We Cast a Shadow

“There were many unknowns in my pursuits of happiness, but one thing I understood: law firms like Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux didn’t hire, let alone promote, angry black men. If this was a competition, I needed a new strategy. The shareholders wanted entertainment. They wanted a good time. They also wanted subservience. They did not want to feel threatened. If I was going to win, I would have to demonstrate I was willing to give them exactly what they wanted.”

This is the first example of the narrator’s characteristic willingness to bend to the racism of those around him when it helps further his personal goals. He originally arrived at Octavia’s party in a beautiful, elaborate Roman centurion costume, one he was proud of, but after realizing that the party is a competition between himself and fellow Black lawyers Franklin and Riley, he decides that his best chance of winning is to perform the firm’s racist stereotypes of a Black person rather than displaying beauty or pride.

“Nigel’s general shade stabilized to an olive tone so that he might be mistaken for a Venetian boy who spent his summers cartwheeling across the Rialto Bridge, but the birthmark colored from wheat to sienna to umber, the hard hue of my own husk, as if a shard of myself were emerging from him.”

Nigel’s birthmark is the driving factor behind the narrator’s extreme determination to get a promotion; the money will afford him the surgery to get rid of the mark. Here, he describes the mark as a part of himself emerging from his son, highlighting his distaste for his own Black identity and his fear that Nigel will endure a life as hard as his own.

“I noticed that Penny’s rubbing had removed some of the cream from Nigel’s face, revealing a dime-sized view of his stain. I opened the container, which Penny had dropped on the landing, and worked a fresh glob of the cream onto the birthmark.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I know, Dad.’”

While the narrator’s treatment of his son can seem callous and cruel, he is motivated by love and a genuine belief that whitening Nigel’s skin will lead him to a happier, more prosperous life. The misguided purity of his motivations gives his actions an empathic context.

“In those moments, there was nothing at all between me and them, the two souls I cared most about in all the unknowable universe. Those were the times when I believed that there was a plan, although I wasn’t privy to the details, and that it was a just and good plan designed to benefit Nigel, Penny, and perhaps even me. Those slim fissures in my logic never lasted long enough.”

This quote reveals the depth of the narrator’s trauma and how it affects his life. He is so consumed by worry over keeping his family safe that he rarely gets to enjoy the fruits of his labor, simple moments of happiness with his family. When he does get a moment of peace or happiness, he assumes it’s due to flaws in his logic, because he sees no logical way to be happy and at peace with himself in the world he lives in.

“Penny rarely turned away from incidents of racism or bigotry. She jumped into them like a Viking with a long sword, her neck flushed as she dismantled her opponents’ arguments.”

Unlike the narrator, Penny has the privilege of being able to call out instances of racial injustice. Her white status provides her a level of protection that allows her to start arguments without the fear of violent backlash. Her fieriness contrasts the narrator’s studied self-preservation.

“I felt guilty, of course, but for the love of Meadowlark Lemon, did the world really need another child of the diaspora with highly developed ball skills? The answer was in the question, and I made all indirect efforts to discourage his growing love of sports. America could cheer someone else’s brown boy down a field and, after he’d wrecked his body and mind, into an early grave.”

The narrator opposes Nigel’s partaking in any activity that might align him with stereotypes of Blackness. This attitude causes him to restrict Nigel’s childhood activities like basketball, at which he is naturally talented. Such invasive constraints contribute to Nigel’s later resentment of his father. 

“Nigel was in blackface. My words came out in the strangest way, like cannonballs down a children’s slide: ‘Why. Does. My. Boy. Look. That. Way?’

‘He said he’s playing a famous musician in a play but he’s too light.’

I tried to stand but collapsed onto my knees. Soon I was crawling. Spit drooled from my lower lip. He can’t look like that.”

When Polaire puts Nigel in blackface, the narrator’s visceral, involuntary reaction relays the depth of his trauma. Not only would the sight of blackface inherently be jarring for its racist trappings, but the narrator (already disoriented from taking a Geisha pill) sees what he fears the most: his son as a Black man. To him, a dark-skinned Nigel is a Nigel who will face the full wrath of society in the same way the narrator and his father have—a prospect he finds almost horrifying.

“No body was left unturned. Yes, all the swaggering Jeromes with their baggy pants and fitted T-shirts, but also the mothers and daughters. And if he could find them, that is to say if they existed outside jail or the cemetery, the fathers, too. I saw it all. Elderly men with their pockets turned out. Girls dressed for parties in platform heels with the contents of their purses scattered across broken concrete. Splattered ice cream cones. Overturned red wheelbarrow. So much depends on a man with a hatred of his own.” 

With the last two lines of this quote, Ruffin references William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The narrator acknowledges that the continued reign of the City’s oppressive system depends on people who hate themselves, and who enact that hatred through violence toward the community. This quote shows the narrator’s obliviousness to certain aspects of his own behavior. Although he criticizes Officer Douglas, the last sentence also applies to the narrator’s own self-hatred and internalized racism.

