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.
Parts 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Oriki” - Part 5: “Gehenna”
Part 4, Chapter 26 Summary
McClusky tells Quinn that he will take his house when he leaves and he’ll keep Lilith there too. Lilith points a loaded musket at him, Quinn threatens him, and he leaves. Quinn kisses Lilith deeply for the first time and after a while she closes her eyes.
The six women are planning the long-awaited revolt. Lilith watches Quinn and flashes back to what the six women said. She wonders how it is possible that she might want to be enslaved rather than free.
In the cave, Lilith tells Homer that their rebellion won’t lead to freedom and they’ll all get captured or killed. Homer is baffled that Lilith does not want to kill more white people and blames it on the fact that she lives with Quinn. Lilith says that killing them didn’t change anything, only that she’s haunted now. She says that after the initial rebellion, the militias or Maroons will get them. Homer says they will set up a country in the style of Africa with six villages in a circle.
In the morning Quinn tries to buy Lilith, and Wilson says no. He returns ranting about how he’s going to tell everyone about what Isobel does in Kingston.
Part 4, Chapter 27 Summary
Quinn follows Isobel into town and finds her at an opium den. He tries to take her with him but the man refuses. She is unable to speak properly and begs for more opium.
Homer again tries to remind Lilith that she has no future with Quinn. If he married her, she would have to own enslaved people because that’s what he does. Homer shows Lilith Wilson’s journal in which he describes what happened in Venice. Wilson was going to be accused of beating and raping a woman who would be believed over him, so Quinn killed her.
That night, Quinn comes home to Lilith and tells her that Wilson asked him to stay.
Part 4, Chapter 28 Summary
Lilith sees Iphigenia, Gorgon, and Callisto in the planting shed plotting something, and Lilith concludes it is a plot against her. She finds Homer to tell her and she seems unbothered. Lilith reflects on how much Homer has changed. When Lilith goes back to her house, Gorgon is going through a cupboard and tells Lilith they will meet that night.
That night at the cave Callisto and Gorgon kill Iphigenia because she was revealing their plans to someone who was telling their master. Their meeting the previous day was to make her think they were going after Hippogenia. Homer tells them how to hide the body and everyone scatters.
Part 5, Chapter 29 Summary
Wilson gets Quinn early in the morning and rides away, serious and in a rush. Lilith tries to tell Homer but she is lost in a daze thinking about her children. She says she likes that the white man’s God has no past or future, only the present.
Homer starts telling Lilith the story of her mother Demeter when Pallas comes in to say that someone must have told someone because the slave drivers have guns today.
Wilson asks Homer where an enslaved woman named Athena is and Homer says she has the flux. Wilson knows she’s lying because he just found her body dead off the side of a cliff. He punches Homer and then orders a white man named Richardson to deal with her and to find the man whose shirt Athena was holding at the bottom of the cliff. The shirt belongs to a man named Atlas. Richardson shoots off two of his toes and a thumb, shoves his musket up his ass, and then Atlas confesses that Homer bewitched him with Obeah and made him do it.
At noon they meet at the cotton tree. They hang Atlas then hoist up Homer, naked, and Richardson whips her continuously. Lilith looks at Callisto and Callisto nods.
Back in their house, Lilith gives Quinn poisoned tea. She cries as she watches him realize what is happening and lose control of his body. She thinks about the life they could have lived together. As Richardson continues to whip, a flock of birds signals the smoke in the sky coming from Worthy Park Plantation, the ones they were talking to about rebellion.
When six enslaved people in the house sound the abeng, the enslaved people in the field act. The slave drivers kill a few, but the enslaved people easily overpower them. Callisto herself chops up McClusky with her knife.
After the fields are set to flames, it is chaos. Lilith watches from their house while people run around outside burning, killing, and raping. Callisto cuts Homer down from the tree, and Homer personally goes to kill the mistress. Pallas sees Isobel get raped and then chooses to make her live so Isobel can feel what happens when someone takes something that is not theirs. Quinn wakes up and leaves the house with two guns. Lilith fears that the other enslaved people will see her only as Quinn’s woman, so she flees to Jack Wilkins’s house, which people seem to have forgotten about. She defends Wilkins from enslaved people coming through the window and kills two of them. She waits there with him.
