Part Seven–Epilogue Summary and Analysis
Part Seven
The narrator next sees Tracey in London in 2005, eight years after receiving the fateful letter. On a date with Daniel Kramer, the narrator decides on a whim to see the musical Showboat, which, to her surprise, features Tracey. Tracey has changed her stage name to Tracee Le Roy and has not done much significant work in the eight intervening years. The narrator notes to Kramer that Showboat’s lead part of a mixed-race woman is played by an actress with a Greek last name, instead of being performed by an actual mixed-race dancer like Tracey. Kramer contradicts her, and the date is unsuccessful. The narrator contemplates meeting Tracey after the show but stops when she sees Tracey’s mother waiting to pick up her daughter. In the backseat of Tracey’s mother’s car are two sleeping small children, presumably Tracey’s. The narrator turns back, wondering if the children are the reason Tracey has worked little in the last eight years.
In New York, Aimee imperiously asks the narrator to move out of her house. The narrator is assigned a flat with Fern, which creates a strain between the two. Aimee starts preparing for a concert featuring “some kind of a West African theme.” Aimee and Lamin spend all their time together. To the narrator, Lamin’s attitude is a puzzle: While he seems to have seamlessly grown into the luxury around him, at times he appears uncomfortable. The narrator decides not to attend Aimee’s concert. Earlier in the week, watching Aimee, Jay, and Kara dress up as “Asante nobles,” the narrator mentions to Judy the issue of cultural appropriation but is snubbed by the older woman.
The narrator, Fern, and Lamin visit the village again. The narrator is surprised to see that Hawa has taken to wearing more conservative clothes than her usual form-fitting garments. Hawa tells the narrator that she is getting married soon, to Bakary, a Tablighi man. Hawa is preparing to lead a more pious, austere life. Shocked at the change in her friend, the narrator grieves for Hawa. However, Hawa seems content in her choice and suggests that the narrator may be viewing her decision from a western perspective.
Dining with her mother back in London, the narrator notices that her mother appears thinner than usual. The mother has also parted ways with Miriam. She informs the narrator about the vituperative emails she has been receiving from Tracey, sometimes a dozen a day, since the last six months. In the abuse-laden mails, Tracey often blames the narrator’s mother for the poor condition of their estate and for her son’s expulsion from school.
The narrator learns from Miriam that her mother is being treated for advanced cancer of the spine. Miriam asks the narrator to keep their conversation a secret from her mother. Sharing Tracey’s emails with the narrator, Miriam asks the narrator to help stop Tracey from contacting her mother. The narrator heads over to Tracey’s house. She finds Tracey transformed into a “heavy-set, middle-aged woman.” Tracey now has three children, each with a different skin tone. Perhaps unexpectedly, the narrator finds the children happy and bright. Tracey tells the narrator that her mother has died. Since there was no one else to look after her children, Tracey had to quit dancing. The narrator asks Tracey to stop emailing her mother, but Tracey refuses and accuses the narrator and her mother of conspiring to keep people like Tracey downtrodden.
On Aimee’s last visit the village—purportedly to set up a sexual health clinic inside the school—Aimee and the narrator argue about the propriety of such a...
(This entire section contains 1447 words.)
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move. During a tour of the village, Aimee and the narrator are both captivated by a gorgeous baby. Despite her mixed feelings about motherhood, the narrator feels she is drowning with love for the baby, like a “dopamine rush.” Meanwhile, the narrator and Lamin begin a secret romance. The next day, the villagers organize a drum circle, taking the visitors by surprise. Hawa visits the circle, having told Bakary she is buying fish in Barra. Hawa is happy to join the celebration but does not dance, since it is now improper for her to do so. The narrator marvels at Hawa’s flexible nature and her capacity to find joy in every situation.
In London, the shocked narrator finds Estelle tending to the very baby with whom she fell in love. It becomes obvious that Aimee has adopted the baby in a matter of weeks, without the narrator’s knowledge. To add to the narrator’s heartbreak, Estelle tells her the baby is named Sankofa, a word which has deep emotional and cultural resonance for the narrator. The narrator is stunned by Aimee’s appropriation of an African baby and the dubious, speedy manner in which the adoption has been secured. Mary-Beth, another of Aimee’s personal assistants, provides the narrator with the details about the hurried adoption.
Once again, the narrator drowns her perturbation in a project—her final project for Aimee, as it turns out. Aimee has arranged for a photo exhibition in Berlin, for which Judy rephotographs old photographs of dancers from Baryshnikov to Michael Jackson. Though Judy is the photographer and the narrator the researcher, the credit for the exhibition goes to Aimee. However, the narrator has a small moment of victory when she manages to get her and Tracey’s childhood idol Jeni LeGon included in the list of dancers. But in the process, she uncovers many sobering facts about LeGon.
In New York, a “grenade goes off” when Fern informs Aimee about the narrator’s affair with Lamin. Judy fires the narrator through “invective-laden” texts and forces her out of her flat. With her New York visa set to expire soon, the narrator seeks shelter with her acquaintances Darryl and James, a couple she met at a dance performance earlier in the year. Pushed to inflection point by what she perceives as Aimee’s unfairness, the narrator anonymously posts online the back-channel adoption contract she had found on Mary-Beth’s phone, leading to an uproar. The narrator is sent off to London, where she has arranged to meet Lamin, having secured him a British visa. Thus, the narrative loops back to the events of the prologue.
Tracey leaks the childhood video of their obscene performance parodying Aimee to the media. The narrator’s honest whistleblower image is ruined, and public opinion turns against her. She and Lamin drift apart. However, she reconnects with Fern, who visits London, and they spend a quiet, peaceful day together. The narrator learns her mother is in hospice care.
Epilogue
Delirious and critically ill, the narrator’s mother tells her daughter that she should raise Tracey’s children, since she can give them a better life than Tracey. The narrator heads toward Tracey’s flat in Willesden Lane. Her mother dies before the narrator reaches Tracey’s home. Standing outside Tracey’s tower, the narrator watches Tracey dancing with her children on the balcony. The narrator understands that Tracey and the children are happy in their own right.
Analysis
The real Jeni LeGon plays a part in dispelling the narrator of her last childish notions of a race-free world. Researching LeGon in Europe, the narrator learns that the happy, carefree, well-respected Black dancer of her and Tracey’s imaginations was a fiction. The real LeGon was never respected on her film sets, Fred Astaire never once even spoke to her, and she was only hired to play the roles of domestic helpers. By all reports, LeGon, who migrated to Paris from Hollywood, did not even feel like “a person” till she was in France. Even her stage name was not her own but rather the result of a journalist’s typo. She was born to “descendants of sharecroppers” out of Georgia, Hector and Harriet Ligon. Thus, the narrator realizes that the Jeni LeGon she and Tracey have been chasing never existed.
Two sets of significant appropriations occur at the close of the book, one more fully realized than the other. In both cases, what is being appropriated is a child, or children. While the narrator is horrified by Aimee’s appropriation of a beautiful African baby, she briefly considers her own mother’s delirious suggestion that she take over Tracey’s children. However, the narrator soon realizes that her mother’s advice stems from the same kind of savior complex that made Aimee wheel into Africa and take away the baby she named Sankofa. Watching Tracey dance with her children, the narrator can see that Tracey does not require saving. She simply wants to dance.