“There may be beauty in my blackness and dignity in the struggle of my people, but I won’t allow my son to live a life of diminished possibility. I see a constellation of opportunity that those of my ilk rarely travel to. I see my Nigel at the center of those stars. This reraises the question I’ve occasionally concerned myself with during Nigel’s life: What if I can ensure that my boy is not perceived a black man? What if he is simply a man?”

As the narrator applies an extra-strength bleaching cream to Nigel’s skin, he sees that Nigel is squirming in pain, but calmly justifies his actions through a lengthy internal monologue about the disadvantages Black people face in the modern world. This moment illustrates one of the narrator’s largest contradictions as a character: He hurts his son to protect him, hurts him out of a sincere belief that the pain he’s causing Nigel will ultimately make his life better.

“White people ain’t no more evil than the next man, and don’t let nobody tell you they are. But white folk radioactive, too. Because they got the top card and always will. ‘Cause they glow in the dark, they can’t help but hurt you like what make cancer. You get me?” 

Mr. Ben, the narrator’s grandfather, spoke these words of advice when the narrator was very young. The narrator has taken the advice to heart. He treats white people with an extreme care and caution that can seem excessive, but the events of the novel seem to support Mr. Ben’s warning. Even white people who aren’t openly hostile or racist, like Octavia, end up hurting him through ignorance or casual cruelty. However, he is also responsible for many of the ways in which his life eventually falls apart. 

“At windows all over the Tiko, people, their faces terrifyingly angelic from the amber ground lights, glanced down on the entrance to Building Seven where a group of Anti-Violence Task Force police—heavily armed and armored—streamed out of the doorway like a long muscular centipede. I used to hear the voices of women screaming after these incidents. But there was no screaming. Whoever had been in that apartment, whatever their gender or age or employment, was dead now.” 

This scene, recalled from the narrator’s time at the Tiko, shows how normalized anti-Black violence has become. The ironically named Anti-Violence Task Force seems to exist purely to maim and kill Black people who are deemed threatening. The narrator calls back to past incidents, indicating that this is far from the first time Tiko residents have been murdered by the task force. Moments like these help to explain the narrator’s intense fears that the world is out to get him and his family. 

“How had I become one of those fathers who were deathly afraid of showing any signs of tenderness? What was I doing to us? I had been ignoring my son’s predicament. Instead of engaging with his pain, I did everything to minimize it. The kid who called Nigel a cow wasn’t unusual. Other kids cast similar aspersions, bullied him like it was their jobs. More would in the days to come. But I’d heard of a way to help people like Nigel. I knew what I had to do.”

This is the narrator’s internal monologue when Nigel comes home crying after being bullied for his birthmarks. The narrator neither comforts his child, nor considers the possibility of addressing the bullying itself through contacting the school. Rather, his fearful preoccupation with Nigel’s skin causes him to seize upon this insult and use it as fuel to justify a demelanization procedure.

“‘They’re going to turn us into a police state,’ Penny said. Of course, I agreed with her. But I couldn’t let her know that. If she knew I agreed with her, that would be the end of everything. No more BEG. No more plan. No more saving Nigel. Besides, it’s not like a racist police state would ever affect her. And once I helped Nigel, he’d be safe too.”

Penny reprimands the narrator for joining forces with the BEG and Mayor Chamberlain, who are working to take rights away from Black people after the ADZE attack at the mall. The narrator knows that she is correct in predicting that the City will become a police state, but he doesn’t care, assuming both of the people he loves most will be safe. His reaction demonstrates his myopic focus on his own family and the ways he can be both selfish and selfless. He seems not to care if other Black city residents, including Mama and Supercargo, suffer—on the other hand, he disregards the fact that the new laws will also affect him, as long as his family is safe, although this may be due to his belief that he is different and better than other Black people.

“‘What do I do?’ I asked. I wanted to grab her up and run her to the hospital. But I knew I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t straighten her ruined leg. I couldn’t cradle her head against me. What could I do for her?”

Penny’s death after being run over by a police van casts a dark irony on the previous quote. The narrator has never once worried for her safety, assuming that her whiteness protected her from all the evils of the world. In the end, she is collateral damage of the racist systems that he has been helping to prop up through his work at Seasons. Tragically, he is unable to comfort her in her last living moments because the same officer who ran her over views the narrator as a threat to Penny’s safety.

“‘You’re trying to sound so tough. You can’t even say her name.’

‘And you can?’

‘I talk about her all the time.’ Nigel glanced at me, then away. ‘Just not with you.’”

After Penny’s death, the narrator’s emotional stagnation pushes his son away. Nigel has had to seek comfort and healing outside of his relationship with the narrator, who believes that the best way forward is to pretend that everything is okay. The narrator’s egocentrism shows its face: His reaction to Nigel’s assertion that he talks about Penny with other people is not to open up, but to feel wounded that Nigel considers other people more worthy of speaking to than his own father.

