51 pages • 1 hour read
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
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Chapters 26-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “Kitty”
Content Warning: This section includes a discussion of racially and sexually motivated murder, as well as a description of marital rape.
It is now the summer of 1956. Kitty continues her work with Blair House. The organization faces an unexpected threat when one member, Nina, goes missing. Nina left her Black husband to pass as white and married a white man. Nina’s first husband found her and grabbed her at the Santa Monica pier in front of a lot of people, saying that he was Nina’s husband. The Blair House women come up with a cover story to conceal Nina’s double life, suggesting that Nina was having an affair with a Black man. The incident reminds the Blair House women of the constant risks they face: “Everyone realized how vulnerable they were, how insignificant they could become” (264).
Chapter 27 Summary: “Kitty”
In October 1956, The Misfits premieres. Kitty becomes an overnight star. Nathan and Kitty are engaged but keep their relationship private. When a young Black boy, Michael Walker, takes a photograph of Nathan and Kitty kissing, Nathan offers the boy money and a job in exchange for keeping the photograph secret.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Kitty”
Kitty is surprised to hear from Emma’s maid, Abigail, inviting Kitty to Emma’s home for the weekend. Since Emma got married, Kitty has called her a few times, but Emma never replies. When Kitty gets to Emma’s home—Emma’s husband is away for the weekend—she is shocked to discover that Emma has a drinking problem. Kitty realizes that Emma’s drinking could endanger both Emma’s and her secrets.
Emma feels stuck. Her husband does not want her to work. She does not have a high school diploma or records as “Emma Karr,” so she can’t go to college. She cannot have children, for fear that they might have dark skin. Emma tells Kitty, “Dreams of babies keep me up at night. The drinking puts me to sleep” (279). The pregnancy issue also complicates Emma’s marriage, as she must come up with excuses not to sleep with her husband. Emma’s maid, Abigail, confesses to Kitty that Emma’s husband is having an affair.
Kitty inadvertently gives away Emma and Kitty’s secret to Abigail in a brief moment when she touches Abigail’s shoulder and says, “You can trust me” (277). This small act of intimacy is enough for Abigail to recognize that both Emma and Kitty are passing. Kitty resolves to help Emma and enlists Abigail’s help. On a weekend when Emma’s husband is traveling, Kitty takes Emma to a doctor to remove her womb; Abigail helps care for Emma during her recovery. Now, Emma can be physically intimate with her husband without fear of pregnancy. Emma also gets involved in charitable causes and ends up joining Blair House. Happier in her marriage and with a purpose, Emma gets control of her drinking.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Kitty”
Kitty’s narrative continues in January 1960. Despite Kitty’s fame, she is unable to make progress in her mission to diversify Hollywood: “There were twenty projects in preproduction at Telescope, and none of them had a Colored face in it” (282). Kitty finds that Nathan is unwilling to deal with issues affecting Black people in his movies. When Kitty pitches a movie scene to Nathan that would show a Black driver getting stopped by the police twice in one drive, he suggests this would be unrealistic. When Kitty points out that for a Black man, it is a realistic scenario, Nathan replies, “I want to stay as far away from reality as possible” (285).
