Part 6, Day and Night: Chapters 1–7 Summary

In Part 6, Chapter 1, the narrator goes to university to study media and finds that she enjoys her classes and dancing with her friends. When her mother crushes her happiness by saying the college is second-rate, the narrator tells her not to visit again. The narrator finds her first lover, a student named Rakim who thinks he is a god and a “Five Percenter.” This is a Black nationalist who believes a malicious 10% of the world tries to rule over an ignorant 85% while the other 5% know what is really going on. The narrator loves his passion but finds that he is highly critical, including of her beloved tap dancers and her lack of traditionally feminine qualities. She eventually dumps him.

The narrator makes her fifth visit to Aimee’s school, now known as the Illuminated Academy for Girls or the IAG, in Chapter 2. She has the feeling that the government is withholding support for the village, expecting Aimee to pay for everything. Aimee and Lamin are now lovers.

Chapter 3 turns to the narrator’s post-college years as she moves in with her father to job-hunt in London. Back in Africa in Chapter 4, she gets the job of talking to Lamin about Aimee’s plan to get him a visa so they can be together permanently. As they visit Kunta Kinteh Island, once a port for holding enslaved Africans in prison cells, the narrator considers how “power had preyed on weakness” here as it does everywhere. Every tribe has its “blood-soaked legacy”; this is hers. Lamin gives her vague answers to her questions.

In Chapter 5, the narrator applies for entry-level media jobs and takes a temporary job at a pizza place. Tracey sees her there, and they go out for drinks. Tracey tells her she has a role in Guys and Dolls on a West End stage. Hearing that the narrator is job-hunting, Tracey offers to get her a job as a stagehand.

In Chapter 6, the narrator returns to work for Aimee, who is displeased because the narrator’s mother has been investigating the British government’s cooperation with West African dictatorships. If the government overseeing the school finds out, the school will be dead. At a birthday party in New York for one of Aimee’s children, the narrator tries to talk her mother out of her campaign, to no avail. Fernando confesses his love for the narrator at the party, a situation she finds awkward. She tells him she only wants to be responsible for herself.

In Chapter 7, the narrator has taken the stagehand job for Guys and Dolls. Tracey is secretly having an affair with a much older, married Kenyan actor. The narrator finds it confusing that though color-blind casting is in vogue, men in theater still hold all the power. She decides to leave the show after a paid internship at YTV comes through, and she and Tracey go out that night. When the narrator forgets her key, she gets Tracey to let herself in by the back kitchen door. Tracey reports the door is locked and they’ll have to go to her place. On Sunday, she finds a letter from Tracey that hits her like a bomb: on Friday she caught the narrator’s father having sex with a blow-up doll that looks like a caricature of a Black woman. The narrator burns the letter.

Part 6, Day and Night: Chapters 1–7 Analysis

Readers see the difficulties inherent in mother/daughter relationships in Part 6, Chapter 1 when the narrator’s mother criticizes her choice of school, effectively crushing the first happiness the narrator has felt in years. As she did in Part 4, Smith shows that the mother’s idealized vision of education is neither practical nor helpful.

The role played by power in any relationship vibrates through the novel and is seen here in the narrator’s short-lived romance with Rakim. Smith shows the dramatic irony inherent in his belief that he’s a “Five Percenter,” one of the 5% of people who supposedly understand that 10% of the world—including the Nation of Islam, the media, and churches, among others—tries to rule over the other 85%. While he is paranoid about being ruled by institutions, when he tries unsuccessfully to dominate the narrator, he himself falls into the trap of letting his male gender define his identity. Power always preys on weakness, as the narrator reflects in Chapter 4 while visiting the holding cells for enslaved Africans. This is true everywhere, even onstage, where men rule over women.

Readers finally learn the nature of the incidents that cause rifts between the narrator and both her father and Tracey. In Part 3, Chapter 2, the narrator told Aimee about this incident, and Aimee laughed. For the highly sensitive narrator, however, it is no laughing matter.