Prologue–Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
A Prologue: In Which I am Born and Someone Tries to Murder Me
In the prologue, Jane recounts the first time someone tried to kill her. When her mother, a wealthy, white Kentucky landowner, gave birth to the unambiguously Black Jane, the midwife's first instinct was to smother her and declare the baby a stillborn. This, Jane notes, was a common practice at the time, and the midwife was only intending to avoid controversy. With her mother too indisposed to intervene, Jane was saved by Aunt Aggie, a member of her mother's staff and the woman who would go on to raise her. Two days after Jane’s birth, the undead begin to rise from the battlefield at Gettysburg.
Chapter 1: In Which I am Found Lacking
Jane explains that the Civil War was halted, evolving into a war against the dead once the shamblers began to rise. In response to this new threat, the Survivalist Party—now the majority party in Congress—passed the Negro and Native Reeducation Act, which created combat schools where Black students are trained to fight and dispatch shamblers. Five years after the major battles against the shamblers have concluded, Baltimore and a handful of other major eastern cities have been declared safe and “shambler-free,” though Jane thinks this is more political propaganda than truth.
Now seventeen, Jane is a student at Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls in Baltimore County. She's training to be an "Attendant," an armed, combat-ready chaperone engaged by wealthy white women for their protection against the undead shamblers. The girls train in combat using sickles, scythes, and rifles—all specially designed for the task of felling shamblers. As the shamblers are already dead and thus able to sustain serious injury and loss of limb without consequence, the Attendants must directly target their brains. This usually means beheading shamblers with a sickle or scythe, which Jane refers to as "harvesting."
Jane excels in combat, but struggles with the etiquette portion of her Attendant training. After being scolded by the headmistress for her conduct and for sneaking in a forbidden newspaper, Jane is implored to better socialize herself by attending an after-dinner lecture on shamblers at a nearby university. Jane is well aware that Miss Preston’s is far better than most combat academies, where students graduate with minimal training and often end up as shamblers themselves within a few months. Fearing expulsion, Jane quickly agrees to attend the lecture.
Chapter 2: In Which I Look the Fool
In the mechanical carriage on her way to the lecture, Jane finds herself seated next to Katherine Deveraux, her most detested classmate. Katherine is prim, nosy, and flagrantly virtuous—a sharp contrast to Jane, whose behavior is constantly reprimanded. Katherine is also exceptionally beautiful and light-skinned enough to be white-passing, which irks Jane.
Jane notes that Katherine is wearing a much more beautiful dress than she is, made all the more flattering by the tight corset she wears underneath. Katherine stares disdainfully at Jane’s unkempt hair and general appearance and accuses Jane of wearing one of her bonnets. Jane denies this, but admits privately that she did steal the bonnet from Katherine.
The girls spot a shambler out the window, but the carriage is able to pass by it without incident. Miss Duncan, the chaperone for the excursion, says she will alert the patrolmen and remarks that it’s rare to see shamblers so close to the city. As Miss Duncan and Katherine discuss theories about how shamblers are created, Jane touches the good luck charm given to her by Aunt Aggie: a single penny on a string, worn...
(This entire section contains 1105 words.)
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as a necklace. The penny, Jane insists, has some magic in it. It usually feels warm to the touch, but when she's in danger, it always feels cold.
Chapter 3: In Which I Relate My First Encounter With a Shambler
Jane recounts her first experience with a shambler: a childhood tragedy at Rose Hill, her mother's tobacco plantation.
When young Jane snuck out of the main house one day to play with the other less-supervised children, she found them arming themselves with sharpened sticks. They told her that a shambler had been caught in one of the plantation's protective fences and that they intended to kill it. Though Jane knew it was a bad idea, she followed the other kids to the fence. Sure enough, there was a shambler caught in the wire of the fence. Jane realized that the shambler was once Miss Farmer, whose family owned a nearby plantation. The children began to poke at the shambler with sticks, but their plan went awry when the shambler broke free and attacked. Zeke, one of Jane's close friends, was killed before the plantation's shambler patrols were able to neutralize the threat.
Analysis
These opening chapters provide critical context for several of the ongoing themes in Dread Nation: racism, both broadly-speaking and in Jane's own life; the political and social environment of the post-war era; and Jane's relationships with those around her.
By a wide margin, racism drives the majority of Dread Nation's narrative. Overt racism has created the social environment undergirding the inequities of both the book's alternate history setting and its real-life analog, the Civil War. In this timeline, the Civil War has been interrupted by the shambler threat, and the racial issues that led to the fighting between North and South have been left unresolved. Though legal slavery, as it existed before the war, is no more, it has been replaced by laws that force Black individuals into undesirable and dangerous combat roles. These chapters also reveal how racism has shaped Jane's personal life, just as it has the world outside. Born dark-skinned to a white couple, she's an outsider from birth—too Black to be claimed by her white mother, yet too privileged to belong with the rest of the plantation children. For the rest of her life, she continues to straddle this line, bucking social conventions for Attendants by reading, sneaking out, and talking back.
Jane’s defiance, individualism, and internalized colorism impacts her relationships with others. She struggles to forgive Katherine for her traditional beauty, noting that her light skin brings her additional privileges from which the darker-skinned Jane is excluded. She struggles to trust the instincts and motivations of those around her, aware that her own birth was almost scandalous enough to cause her own death. And in almost every setting she finds herself in, Jane struggles with those who claim to have authority over her—she was born outside the established social order, so why should it apply to her?