Nathan and Kitty’s relationship is also complicated by the fact that Nathan wants to have children. Kitty and Nathan are engaged but not yet married. She is secretly reluctant to take this step because then the pressure for a family will increase. Finally, Nathan convinces her, and they get married in a private ceremony. After the wedding, Nathan gives Kitty a pair of earrings that he suggests she wear instead of her grandmother’s gold ball earrings.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Kitty”
Kitty’s narrative jumps ahead four years to January 1964. Kitty and Nathan have been focused on work, and talk of a baby has subsided. When the couple has sex, Kitty always uses her diaphragm. However, one day, Nathan forces her to have intercourse with him without her diaphragm against her will. As a result, Kitty gets pregnant. It is a physically difficult pregnancy, and Nathan suggests that Kitty hire a midwife to stay with her until the baby comes.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Elise”
The narrative switches to Elise’s point of view on October 29, 2017. Kitty’s memorial service and the auction of her possessions are over. Finally, Elise reveals to the reader the connection between Kitty and the St. John family. When Kitty died, she left Elise a handwritten letter. In the letter, Kitty revealed that her real name is Mary Magdalene Ledbetter, that she was born in North Carolina to a Black mother, and that she came to LA at 18, where she began to pass as a white woman named Kitty Karr. When Kitty gave birth to Sarah, Elise’s mother, she realized that she could not raise Sarah as her own. Kitty enlisted the help of her midwife, Nellie, who raised Sarah as her own daughter. Along with the letter, Kitty left Elise old paparazzi-style photos of herself from 1963 to 1969, two notebooks where Kitty wrote the story of her life, a photograph of Mary and Shirley Claire as children down South, and the gold ball earrings.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Kitty”
The narrative returns to Kitty’s point of view in 1964, when Nellie starts working for Kitty. Kitty is careful to treat Nellie well and even convinces Nathan to give Nellie a raise, knowing that she may need Nellie’s help in concealing the truth about her passing if the baby is born with dark skin. Uncertain as to when she should tell Nellie the truth, Kitty remains silent for the time being.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Kitty”
In the fall of 1964, Kitty has a dream where she sees Sarah—and Sarah has dark skin. Kitty takes this as a sign and finally tells Nellie the truth. Nellie reveals that she already knows this; Kitty unwittingly told her in one of the moments when she was ill and in pain. Nellie agrees to help Kitty keep her secret. When Nathan goes on a work trip two weeks before Kitty’s due date, Nellie induces labor, and Sarah is born. Kitty convinces Nellie to raise Sarah as her own. Kitty will provide for the child financially without being involved in her life. Kitty and Nellie tell Nathan that the child died after birth.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Kitty”
Nellie has brought Sarah, now four months old, to visit Kitty. Although Kitty first planned to have nothing to do with Sarah, she finds the arrangement too painful. Nathan is still laboring under the delusion that the child died shortly after birth, and this is the story circulating in the public. The chapter ends with Kitty being contacted by Claire Pew, an old social acquaintance.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Kitty”
Kitty visits Claire, a casual acquaintance, in February 1965. Kitty does not think anything of it when Claire mentions that she comes from a Southern tobacco family and that her father is a “pig” who has had “countless accusations” from women, some of whom the family paid off (320). Kitty still does not make the connection until Claire shows Kitty a photo from her childhood, and the photo shows Hazel. Claire, not realizing who Kitty is, reveals that Hazel died five or six years previously from breast cancer. Kitty becomes physically ill at the news that her mother has died. Without explaining her reaction to Claire, who still does not realize the connection between herself and Kitty, Kitty leaves and drives straight to Emma’s.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Kitty”
Kitty arrives at Emma’s house and confronts Emma about keeping Hazel’s death a secret. Emma admits the truth. Emma also gives Kitty some items she had been saving for her, including Kitty’s birth certificate, the document from the Lakes family offering Hazel money and a job, and an old photo of Kitty and Shirley Claire together as kids.
Inspired by the truth about her past, Kitty starts writing a new screenplay, Down South, and shops it around to other studios in Hollywood under a pen name, Hanes Austen. Nathan is reluctant to make the movie. Eventually, due to the pressure of other people in the industry, Nathan agrees to make the movie. Only then does Kitty reveal that she is Hanes Austen. Nathan must direct the movie to excuse the fact that nobody will ever meet this mysterious writer. Under her pen name, Kitty goes on to have a good career as a writer for Telescope.
