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 2, Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Penny and the narrator are at the Chicken Coop, a fried chicken restaurant run by Mama, the narrator’s mother. Both Penny and Mama think Seasons is exploiting the narrator by “[using] him as blackface” (72) to make the company seem more diverse. He knows they’re right, but he doesn’t care as long as he can fund Nigel’s surgery. Mama hands him a letter from his incarcerated father, Sir, but he rips it up, asserting that “[he doesn’t] associate with criminals” (74).
A man with long dreads enters the Chicken Coop. It’s “cousin” Supercargo, who is not a blood relative but a childhood friend who used to live with the narrator. The two were close before Supercargo went to jail in an alleged frame-up. Nigel mentions that he’s going after the leading role in his school play. He’s learning piano from a new teacher named Mr. Riley. The narrator realizes with a start that this is the same Riley who was recently fired from Seasons. Supercargo leads Nigel to the local community center to practice piano, and Penny follows. When Mama and the narrator are alone, Mama confronts him—she knows that he is saving up for Nigel’s surgery. She tells him that he is losing “[his] heart […] [his] roots” (78) and cautions him not to let whatever he’s struggling with hurt Nigel.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
With Nigel in tow, the narrator visits an old friend named Jo Jo Baker. A former pharmacist disgraced after accidentally poisoning a child, Jo Jo now works in the film industry and sells drugs on the side. At his stately house, they meet his girlfriend, a woman named Polaire, who takes Nigel upstairs to play. Alone with Jo Jo, the narrator admits the reasons behind his visit: He needs a refill of Plums, and he wants Jo Jo to assist him in making an “Afrocentric” ad campaign for Seasons to impress Octavia. As they discuss the project, the doorbell rings. The narrator answers the door to an armed cop who pushes him against a wall and begins to choke him out. Jo Jo reprimands the man, who explains that he only did it because the narrator could have been dangerous. After the man leaves, Jo Jo explains that he’s not a real cop but a man with a substance use disorder who runs drills out in the desert with his equally addicted friends. Jo Jo refills the narrator’s supply of Plums and gives him three Blue Geisha Backrubs, a more powerful version of Plums. The narrator takes a Geisha on the spot. As the pill begins to take effect, Polaire reappears with Nigel, who is in blackface. She explains that it’s just makeup for the upcoming play, but the narrator collapses, distraught, mumbling that Nigel “can’t look like that” (87).
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
The narrator grew up in the Tiko, one of the City’s last remaining housing projects, a collection of buildings which houses most of the City’s Black residents. He, Jo Jo, Nigel, and Polaire drive up to the Tiko with boxes of t-shirts featuring Crooked Crown, a famous, formerly Black popstar who has recently undergone “demelanization” at PHH, a process involving “lip thinning, a nose job, skin bleaching, and the Devil knows what else” (90). Tiko residents pose with the narrator in exchange for free t-shirts while Polaire snaps pictures for the diversity campaign. As they wrap for the day, they’re approached by Supercargo, who invites them into his building. Inside, they are confronted by Uncle “Ty” Tyrod, who “[isn’t the narrator’s] real uncle any more than Supercargo [is his] real cousin” (95). Their connection stems solely from the fact that City authorities tend to group random Black men together into assigned housing. Uncle Ty explains to the assembled group that he has just served a prison sentence for killing and eating his son Jacques after cooking the boy in his sleep during a vivid nightmare. The narrator knows this isn’t true. In reality, Jacques was shot by a police officer as he and Uncle Ty walked back from work one day. Uncle Ty cannot process this reality and made up the cannibal story to cope. A fascinated Polaire tries to arrange a photoshoot with Uncle Ty, but Supercargo kicks them all out of his apartment.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
As he leaves the Tiko, the narrator recounts the story of Officer Dred Douglas, a Black police officer who used to patrol the development during the narrator’s childhood. Considered a gold-star cop, Douglas was omnipresent around the Tiko, keeping a mistrustful eye on residents at all times. He was a hateful man, suspicious of everyone and prone to doling out beatings. During his time at the Tiko, the narrator saw Douglas perform bodily searches on almost every resident, from grown men to children. He recalls images from these searches: emptied pockets, purses turned inside out, children’s ice cream cones melting on the ground. Picturing an overturned red wheelbarrow, he muses that “so much depends upon a man with a hatred of his own” (101).
Part 2, Chapters 9-12 Analysis
This section of the novel further explores the rampant racism of the narrator’s world and peoples’ differing reactions to their trauma. The reader is introduced to other Black characters who have each found their own way to deal with their situation. Not everyone has gone the route of the narrator, Franklin, and Riley. Mama disapproves of the narrator’s strategic schmoozing with racists. Like Penny, she takes issue with his exploitative role as a diversity mascot and worries that his mindset will negatively affect Nigel as he continues to essentially tell his son that being Black is a bad thing.
Outside of family, the narrator has few Black acquaintances or friends. His closest friend is Jo Jo Baker, a white man he went to college with back when “it seemed as if the country were turning away from the old troubles of systemic racial oppression” (82)—another eerie callout to modern-day America. Jo Jo’s life contrasts with the narrator’s and highlights the different experiences of the novel’s Black and white characters. While the narrator has had to do everything perfectly in life in order to attain modest success, Jo Jo got away with poisoning a child during his failed career as a pharmacist. His wealth and skin tone allow him to dabble in crime without the fear of repercussions, as he openly deals drugs to the narrator and others. When a police officer comes to the door, however, it is the narrator who ends up in a headlock because he is perceived as a threat just for being Black. It’s later revealed that he isn’t even a real officer, but a paranoid man with a substance use disorder who runs a backwoods military camp. The fact that he feels perfectly justified in threatening the narrator, a brilliant lawyer, highlights the way that race eclipses all other social dynamics within the City.
Uncle Tyrod provides another example of a character with internalized societal racism. In the aftermath of his son’s death in an incident of police brutality, his mental health deteriorates: He creates a narrative which places the blame for his son’s death on his own shoulders, casting himself as a brutal monster. Jacques’s story resembles real-life incidents of police brutality, driving home the point that the seemingly cartoonish racism of the narrator’s world is not far removed from our reality. It also further contextualizes the narrator’s fears over Nigel’s birthmark. In his world, a dark-skinned man has to fear for his safety at all times. Such details explain the narrator’s overwhelming horror when he sees Nigel in blackface, an already disturbing sight.
In Chapter 11, the narrator returns to the Tiko, the grim housing development mentioned in earlier chapters. Despite having grown up there, he now avoids it like the plague. This is a further rejection of his Black identity, but it’s also likely that he experienced trauma at the Tiko that he is eager to leave behind. The reader knows that his father, Sir, is in prison, but not the reasons behind his sentence. There is a hint when the narrator relates the story of Officer Dred Douglas. Douglas also illustrates how extreme racist narratives can be internalized by their victims. Despite being Black himself, Officer Douglas policed the Tiko’s residents with extreme, violent suspicion, earning him national acclaim and the title of “America’s top cop” (99). In an allusion to William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” the narrator states that “so much depends upon a man with a hatred of his own” (101). This statement can apply to both Douglas and the narrator himself; although he is not committing violence, the narrator, like Douglas, benefits from his pressured cooperation with a racist system, and the effects of his internal identity conflict are harmful to those around him. His relationship with Nigel is proof of this; he hurts his son not only emotionally but physically by forcing painful skin bleaching treatments. There is also, however, a key difference between Douglas and the narrator: While Douglas is motivated by hatred, the narrator is driven by a fierce and protective love for Nigel and a desire to give his son a better life.
