51 pages • 1 hour read
The Book of Night Women
A 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 1, Chapters 8-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Niggerkin”
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
A woman named Isobel arrives in Montpelier to help plan the New Year’s Ball, which is in 10 weeks. Wilson tries his best to dress presentably and ignores Lilith more than ever. During the full moon, Lilith runs into the field and Robert Quinn knocks her out. She wakes up in a nice office and Quinn tells her she’s lucky he is the white man who found her. He asks her what she was doing out in the fields and she says she was looking for Homer, but he doesn’t believe her. The next day she is so scared that she works extra hard and Homer and Gorgon act like they know somehow. Gorgon looks at her and says without speaking: “bufu bufu backra riding through the bush” (97).
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Quinn goes to check on Tantalus because his foot is infected, and when he sees it has maggots on it, he throws up and never acts the same. The enslaved people say they’ve seen this before when white men realize they don’t have a taste for blood. Quinn begins to eat with Homer.
The ball comes around and Isobel does not choose Lilith to work. She’s upset and asks Homer to join their meeting that night but Homer says no. Lilith feels bitter, lonely, and certain that she deserves love, so she gives Gorgon a chunk of Andromeda’s hair and earrings that she stole from Circe, and the next morning she wakes up to hear that Andromeda bled from all her holes and died. Homer looks right at Lilith.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
The white people try to figure out what happened to Andromeda. Quinn says it’s the bloody flux and Isobel says it’s Obeah. Wilson does not know enough but he sees the way Homer reacts when Isobel mentions Obeah. Lilith is terrified that she will be accused of murder.
She eavesdrops on their conversation with Quinn arguing that Obeah is ridiculous and Isobel arguing that they must learn about it so they can control it. Jack Wilkins tries to assert his power and insults Quinn as an Irishman, but Wilson rejects him. Per Isobel’s recommendation, they burn candles down to the nail throughout the plantation and many enslaved people try to run away or somehow put out the candles before they burn down. Jack Wilkins brutally tortures all of them and kills one. They raid one house that has rags hanging everywhere and foul smells and dead things, and they burn the woman inside. Then Wilkins brings a jewelry box to Homer, asking about it. It has the earrings Lilith gave Gorgon two days prior. He gives up his search and leaves, but Lilith is haunted.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
Lilith wakes up from a bad dream and walks outside looking for Gorgon only to find Quinn, who is angry because he already ran into her outside at the wrong time once. He drags her to a shed and takes out his whip, but when he makes her pull down her dress, he says she’s just a child.
Christmas comes and the enslaved people working in the field celebrate. They dress up and dance and sing. Lilith finds Gorgon and she says that Omolu grants whatever the person wishes deep down, so Lilith must have wanted Andromeda dead. Lilith feels guilty and turns away, only to be surrounded by Johnny jumpers. They say they are going to kill her, and then the one holding a knife to her vomits everywhere and they all run away. Lilith looks around but sees no one.
The next morning Lilith wakes up to a blue uniform for the New Year’s Ball next to her. She dances around with it before realizing Quinn is watching her from the top of the cellar.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
Wilson comes downstairs stumbling and asking for help, and Lilith receives him and tries to make him the tea Homer makes. She hears a voice telling her to give him a concoction that will make him fall in love with her. Before he can drink tea, he starts trying to get upstairs and leans on Lilith. She ends up dragged into bed with him and taking off his clothes. He says her name three times before passing out and she feels like he treats her differently.
The mistress decides to exit her room and critique everything in sight, starting with the decor for the ball. At breakfast, they talk about the uprisings of enslaved people, and Quinn is brash in warning them. Everyone else says things are fine and Isobel reminds him of his place. The mistress begins talking nonsense and falls out of her chair. They put the mistress in her room as she yells that her son should not be betrothed to a French Creole girl. Wilson tells Quinn that he cannot speak badly about the French while Isobel is around, and Quinn reminds him they’re at war with the French.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
The night of the ball arrives. Lilith talks back to Homer after she invites her to their meeting that night. Homer gives her specific instructions with soup and Lilith walks into the room, turns around to glance at Homer, and turns back around to collide with Isobel’s chaperone. Wilson immediately punches her repeatedly, and Quinn pulls him off, telling him to stop beating her in front of his guests. His guests stare and whisper to each other. Quinn tells the slave drivers to punish Lilith, and they drag her outside to a shed, where they rape and abuse her.
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary
Lilith awakes to Homer putting a warm rag on her face and rubbing ointment from plants on her. The other five women help and keep watch. Lilith bawls.
Homer and Quinn later discuss the chaperone’s health, and Quinn asks about Lilith. He realizes that they did not whip her but did something far worse. He runs into Homer’s room and is appalled to see Lilith in that state.
Homer listens through the door as Quinn and Wilson discuss what happened. Wilson fears that his social standing has fallen because of his outburst, and they mention his outburst in Venice. Wilson tells Quinn that he is there to save Wilson from himself. Quinn tells him what McClusky and the other men did to Lilith, and Wilson says it is “her misfortune” and that if he had been there instead, she would have wished for death.
Homer comes running into her room where Lilith is healing and tries to tell her to run, stuffing a bundle of coins in her bosom. Then Quinn comes and strips her naked so the coins fall out. He drags her to the cotton tree and has a Johnny-jumper whip her with everyone watching. After that day, twice a week when Isobel comes to Montpelier, Lilith gets 10 lashes. Quinn looks away while someone else delivers them. The six women heal and sing to Lilith in Homer’s room after each whipping. A quilt pattern of scars forms on Lilith’s back.