Chapters 26-36 Analysis
This cluster of chapters focuses primarily on the theme of intersectionality, specifically the disadvantages that come with being not only Black but also a Black woman—and in this case, a Black woman passing as a white woman. The risk is not only a loss of status but also a loss of life. This is first seen in the case of Nina, a Black woman passing as white who is murdered by her ex-husband. To protect themselves, the women of Blair House must concoct a story that makes everyone believe Nina is white; there can be no doubt as to her race. At the same time, the Blair House women realize the risk they engage in simply by existing as passing Black women in the white world: “Everyone realized how vulnerable they were, how insignificant they could become. […] Some had been jealous of Nina’s glamorous life, but they felt bad about their envy now. The need to possess her, to own her, was the masculine greed that killed her” (264). Race was a factor in what happened to Nina, but the more salient factor was gender. She was killed by a jealous husband who believed that he had a right to possess his wife.
The topic of intersectionality and the doubled disadvantage of being a Black woman is also seen in Emma’s story. Emma desperately wants to have children but cannot, for fear her child will be born with dark skin. She drinks to cope: “Dreams of babies keep me up at night. The drinking puts me to sleep” (279). With Kitty and Abigail’s help, Emma has an operation to remove her womb so she can continue to be intimate with her husband without fear of pregnancy. Again, this shows how being a Black woman could prove life-threatening at the time. Such an operation, especially when conducted secretly, is a risky endeavor, and Emma’s recovery is difficult. However, to protect her livelihood and possibly her life, Emma feels this is a necessary action, extreme as it may seem to the reader.
The double threat of being a Black woman is also seen in Kitty’s relationship with Nathan. Kitty, like Emma, cannot risk getting pregnant. For years, she goes out of her way to prevent pregnancy with Nathan, always using a diaphragm. Ultimately, Nathan rapes Kitty. Although the book does not define the incident as a sexual assault, the description of Kitty’s experience of the incident makes it clear that he forces himself on her without her consent. When Kitty reaches for her diaphragm, Nathan physically restrains her from getting it, and “she ha[s] to use her entire body to resist him. […] He pin[s] her arms above her head against the bed” (291). Afterward, Kitty thinks, “He already owned her career, and that night, he showed her the thought he owned her too” (291). The language here—the idea that Nathan “owns” Kitty—nods to slavery as well as to Kitty’s mother’s assault by her employer. The idea of ownership is also traditionally associated with marriage; women were seen as the property of their husbands. Nathan’s “ownership” over Kitty is two-fold: He owns her as a white person owning a Black person (unknowingly, since he does not yet realize she’s passing) and as a husband owning his wife. By raping Kitty, Nathan establishes his ownership of her. He takes what is “rightfully his,” as her husband.
While highlighting the dangers of intersectionality, these chapters also continue to emphasize the book’s theme of Race and US Structural Racism. In these chapters, Kitty’s struggles to diversify the film industry reveal the ways implicit racial bias and capitalism combine to stigmatize and discriminate against Black artists and Black stories. As Kitty describes, despite her efforts, “There were twenty projects in preproduction at Telescope, and none of them had a Colored face in it” (282). Every time Kitty tries to get Nathan to make more diverse films, he balks. Nathan, like the character of Henry Polk, would never consider himself racist; he sees “racism” as being something only KKK members are capable of. Yet Nathan is racist. Nathan’s lack of concern for diversity in film speaks to this. Nathan does not want to touch any realistic portrayals of Black people and the racism they face. For example, when Kitty wants to include a scene where a Black man gets pulled over by the police twice within a short time, which she assures to Nathan is “realistic” for Black people, Nathan replies, “I want to stay as far away from reality as possible” (285). Later, when Kitty urges Nathan to stop making “fluff” and to create movies that can spark change, Nathan retorts, “I’m not here to change the world. I’m here to entertain, and I’m telling you, it won’t make any money” (328). Nathan’s comment hints at the ways structural racism and capitalism are intertwined. Above all, Nathan wants to earn some cash. He is willing to ignore the reality of entire segments of the population because the racism at the heart of American society makes doing so profitable. His decision highlights the capitalist component of structural racism: Rarely does it pay to go against the grain.
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