slave market where she watches a man and a woman be auctioned off.
When Lilith is back, she speaks to Homer about how it feels to kill someone with her hands. Lilith says it felt so good in the moment but haunts her so much that it made her understand why white people are masters: because they are the only ones who can bear the weight of the killing. Homer tells Lilith that the rebellion will happen tomorrow.
She hears Wilson and Quinn arguing about Isobel. Quinn begs him not to marry her and Wilson asserts his power over Quinn. Quinn sees Lilith in the doorway and slaps her. Lilith doesn’t feel surprised or sad but she feels the darkness. The next morning Quinn says he has been dismissed.
Part 3 Analysis
This section, called Nightwomen, continues to develop one conflict of the novel, which is the effort to escape The Cycle of Violence that characterizes slavery. Lilith further establishes her identity, experiencing pleasure, inching toward love, and refusing to act on getting revenge.
James vividly describes the brutal abuse of the enslaved people to tell the truth about the extent of the enslavers’ cruelty and to demonstrate the inevitability of retaliation in The Cycle of Violence. The narrator tells the story of the Montpelier rebellion that resulted in Lilith’s birth: Enslaved people tried to rebel, Wilkins killed them, and then he raped a young girl who gave birth to Lillith. Lilith grew up to burn down Coulibre, continuing The Cycle of Violence. Lilith’s circular fate is one example of the truth that “every negro walk in a circle” (313).
While Wilkins temporarily quelled the rebellion at Montpelier, the end of the chapter notes that “some fire don’t go out,” and white men still “sleep with one eye open, waiting for the fire next time” (266). This line alludes to several pieces of relevant history: The Fire Next Time is a nonfiction book written by James Baldwin, a Black American writer. The title of Baldwin’s book is a reference to a line in a Black Spiritual song that says, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!” In his book, Baldwin uses the phrase to argue that until America faces its bloody history it will face an even worse, more destructive future, continuing The Cycle of Violence until everything is destroyed. In The Book of Night Women, James echoes this idea, using the phrase to warn of the inevitability of a violent rebellion under enslavement and hint at the fact that there is no end within The Cycle of Violence without an apocalyptic result. By referencing Baldwin’s work, James gestures at the fact that, over 150 years later in the United States, a Black writer still implores people to face their histories and themselves. Through the mode of historical fiction, James conveys that the book’s message still holds true today and that the cycle of violence has not been truly resolved.
This section also continues to explore the complications of Lilith’s identity. The book shows Lilith experiencing pleasure during sex for the first time. Lilith’s relationship to sex is parallel to her relationship with being a woman: She fears and avoids it, but she feels it and it confuses her. Her relationship with Quinn begins with sex that is rape because Lilith has no choice but to partake. Their sex, however, is as complicated as Lilith’s relationship with other aspects of her identity. She feels shame that she feels pleasure, and the two feelings of shame and pleasure mix: His voice “shame her as it sweet her and she try to hold on to hating Robert Quinn” (269). Lilith’s sexual experiences with Quinn thus become a microcosm for the tension of shame and pleasure Lilith also feels for seeking vengeance on her enslavers.
Lilith’s relationship with sex also poses questions about The Search for Autonomy Under Slavery and whether this is an impossible aim. As an enslaved woman, she is denied the right to find her own pleasure, yet when she finds pleasure under enslavement, it feels wrong because she could not have chosen it for herself. She can choose to live a life with no pleasure or she can take the pleasure she can find within slavery. Lilith ultimately holds tightly to the happiness she finds—the only piece of love that resembles her childhood fantasies of princes and gentlemen—but she endures the public shame of finding it. The book therefore suggests that part of the paradox of slavery is that an enslaved person must either betray themselves, betray their people, or die. Lilith tries all three at various points in the story.
The text further emphasizes The Search for Autonomy Under Slavery when Quinn asks her to call him Robert instead of massa in their house. When she refuses, he commands her and she responds, “You commanding a slave to be free?” (317). Her rhetorical question reveals the irony in his request. She knows that calling him by his first name does not change the fact that she must obey him. It may hide the truth from them both, but she cannot give him everything because eventually they will turn back into enslaved and enslaver, and she will face the consequences. As he inches toward familiarity with her, she becomes increasingly scared of her feelings toward him knowing they will lead only to pain. No matter how close Lilith gets to approximating her fantasies about her freedom and love, she remains enslaved. Lilith therefore struggles to figure out whether these fantasies do more to help or hurt her sense of self.
Back at Montpelier, Lilith attends the meetings of the night women and tries to express why she cannot participate in the murder that rebellion requires. She tries to explain to Homer, “[y]ou kill just one time and you know why God save murder for himself. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And good. Good. Good. Too good […] You do it and you know why white man be master over we […] Only white man can live with how terrible that be” (329). Her speech explains the guilt she lives with: Not only did she kill people, but she enjoyed it. She lives haunted by the lives she ended and the knowledge that she is capable of the actions that make white men monsters.
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