58 pages • 1 hour read
Maurice Carlos RuffinWe Cast a Shadow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A 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 1, Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Against the backdrop of a lavish costume party, the reader is introduced to the novel’s first-person narrator, who claims that his name doesn’t matter and describes himself only as “a phantom, a figment” (1). He retells the party’s events, hosted at the extravagant house of Octavia Whitmore, the narrator’s boss at the law firm of Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux. Including the narrator, Seasons has only three Black employees. The narrator is dressed as a Roman centurion, but the other Black lawyers, Franklin and Riley, have come as a prisoner and a busboy respectively. Riley informs the narrator that the party is in fact a competition between the three of them: Whoever wins will be promoted to shareholder, and the losers will be fired. The narrator badly needs a promotion because he is saving up for a cosmetic procedure to give his son, Nigel, “a normal face” (5). Realizing that his costume will work against him—because shareholders don’t like “angry black men” (6)—he goes to Octavia for help. Out of the several alternate costumes she offers him, the narrator selects a Zulu chief outfit consisting of a feathered headdress and a loincloth. In his new costume, he dances in an exaggerated, mocking way for the shareholders’ entertainment. The crowd is cheering and engaged—until they aren’t. Noticing shocked faces, the narrator realizes that his loincloth has come off, and he is naked. Humiliated, he runs out of the party.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
The narrator lives with his white wife Penny and their biracial son Nigel in a city somewhere in the South known only as “the City.” Their neighborhood is a charming enclave where most of the City’s Black population used to reside before they were “vigorously re-appropriated to the penitentiary at the parish line” (13). City police vans regularly patrol the neighborhood because of the narrator’s presence as a Black man. Penny wants the narrator to raise the issue to the City, but he brushes it off; it’s standard for the police vans to visit neighborhoods with Black residents to check for drug usage, conflict, or death. He thinks it’s for his own good, because it “wasn’t uncommon for people to attack [Black people] in the streets” (15) when he was growing up.
The narrator is certain that he’s been fired from Seasons and is distraught over his failure to pay for Nigel’s surgery. Penny doesn’t support the surgery, wanting Nigel to be confident in who he is. The cosmetic defect that the narrator seeks to correct is a dark brown facial birthmark that has grown steadily since Nigel’s birth as if “a shard of [the narrator] [is] emerging from him” (18). Nigel shows the narrator a school project he’s been working on, but the narrator is too distracted by the sight of his son’s birthmark to pay attention.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
The narrator returns to Seasons, planning to quietly pack up his office and leave. In the kitchen, three recently-promoted junior shareholders—Dinah Viet Dinh, Paul Pavor, and Quentin Callower—are talking. Dinah is Vietnamese, while Pavor and Callower are white. Pavor says that Franklin, Riley, and the narrator should all be fired, proclaiming that they’re only retained to meet a diversity quota. A Black maid named Etherine walks in, and the narrator, who prides himself on dressing well, is disgusted that she’s come to work “dressed like Mammy in Gone with the Wind” (28). He remembers that, years ago, he asked Etherine why she dressed like she still lived in the Antebellum South. She retorted that Seasons would have him in a butler’s outfit before long.
Upset that he’s spent eight years of his life at a firm that never appreciated him despite his being one of its best lawyers, the narrator decides to leave some parting graffiti in the conference room. Before he can do so, however, Dinah shows up to inform him that he hasn’t been fired. In fact, he’s been promoted to chair of Seasons’ (all-white) diversity committee and needs to meet with Octavia immediately. As he heads toward her office, however, he gets a call from a dean at Nigel’s school. Nigel has been involved in an “incident” and is asking for his parents.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Nigel attends the School Without Walls. Despite the school’s ostensibly liberal politics, Nigel is bullied for being one of its only students of color. By the time the narrator arrives at the school, Penny and a brigade of firefighters are already there. Nigel has locked himself into the art room’s utility closet after a confrontation during a free-painting session. When Nigel calls out for his father, the narrator uses a fire extinguisher to smash through the closet door in a panic, only to find that Nigel has already crawled out through a grate. There is a white substance all over his face, covering his birthmark so that he looks “like a normal child” (37). Penny asks if it’s paint, but a little girl explains that it’s skin bleaching cream. Nigel had been applying it in class and she called him a beauty queen, leading to the closet incident. Penny is furious that the narrator gave Nigel bleaching cream. When Penny is distracted, the narrator smears more cream onto Nigel’s birthmark.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Seasons hosts an annual firm retreat, which this year is located on an old plantation called Shanksted. Amidst the chaos at Nigel’s school, the narrator missed his chance to meet with Octavia. He resolves to make up for it in person by meeting her on the plantation. Penny and Nigel are accompanying him on the trip. On the drive up, the trio sings happily together in the car. The narrator feels safe and close to his family but believes that this feeling is a result of “slim fissures in [his] logic” (43) which never last long.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
As the car approaches Shanksted, Nigel notices felt shapes that “look like strung-up people” (45) hanging from the trees. At the front desk, the receptionist tells the narrator that, even though his name is on the list, they don’t have a room for him. He, Penny, and Nigel are consequently moved to an area called The Planters Suite. Their bellboy is a Black man named Moses who’s undergone cosmetic surgery to “deplump” his lips. Moses gapes at Nigel, reminding the narrator of the rarity of interracial marriages and biracial children in the modern South. When Moses is gone, he tells Nigel that none of this is his fault but reminds his son to keep up with skin bleaching and wear a sun hat anyway. He then heads to the master suite, taking a “Plum”—a purple painkiller pill—along the way. In the suite, Penny lies naked in bed. Sensing “an invitation to truce” (48), the narrator climbs in with her.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