One day Jack Wilkins stumbles onto Montpelier looking skinny. No one knows what he said to Wilson that day, but the whippings stop. Soon after, Lilith walks to his house, not knowing why. He complains about his barren wife and the fact that all his children are Black. He asks her why she came, stares at her for a long time, and then tells her to leave.
Homer comes into her room flustered, and Lilith assumes they are going to kill her, but Homer says they are sending her to Coulibre.
Part 1, Chapters 8-14 Analysis
The sentences, “[e]very negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will” begin five chapters throughout the novel, each leading into a different explanation of meaning. In Chapter 11, the narrator explains that no matter where they come from, Black people are forced to walk in a circle with no light to alert them that they are walking right back to the torture of enslavement. In this section Lilith begins to find herself in The Cycle of Violence in which she unintentionally participates. Enslavers meanwhile try to take away anything enslaved people could use to get out of the circle—such as history, communication, and healing.
As Lilith thinks about the New Year’s Ball and her interest in white people’s affairs, “[s]he think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don’t know colour” (147). Lilith observes that even the language surrounding the color of flesh and therefore one’s race has no logic to it. Black really means brown skin, and at Montpelier, Lilith, who has both Black and white blood, is considered Black. As Lilith tries to make sense of her complex identity and as the enslavers’ constant hypocrisy comes to light, the concepts of race and racism become increasingly ridiculous. Lilith’s confusion is born from the truth that racial segregation has no real basis. As the logic of the social construction of race deteriorates, the lines that characters draw between races also start to blur. Isobel slips into speaking in Jamaican Patois, Quinn shows Lilith mercy, and Lilith accidentally kills Andromeda.
Enslavers’ own racial politics within whiteness also begin to come to light. At the hint of a conflict, Quinn’s Irish identity and Isobel’s Creole identity become insults, which incentivizes both of them to firmly establish themselves on the side of the enslavers. In their conversations, black and darkness are synonyms for bad, and light and white are synonyms for good. Quinn says he will “flog some light back into their thick skulls,” and Isobel says that the colonies might as well be in the “Dark Ages” (113, 115). The two of them try to clearly separate themselves from Black people out of fear that, if they do not, they will lose any power in white society. They try to prove their belief in white supremacy through language because their status in white society is constantly being questioned. Wilkins says to Quinn that they “[u]sed to have your kind in chains before we switched to n******” (114). The racial hierarchy of the white world is constantly at play, and Wilkins even invokes this hierarchy as an argument tactic when trying to prove Quinn’s inadequacy. Wilkins uses the n-word in this sentence to emphasize his comparison of Quinn to the enslaved people that Quinn is tasked with controlling. While slavery is based on the differences between white and Black people, the text shows that, even among themselves, white people constantly put others down to feel better about themselves. The novel argues that this hierarchy of superiority is the only logic driving white supremacy and enslavement.
This section of the text extensively unpacks the complexity of Lilith’s character. Lilith is constantly caught between her relentless hope and the urge to harden herself to minimize her pain. She is a romantic and she gets through the day in part by fantasizing about how a man could change her life. She is unable to lose her empathy for people, even when she wishes harm upon them. When she asks Gorgon to get rid of Andromeda and Andromeda dies brutally instead of just missing the ball, Lilith tries to soothe her conscience by thinking that “[t]o kill a n***** is like to kill a horse […] She invoking the white skin to come up and bury the black” (124). In her efforts to lose the empathy that tortures her, she tries to channel the white part of her that should be more capable of violence without remorse. The book therefore suggests that the confusions and paradoxes that plague Lilith’s desires and her sense of identity are rooted in the ways that Lilith identifies as both white and Black.
In a similar vein, despite her inability to channel white cruelty, Lilith is convinced she will both receive love from a white man and perhaps even become white herself: “Lilith was goin’ to get the love she want. Lilith know from the day she see the page with the sleeping princess. Back then, she believe that one day she would wake up with gold hair” (102). First with the princess photo and later with the book Joseph Andrews, stories about white people give Lilith comfort. She herself has Green Eyes from a white man, and she believes she will find a love she has only seen white people have. She wants to hate white people—it is by the hands of white people that she received the Quilt of scars on her back—and she does at times hate them, but she also wants things that white people have while she has a white father. The reasons behind her feelings are an eternal question for Lilith: She does not know if she wants “a pappy, massa or lover,” or protection, or to experience what people mean when they say that “[w]hen a man sweet for a woman and a woman sweet for a man, even slavery don’t seem so bitter” (130). She feels like something is wrong with her, and “[s]he start to blame Circe for giving her white woman expectation and hatred for negro life” (147). Having been born a product of rape, enslaved on a plantation, it is easier for Lilith to blame the woman she lived with than see that “white woman expectation” is the freedom that they all deserve, and a “hatred for negro life” is the instinct for autonomy at any cost that lands her in the cave with the night women. The night women themselves treat Lilith differently at times—they walk the same line she does, wanting her to survive and not knowing whether softness or hardness is the right path. In their own ways, all the women are searching for Autonomy Under Slavery.
Unlock all 51 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Marlon James
