41 pages • 1 hour read
Esi EdugyanHalf-Blood Blues
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A 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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary
In 1992 Chip visits Sid at his Baltimore apartment, where he lives as a retired bachelor. The two are about to go to Berlin to attend the premiere of a documentary about Hiero at a festival held in his honor. After some friendly banter, Chip indicates that he has something important to say. Sid listens skeptically as Chip tells him that Hiero, long presumed to have died in a concentration camp, is living in Poland, and that he sent letters to Chip. Sid abruptly shows Chip out.
Sid reflects on the musical legacies of his former bandmates. Following the discovery and belated release of “Half-Blood Blues,” the incomplete record Sid saved from the Paris sessions, Chip gained renown as drummer, while Hiero was hailed as one of the all-time great trumpeters; Sid’s career, on the other hand, failed to take off. As Hiero’s playing gained legendary status, various researchers offered differing accounts of his death.
Sid and Chip arrive in Berlin. On the way to the hotel, Sid instructs the cab driver to stop by the historic Brandenburg Gate. Seeing the gate, they realize how much things have changed: “This ain’t our Berlin,” Chip observes (43).
They make their way to the theater, which is full of people who cheer as they enter. After a brief speech by the director, the film opens by touching on the recording of “Half-Blood Blues” as well as the treatment of various Afro-European and American ethnicities under the Third Reich. Sid then appears onscreen to tell the story of Hiero’s arrest. An interview with Chip follows, in which he attributes Hiero’s arrest to jealousy “over a woman” on Sid’s part, calling his actions “a crime for which Sid ain’t never been held to account” (58).
Mortified, Sid walks out. He describes Chip as “veteran liar” and recalls the story of their first encounter as children: After meeting on a playground, 10-year-old Chip took Sid to see a senile woman he called “Tante Cecile.” While there, he introduced the two of them as Arnie and Theo, which were the names of her two dead sons. She gave them lots of candy.
Still fuming, Sid visits first a park, then a café. Chip shows up and offers a tearful apology. Sid softens but announces his intention to leave Berlin immediately. Later, just as he’s leaving the hotel, Sid spots Chip in a rental car. Unconvinced of Chip’s vision and driving abilities, Sid ends up taking the driver’s seat.
Part 2 Analysis
As Edugyan introduces the novel’s second major storyline, she raises the possibility that the past can have long-reaching, even haunting, effects on the present. After establishing that Sid and Chip’s amiable relationship is still more or less in place, she raises readers’ curiosity about why they respond differently to the possibility that Hiero is still alive; whereas Chip shows eagerness to reconnect with Hiero, Sid responds with skepticism and even dread, suggesting a guilty conscience.
The difficulty of grappling with the past is further explored, first as Sid reviews the complicated archival history of “Half-Blood Blues” as it was lost, rediscovered, and scrutinized by scholars and record companies. On one hand, Sid is impressed at the efforts of the musicologist who first brought the record to public attention; on the other hand, he quickly points out the scholar’s mistakes in reasoning. Likewise, as he attends the premiere, he is both surprised by some of the information the film provides about Nazi Germany and Hiero, as well as offended by what he considers to be misleading or presumptive statements about himself and his motives. Even as they wander the city, Sid and Chip agree that the city has “lost something,” but they can’t quite articulate what; the past remains elusive.
Following Sid and Chip’s falling out over Chip’s comments in the documentary, an angry Sid vents his anger by painting Chip as an unreliable source. Ironically, however, his doing so likely induces readers to further question Sid’s own reliability as narrator, since the anecdote he tells about a young Chip wrangling candies from an elderly woman is not particularly damning. Thus, by the end of this section, both Sid and Chip have weaponized the past.