In the afternoon, the narrator and his family head down to the Old House, a mansion on the plantation property, hoping to run into Octavia, but she is nowhere to be found. The narrator wants to leave before a scheduled tour of the plantation begins, but Penny insists on staying. She is not one to shy away from “obvious racism or bigotry” (51). Two tour guides in period dress, Nathan and Mary, spin a romanticized version of life in the South which glosses over slavery. Penny calls them out several times, culminating in a confrontation when Mary refers to the civil war as “[a] war of unprovoked [Northern] aggression” (53). In the aftermath of their argument, Penny realizes that Nigel is missing. Security sends Moses the bellboy with a bloodhound. Alerted to Nigel’s scent, the dog leads them deep into the woods, where they find Nigel playing, naked, in a river. With a strange smile on his face, he explains that he just felt like going for a swim.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
The Monday after the plantation trip, the narrator and Nigel meet with Octavia at a basketball arena in the City. Octavia admonishes the narrator for his failure to make their previous meeting, then pins a sun-shaped pendant to his shirt, signifying that he is now “one of [her] people” (64). Despite getting the most votes out of the three candidates, however, he did not get enough to become a shareholder, so he is provisional until he is either promoted or fired. Octavia lays out her mission for the narrator: She wants his help in acquiring Personal Hill Hospital, or PHH, the cutting-edge hospital where Penny works, as a client. His job will be assembling a diversity campaign to show that Seasons cares about the Black community; this will allow them entry onto PHH’s list of approved legal firms. Callower and Dinah are also in on the plan, and Pavor is running for mayor in order to influence things from the inside.
Part 1, Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The first few paragraphs of We Cast a Shadow seem to situate the novel in a normal, modern setting; we first meet the narrator at a lavish costume party where the rich and powerful are getting drunk on Southern comfort. This impression is abruptly inverted when the narrator mentions Franklin’s and Riley’s costumes. As two out of three of Season’s Black employees, their adoption of a prisoner’s and a busboy’s uniform, respectively, is starkly farcical, but it is one of the milder incidences of racism in the first part of We Cast a Shadow. Ruffin uses dark satire to evoke an America in which anti-Black racism has reached cartoonishly heinous levels. Discrimination is not only accepted but codified, from the City Police vans patrolling the narrator’s neighborhood to police officers who shoot Black people with impunity, to the location of Seasons’ annual retreat at a plantation where effigies of lynched people hang from the trees. Yet the narrator’s dystopian America closely parallels our own: He lives in a generic urban area known only as the City, drives a VW Bug, and lives in a seemingly normal house with no futuristic trappings, all clues that We Cast a Shadow is set in a not too distant future.
The reader doesn’t learn the narrator’s name, and his description of himself as “a phantom” and “a figment” suggests that he struggles with a sense of identity. He has absorbed much of the virulent racism around him and associates Blackness with fear, danger, and negativity—early on, he describes Franklin as “too Black to be pretty” (4), and he takes an instant dislike to a child at Nigel’s school because of her traditionally Black hairstyle and dark skin. Race is always on his mind, and his stream-of-consciousness narration often flits from mundane observations about daily life to pondering the many ways that society is set up to degrade, harm, and kill Black people. To cope with this ever-present fear, he uses painkillers called Plums, which sometimes cause hallucinations and lapses of amnesia where he loses chunks of time. To survive a world which seems designed to hurt him, the narrator has developed a strategy of total deference. He readily debases himself at work in hopes of a promotion and accepts all manner of micro- and macro-aggressions without complaint. His strategy seems to be working; he enjoys far more material success than most of the City’s Black residents, working a fairly prestigious job and living in a “safe” gentrified neighborhood rather than in the Tiko, the housing development where the majority of the Black population has been relocated.
Despite his seemingly neat life, he feels intensely fearful hypervigilance about being Black, which manifests mainly in his treatment of his son, Nigel. Nigel is biracial, born with skin light enough that he “might be mistaken for a Venetian boy who spent his summers cartwheeling across the Rialto Bridge” (18) if it were not for his ever-spreading facial birthmark. The narrator sees the dark patch on his beloved son’s face as physical proof of his Nigel’s Blackness, and fears that Nigel will inherit his father’s miserable lot in life if he is perceived as Black. This fear causes the narrator to be an overbearing parent as he tries to stop the slow spread of Nigel’s marks by any means necessary, including methods that are painful for his son. Nigel is a bright, sweet, and happy child who loves his father, but the narrator’s single-minded focus on his Blackness causes him to miss moments of connection with his son; when Nigel tries to show off an impressive science project, for example, the narrator is too fixated on his birthmark to absorb anything.
Octavia’s proposal that the narrator head up an all-white diversity committee clearly demonstrates Seasons’ superficiality; the company is only concerned about appearing anti-racist when it affects their bottom line. Seasons employees readily degrade and discount the narrator for being Black, but Octavia is happy to strategically exploit him to secure a deal with influential client PHH. The narrator is perfectly aware of this, but he complies because it will help fund Nigel’s surgery. This is just one example of his desperation, and related moral compromise, to protect his family and advance himself. This tendency will inform many of his actions throughout the novel.