“I was astonished. My son was brilliant and wily, of course, but only a child. I never imagined him using his intelligence against me, even if only for a second. It was an inversion of our relationship.”

Nigel beats the narrator in a game of chess using loaded dice, which shocks him. Even though Nigel has recently been sneaking off to untraceable locations and growing a network of new friends, the narrator still thinks of him as the obedient child he was at the start of the novel. He sees himself as the dominant father figure who controls Nigel’s life, but this moment is a hint that the narrator is not as in control as he believes.

“My father had been careless, an idiot! All his talk of respect and restraint. When it counted, he became an animal just like a common street thug. If he had contained himself, Douglas wouldn’t have gone at him. But he allowed himself to be removed from our lives just when we needed him most. I promised myself to be a better, stronger, a more resilient man than he ever was. I was almost to the promised land. I would never abandon my son.”

This quote goes a long way toward explaining the narrator’s extreme caution and emotional repression. Sir was arrested and jailed for life after a momentary and uncharacteristic emotional outburst. The narrator lost his father because of that outburst, and his internalized racism causes him to place the blame on Sir rather than on the officer who antagonized and beat him. As a parent, he has resolved not to ever make a mistake that would result in losing Nigel, and so is overly amiable and subservient to ensure that he will not provoke the anger of a system that can throw an innocent Black man in jail at any time.

“I watched Nigel for a moment. His dull eyes. The spittle collecting at the corner of his mouth. Those reedlike arms. A helpless lamb in this world, but morally strong. Could he muster the backbone to be the kind of father I was? I hoped not.”

After drugging Nigel when he refuses an injection, the narrator studies his unconscious son. Despite having had to sedate him to get him home, the narrator obtusely infantilizes him, showing that he can’t see Nigel as he is: a young man with strong values that contradict his father’s and a sense of independence. The narrator wonders if Nigel will become a father like him. This question is later answered when Nigel has his own daughter, and it becomes clear that he will be a much better parent to her than the narrator was to him.

“They placed their knapsacks on the ground and removed sculptures. No—masks. Wooden abstract masks like the ones I’d seen in Booker T. They were ADZE masks. My son was a terrorist.”

At this moment, the narrator loses everything that he has been working so hard for. His attempts to protect Nigel have been so focused on shielding him from the outside world that he has been unwilling to confront the path Nigel himself went down, even as it became clearer and clearer to the reader that Nigel joined ADZE. After the narrator’s endless attempts to distance Nigel from the Black part of his identity, his defection to what he considers a Black supremacist terrorist group is the ultimate shock. 

“I recognized that Octavia could have always done this. She could have done it months ago, even on elevation night. I’d fought so hard—for what? Nigel was gone. I would never see him again. There would be no procedure. No conciliation for a better future. I didn’t deserve the money. I never deserved it.”

The narrator has spent the entirety of the novel working tirelessly at Seasons to get the bonus to fund Nigel’s demelanization, complying with Octavia’s increasingly ridiculous requests and going out of his way to impress her. Once she finally cuts him the check, he realizes she’s been stringing him along, exploiting him to get the maximum value from his role as a mascot. It’s the first time he awakens from his entranced pursuit of promotion since the beginning of the novel; but his realization is too late, and his life is already in ruins.

“I had changed my name within the past eighteen months to break with the past. To renew my life. When [Jo Jo] called, the receptionist, a new girl from Minnesota, had no idea who he was asking for. Only select persons had my new email. The complications of being a transracial person.”

After spending the entirety of the novel focused on the singular goal of securing his son’s demelanization, the narrator finds himself with the necessary funds but no more Nigel. His decision to get the procedure done on himself reflects the final stage of his self-hatred and internalized racism, but it also allows him to symbolically sever his new self from a past that was full of pain and tragedy.

“Under the cap, beard, and black man’s skin was my boy. My Nigel.”

The narrator is shocked to see Nigel presenting as a Black man but still recognizes his son. He characterizes Nigel’s darker skin as something his son is “under,” as if the boy he raised and loved cannot possibly really be Black. He lists Nigel’s complexion with two removable or alterable things, a cap and a beard, suggesting that he still views Nigel’s race as something that can be separated or taken off.

“‘Tell me something, Dad.’

‘Anything.’

‘Do you honestly think you would be able to accept her looking the way that she does?’

‘I-’ I stopped myself from speaking and looked down.

‘At least you’re really thinking about it. I appreciate that. But we don’t need that in our lives. Go home. Enjoy what you’ve done to yourself. But don’t haunt us anymore.’”

As soon as his granddaughter is born, the narrator instantly notes the darkness of her skin and hopes to himself that her complexion will lighten. After everything he’s been through, he is too far gone to change his racist and colorist views. Nigel knows that if he allows the narrator contact with his granddaughter, he will feed her the same poisonous ideas he fed Nigel as a child. His final line to his father is a request not to be haunted, a reference to the novel’s recurring portrayal of the narrator as a ghost-like figure who lacks an identity.