Part 5, Chapter 30 Summary
Later Lilith is knocked out and captured as a fugitive from slavery. Ninety-four white people die that day and an unknown number of Black people. Each plantation tortures and kills the remaining enslaved people differently. Wilson leaves them in a cage, but someone comes to get Lilith because Wilkins claims she protected him. Lilith is told to tend to Miss Isobel, who Lilith finds out of her mind, with bruises on her breasts, vagina, and everywhere else. Lilith puts her in the bath and pours warm water on her as she sobs.
Wilson gets 37 gibbets and hangs each enslaved person, lining the road to the estate. They slowly die over two days, Gorgon being the last. Wilson spends his time crying on the hill where his mother and friend are buried. Isobel cries about her honor and locks herself away. Lilith tries to remember Quinn by smelling his clothes. One night Wilson finds her there and holds her down and humps her without entering her. They both cry.
Part 5, Chapter 31 Summary
The narrator explains each death of the six women and what song is sung for them. The narrator reveals herself to be Lovey Quinn, Lilith’s daughter. Lilith taught her to read and then to write so that someone would sing her song. The narrator says that she knows this because the blind woman in the dark told her.
Parts 4-5 Analysis
As the rebellion approaches, Homer and Lilith clash and Lilith struggles to understand her conflicting feelings as she watches The Cycle of Violence escalate around her. James uses humor to paint a picture of the white people’s descent into complete insanity, and Lovey, speaking as the narrator, sheds light on the truth about darkness and womanness.
James uses humor, juxtaposed against the brutality of slavery, as a tool to emphasize the ridiculousness of white people and the system they created. In the final chapters, for example, as Lovey recounts the aftermath of the rebellion at Montpelier, she describes the scene at Quinn and the Mistress’s funeral wherein Wilson throws a rock at the preacher: “The stone clap him right between the crack of him arse and the preacher yelp” (416). The preacher proceeds to “run down the hill so fast that he trip and fall and roll halfway down” (416). This physical comedy is positioned against a funeral for two enslavers right after Wilson slowly murders 30 Black people. The scene portrays the white people as buffoons. Lilith just watches without comment, but their actions reveal the truth that despite their posturing, weapons, and violence, white people act like children. This scene also represents the shift in Lilith’s thinking from fearing white people to pitying them.
In this section, Lilith’s inner turmoil finally brings her some clarity. Haunted by the lives she has taken and falling in love with Quinn despite her best efforts, she tells Homer that she will not kill any more people in the rebellion. Lilith sees the rebellion as an attempt at revenge, but she tells them that after getting revenge at Coulibre, there was “[n]othing different. Nothing better” (349). As she tries to tally the number of people she has killed, she loses track of which white people tortured her and why she wanted revenge. She remembers Homer saying “you can’t kill so many people and don’t kill a part of yourself too,” which explains both her hesitation to kill again and her empathy for white people (375).
Lovey draws connections between the concepts of Darkness, Womanness, and Freedom woven throughout the novel. She compares herself to Atlas, who carries the burden of the world on his back, knowing that she must tell the story of the night women. She recounts each woman’s fate and the songs sung about them that reflect their legacy. By explaining their songs, she references the tradition of song among enslaved people as a means of remembering without reading and writing. She explains the connections between darkness, womanness, and freedom:
Any n*****woman can become a black woman in secret. This is why we dark, cause in the night we disappear and become spirit. Skin gone and we become whatever we wish. We become who we be. In the dark with no skin I can write. And what write in darkness is free as free can be, even if it never come to light and go free for real (427).
This harks back to when Homer told Lilith that reading is freedom in itself. What happens in one’s head can be free, even under enslavement, and what happens at night is similarly clandestine. White people try to tell Black people who they are, but Lovey looks at their darkness and womanness and sees freedom. When the darkness of the world matches her own, she can become a spirit, free of the confines of race, and tell their story. Even when daylight comes and they are enslaved, the story itself can be free.
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By Marlon James
