Part 7, Late Days: Chapter 1–Epilogue Summary

All the chapters in Part 7 take place during the same period. Chapter 1 begins in 2005 as the narrator says she didn’t see Tracey again for eight years. On a date, she decides to see the musical Showboat because Tracey is in it. She learns from the program that Tracey has changed her first name to Tracee and her last name to Le Roy. Tracey is a background dancer, still beautiful, sexy, and talented, and the narrator is jealous of her. She goes to see Tracey at the stage door but changes her mind when Tracey’s mother comes to pick her up and the narrator glimpses two young children in the car.

Chapter 2 finds the narrator back in New York in a rented apartment as she helps prepare for an upcoming show of Aimee’s with a West African theme. This involves special drums, kente cloth, and a Senegalese American dance troupe. The narrator skips the concert and instead follows it on Twitter, thinking of how, during preparation for the show, she had brought up the question of cultural appropriation. Aimee says artists are allowed to use things because “the aim of art [is] love.”

In Chapters 3 and 4, the narrator arrives in Africa and finds that Hawa is now engaged to a sensitive, poor friend of Musa’s. She wears a shapeless skirt and new black scarf and has become more devout. Back in London, the narrator has dinner with her mother and feels that her mother has finally earned the respect she always wanted. She learns that Tracey has reached out for help after her son’s expulsion from school; the narrator’s mother is unable to help, and Tracey’s emails to her become increasingly angry and strange.

In Chapter 5, Miriam, now the mother’s ex-lover, calls the narrator to say that her mother is very ill with stage 3 cancer. Miriam asks the narrator to stop Tracey from harassing her mother. Tracey’s emails turn out to be paranoid accusations of how the narrator’s mother let her down as a child and now as a politician. The narrator goes to see Tracey, now overweight and not working, with a new baby along with her other two children. They all have lunch, and then Tracey tells the narrator that both she and her mother are part of a system that seeks to “control everything.”

In Chapter 6, the narrator goes with Aimee to West Africa to investigate opening a sexual-health clinic. As they travel around the village, Aimee’s group encounters a woman with a new baby girl whom everyone, even the narrator, adores. Visiting Hawa’s compound, the narrator finds her friend has left to get married and will return the next day. Lamin tells her this, then confesses that he thinks Aimee is too old for him and he wants children. Suddenly the narrator understands that she and Lamin will become lovers. She goes to him that night.

Chapter 7 begins as the narrator learns Aimee has adopted the baby she saw in Africa and named her Sankofa. The next time she visits Africa, nobody will talk to her about the expensive adoption, though she later learns about it from another of Aimee’s assistants. She continues to have sex with Lamin but realizes she doesn’t love him. Fernando catches her one morning as she returns from Lamin’s house, and she feels ashamed. He tells her that Lamin’s British visa is about to go through. Chapter 8 takes the narrator and Aimee to Europe for a tour.

Chapters 9 and 10 recount the story of how the narrator and Aimee part ways. Aimee has learned about Lamin and the narrator’s affair and fires her in a series of angry texts sent by her manager, Judy. The narrator guesses that Fern, exasperated with his job, has broken the news. She has been thrown out of her New York apartment and goes to stay with some friends. For revenge she sends a gossip site everything she knows about Sankofa’s adoption. Soon reporters are camped outside her friends’ door, and Judy gives her a ticket to London to get rid of her.

In Chapter 11, Tracey has capitalized on the narrator’s publicity and her anger at her family to release the vulgar video from Lily Bingham’s birthday party. With Aimee’s music playing in the background, the video turns the narrator’s story into “the twisted consequence of a lifelong obsession.” The narrator has now reached the time period of the prologue. A few days later, she takes Lamin, whose ticket to London she has paid for, to her mother’s flat but learns that her mother is in hospice. The next day, she visits her mother, who is dying at age 57. When she returns to the flat, Lamin is gone, much to her relief. She calls Fernando, who has quit his job with Aimee, and then meets him when he comes to London. He tells her Lamin is in Birmingham, hoping to study. The narrator begins to feel at peace with herself, imagining a possible future with Fern, with “time on [her] side.”

In the epilogue, the narrator describes her last visit to her mother. The mother wants to help Tracey’s children, but in her confusion, she talks of the children as if they belong to the mother. The narrator tells her she was a good mother, and the mother replies that Tracey’s children should be with the narrator. She dies the next day. The narrator goes to see Tracey, thinking she can’t take the children but can perhaps offer “something simpler, more honest.” She finds Tracey dancing on the balcony with her children.

Part 7, Late Days: Chapter 1–Epilogue Analysis

The theme of cultural appropriation is addressed directly in Part 7. When the narrator hesitantly questions Aimee’s decision to give her new show a West African theme, Aimee retorts that it’s fine to usurp aspects of the culture because she does it out of love. Aimee uses the same self-justification regarding her adoption of little Sankofa. Since Aimee is one character in the story who never changes from beginning to end, it is fitting that she names the baby for the mythical bird that can only look at the past.

The narrator’s past and present meet in this final section. The twin stories of her youth and her career have caught up so that the last part of the book takes place in a single time period. Likewise, all the decisions—or nondecisions—that she has made catch up to her. Her affair with Lamin leads to her abrupt firing by Aimee. A video filmed decades ago becomes part of her “humiliation.” She has reached rock bottom, with everyone important to her either dead or estranged. Even the death of her mother seems inevitable, and not just because of her illness. A complete break from those who previously dominated her is necessary for the narrator to move forward.

The ending is not without hope, however. With nowhere to go and “time on [her] side,” she can finally begin to figure out who she is. She can reach out to the two remaining people who always loved her for herself: Fernando and Tracey. Speaking with Fernando, she thinks of a possible future “in which I could care for him.” Tracey is her closest peer in her quest for identity; thus, she goes to Tracey to offer her friendship or help, “something . . . between my mother’s idea of salvation and nothing at all.”