Part 2, Early and Late: Chapters 1–7 Summary

Part 2, Chapter 1 begins as the narrator experiences the star singer-dancer Aimee’s first single. Aimee is 22, and the 10-year-old narrator and Tracey adore her. They buy the single as a birthday gift for white classmate Lily Bingham and are the only Black girls at Lily’s party. Tracey is on her worst behavior. She and the narrator put on a vulgar show for the other guests, dancing and clowning around with sexual movements to the soundtrack of the single. Lily records the show on video, and Tracey later pockets the tape. They are caught by Lily’s mother and scolded by the narrator’s. 

Chapter 2 moves the action to the late 1990s and a video channel’s office in London, where the narrator is in her early 20s and now works in talent and artist relations. All the staffers at YTV are excited to hear that Aimee is coming to the office to record a speech, for her music defines video TV itself. The narrator is to be Aimee’s driver and gofer. She nervously anticipates meeting Aimee, passing time by doing internet searches on Tracey, whom she now calls her “crazy ex-friend.” Tracey has appeared in the chorus of a Broadway show, and the narrator frequents her bizarre chat room, which follows a guru who thinks politicians are lizards. The narrator says she hasn’t forgiven or forgotten Tracey, for reasons not yet explained, but she understands Tracey’s urge to explain the imbalance in power in her world. Aimee is taken with the narrator and hires her as a personal assistant.

In Chapter 4, the story returns briefly to the narrator’s childhood. The dancers she and Tracey admire have now changed: Tracey loves “real” dancers, including Michael Jackson, Prince, and of course Aimee, while the narrator has discovered the Nicholas Brothers, legendary Black dancers. Chapter 5 takes up the adult narrator’s story and her initial discomfort with Aimee, which Aimee tries to solve by bicycling with the narrator to a park and getting her stoned. The narrator learns that Aimee is pregnant with her second child and confesses that she doesn’t want children herself because her mother was “trapped” and had to fight for time to herself.

Chapter 6 again returns to the past: Tracey’s father has gone to prison, and the friendship takes on a stop-and-start quality. When the father is in jail or back in Jamaica, the friendship cools off. Then the narrator plays with gentle, childlike Lily Bingham, who claims she is “color blind” but complains about the film Stormy Weather because everyone is Black. The dance school’s pianist, Mr. Booth, is a friend to the narrator and understands her fondness for old movie musicals. He plays while she sings her favorite movie songs and discusses Fred Astaire with her. The narrator ponders the nature of friendship: Does every friendship involve an exchange of power? If that is the case, she wonders, what do she and Mr. Booth—or she and Tracey—give each other?

Part 2, Early and Late: Chapters 1–7 Analysis

Part 2 focuses on the narrator’s relationships with the most important people in her past and present: Tracey, Aimee, her mother and father, Lily Bingham, and Mr. Booth. She has a growing understanding of the complicated nature of relationships and the role of power within them. This is embodied in her childhood fascination with a quotation of Katharine Hepburn about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: “He gives her class, she gives him sex.” Tracey continues to fascinate her in both childhood and adulthood; she sees Tracey’s proneness to conspiracy theories as a way of trying to understand power. The author continues to withhold information from the reader, namely what Tracey did to end the friendship.

The relationship with the wealthy, powerful Aimee is also complicated, although it is purely transactional from Aimee’s perspective: she spends a day with the narrator to make their future together easier. Even as the narrator is distancing herself from her parents, readers see that by her early 20s she has internalized her mother’s views on parenting. She enjoys Lily Bingham’s innocence and the chance to play like the child she still is, but she finds this white friend’s views on race unsettling. Why, Lily asks, is everyone in Stormy Weather Black? Lily thinks it isn’t fair. Only Mr. Booth seems to offer an uncomplicated, supportive friendship.

The narrator immerses herself fully in 1990s culture in the chapters set in that time. In particular, her work for YTV puts her in a constant whirl of parties and contact with celebrities. Readers see a darker side of this culture, however, in Tracey’s bizarre obsession with the man who thinks the world is run by humanlike lizards. This further foreshadows a disastrous collision with the unbalanced future Tracey.