46 pages • 1 hour read
Jewelle GomezThe Gilda Stories
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “South End: 1955”
Thirty-four years later, Gilda is living in a black neighborhood on the South Side of Boston and working as a beautician. In the first scene, Gilda bleaches the hair of a regular customer, a successful and indomitable prostitute named Savannah, and listens to her lively stories of black life. They are interrupted by a man who enters the shop demanding to know the whereabouts of a young prostitute friend of theirs named Toya, who is on the run from a particularly cruel pimp, Fox. The women send him away, just before Toya appears in the alley behind the shop begging for sanctuary.
Savannah and Gilda let Toya rest in the back room of the shop and plan to sneak her onto a train home the next day. Shortly after Savannah leaves, there is a knock on the door—Gilda opens it expecting to see Fox but is shocked to discover Bird standing there. They weep and hold one another, overwhelmed to be finally reunited, and repair to Gilda’s apartment, where they sleep together and take one another’s blood, “cementing their family bond” (139) as they never fully did back in Louisiana. The ritual is intense, like “a birth,” and they feel complete and connected afterward.
They are awakened at dawn by a fire over at the beauty shop. After rescuing Toya from the back room, they return to the scene, where members of the community are watching, angry at the white firefighters who arrived too late to save the shop. They find Fox there, clearly gloating over having set the fire. They realize that his eyes glow orange, and that he is also a vampire. Gilda and Bird confer and agree that this is one of the rare cases in which a fellow vampire is so far gone into evil that they must kill him.
Gilda, Bird, and Toya briefly stop at a local bar called the 411 Lounge and meet Savannah, who insists on helping them kill Fox. Savannah’s kindly young pimp, Skip, drives the four women to the summer house he shares with Savannah on Cape Cod to hide out. At the house they surmise that Fox will find them, and they make a plan to take him down. He arrives the next evening. Savannah throws a pan of boiling tomato sauce in Fox’s face, burning his skin off but not stopping him from attacking her. Bird injects Fox with an old syringe of heroin from Skip’s addict days, and this knocks Fox out temporarily. The vampire women send the others to the hospital and take Fox out to a boat on the water.
He awakens and struggles, but they slice out his heart with a butcher knife, take off his protective clothes with his home soil sewn in them, and push the boat out on the water. When the others return the next day, Toya checks the boat and finds nothing left but the clothes, meaning he has met the true death. As the chapter ends, the party returns happily to the 411 Lounge in the city, disheveled but laughing.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Gilda’s friend Savannah encapsulates the fierce embrace of life Gilda finds among the black citizens in Boston’s South End. Though Boston is not segregated by Jim Crow laws the way Southern states were in 1955, there is still deep racial inequity, evidenced by the citizens’ tense resignation to the fact that the fire trucks from white neighborhoods seem deliberately to arrive too late to save Gilda’s beauty shop. Despite her neighborhood’s lack of formal resources, Savannah is more than able to fend for herself working as a prostitute. She owns diamonds and wears an audacious hairstyle, and she bosses her own pimp around. Her opinions are brash and wise. She never runs out of funny stories, which she tells in a distinctive voice full of aphorisms. Savannah is full of her own self-created power. Her presence in the book ensures the reader does not see impoverished black neighborhoods as pitiable but as thriving community hubs.
The prose in the scene in which Bird and Gilda reunite resembles that of a romance novel. Its pace is breathless but drawn-out as it describes in detail each movement of the women’s bodies and their reactions to each touch. Each of the phases of their sexualized encounter has a double meaning, bearing significance to Gilda’s unfinished birth into her vampiric identity. Both women feel a need for “completion,” which can be interpreted as the need both for sexual climax and for Gilda to get the final transference of blood from Bird. Even as Bird becomes Gilda’s lover in the scene, she also takes on the role of mother she resisted after the elder Gilda’s death.
The images in the fight scene with Fox are the closest The Gilda Stories offers to the kind of traditional horror scene one might expect from a vampire novel: Fox with his face burned off and still grasping at the women, Gilda slicing his chest open and removing his heart with her bare hands. By limiting this kind of scene exclusively to Fox, the novel clarifies its definition of evil. It has nothing to do with vampirism itself, but with hatred, greed, and abuse. Fox’s work as a pimp is also not evil in and of itself: Fox’s foil, Skip, is also a pimp but is gentle, helps the women, and has the strength of character to overcome a drug habit. Fox is evil because he acts as though pimping is synonymous with slave-owning—he sees Toya as his property, and when she flees, he pursues her as relentlessly as a bounty hunter.
