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 3, Chapters 32-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 32 Summary
Reeling from his visit with Sir, the narrator is overwhelmed by the urge to see Nigel and tell his son that he loves him. He heads to Nigel’s scheduled soccer practice but discovers that Nigel hasn’t attended in weeks. Nigel isn’t answering his phone, so the narrator drives to Araminta’s house. Araminta answers the door to tell him that Nigel isn’t there, but he can smell Nigel’s scent in the house. Breaking the door down with his shoulder, he demands to know where Nigel is. Araminta points him toward a room in the back of the house, where the narrator catches Nigel as he is trying to sneak out of a window. Nigel refuses to come home, declaring that he won’t take any more of the demelanization treatments. Araminta gets between them, and, when the narrator grabs her arm, Nigel shoves him onto his back. Realizing that she lives alone, the narrator threatens to call CPS on her if she doesn’t come home with him and Nigel, but she retorts that she “ain’t closing [her] eyes in any house [the narrator] was in” (254). The narrator returns to his car and mixes a sedative into Nigel’s medication.
Part 3, Chapter 33 Summary
The narrator brings Nigel home after drugging him into near-unconsciousness. He puts him into bed and prepares a syringe of medication, but Nigel keeps going in and out of sleep as he tries to administer the shot. The narrator goes to the kitchen to fix a drink—but he hallucinates Penny, who tells him that he is going down a dark path and taking Nigel with him. Spirit-Penny disappears into Nigel’s room, and the narrator suddenly wakes up to find the syringe of medication lying unused next to him.
Part 3, Chapter 34 Summary
The narrator rarely knows Nigel’s whereabouts anymore, and even when Nigel is home there is “a kind of cold damp” (260) between them. The narrator becomes more and more suspicious, even losing his much-treasured ability to read. He dislikes being outside, feeling watched and constantly worried that someone will call the police on himself or Nigel. It’s not a far-fetched worry; a Black family in the Tiko was recently arrested in their own home for being a threat to public safety. One day, Nigel is over two hours late to get home, and the narrator can’t find him on the app he uses to track him. When Nigel finally shows up, the narrator quickly pulls him into the house. He grills his son about where he’s been, but Nigel shouts that he hates the narrator and runs to his room. The narrator puts a heavy book in front of his door. Hours later, when he hears the book fall over, he knows Nigel snuck out. He watches Nigel climb into a delivery van and starts up his car to tail him.
Part 3, Chapter 35 Summary
The narrator follows the van to Booker T. Elementary school, a former public school whose grounds are now populated by illicit drug users, homeless people and fugitives. Entering a random room inside the building, he sees the man who led the attack at the mall and realizes this is an ADZE meeting. When noticed, he makes a run for it, tailed by a group of ADZE members. Running across the school yard, a boy in a hoodie advises him to step on a blanket on the ground, which drops him down into a sewer tunnel. Above him, he hears an ADZE member shoot the boy who let him escape. There is light at one end of the tunnel, but the narrator goes the other way.
Part 3, Chapter 36 Summary
On Martin Luther King Day, setup for the Visions of Blackness festival is in full swing at the Tiko. As he walks through a diverse crowd of elaborately dressed Black people, the narrator feels, for once, as though he fits in. He even secured Mama a stall to sell her fried chicken at the festival. A little while into prepping the stall, Nigel and Araminta run out into the crowd. They make their way behind the large stage (where Crown is set to perform) and don wooden ADZE masks. They open the fence around the festival and ADZE members rush in, throwing smoke grenades and fists. The narrator recognizes Supercargo in the fray, beating a security officer with a cudgel. He grabs a handful of Supercargo’s hair, but the hair comes off along with the mask it was attached to, and he realizes that this man isn’t Supercargo after all. As Nigel calls out to his father, the man begins beating the narrator.
Part 3, Chapter 37 Summary
In her office, Octavia assures the narrator that Seasons will assist with any legal fees for Nigel, who is now on the run. If found, he will likely be tried as an adult and sentenced to death even though he is only 13. Despite the chaos, Octavia is cheerful. PHH got a huge publicity boost in the aftermath of the attack by caring for its victims, repairing broken noses and injured lips with demelanization surgery performed on these features for anyone who wanted it. PHH has finally agreed to sign a huge deal with Seasons. Meanwhile, Armbruster’s group is under federal investigation for embezzlement, so Octavia has officially taken over control of Seasons. She writes the narrator his long-awaited bonus check. As he accepts it, he realizes that she could have done this whenever she wanted and has been holding out on him. Now that she finally decides to give the narrator his due, Nigel is too far gone. He tells Octavia he is quitting. She advises him to take a leave of absence but warns that he cannot leave.
Part 3, Chapter 38 Summary
Years after Nigel’s disappearance, the narrator still has no idea where his son is. He sold the old family home and moved into a condo near Seasons, where he was finally made a shareholder. Pavor is serving his second mayoral term, implementing policies including restrictive “Black Safety Laws” (283) and condemning the Tiko entirely. Mama and Aunt Shirls have moved to Canada, and no one knows where Supercargo is. The narrator is entirely alone. One day, he gets an email from Jo Jo, who survived his trip to Oman with Polaire and is now living happily in the Netherlands and raising triplets. Jo Jo has been trying to reach the narrator for a long time but has been unable because the narrator has undergone demelanization surgery and changed his name. Jo Jo’s email includes the details of Nigel’s exact location, pulled from an email Nigel sent asking the narrator to leave him alone.
Part 3, Chapters 32-38 Analysis
The visit to Sir leaves the narrator wanting reconnection with Nigel, but his warped mindset still gets in the way. He does not understand that Nigel avoids him because he’s become obviously and frighteningly unstable. His skin-whitening regimen, increasingly intense, becomes violent when he breaks into Araminta’s house and drugs Nigel after Nigel refuses treatments. The hallucination of a disapproving Penny shows that on some level, the narrator knows he is wrong, but he is too close to achieving his vision of Nigel’s “perfect” life to backtrack. Having already lost his wife, the thought of losing his son terrifies him, but his drastic measures to regain control over Nigel only alienate him further. Nigel was always the center of the narrator’s life, but his obsession now renders him unable to think about anything else.
The extent of the narrator’s removal from reality is evident in his inability or unwillingness to realize that Nigel joined ADZE, even after it is obvious to the reader. There were numerous hints leading up to the revelation in Chapter 36, from Araminta’s mysterious acquaintance with Supercargo to Nigel’s cryptic statement to Eckstein in the grocery store that he “knows” ADZE is real. Even after trailing Nigel to Booker T. Elementary and stumbling into an ADZE meeting, the narrator forges ahead as if everything is fine, exactly as he has responded to every single shock he’s dealt with in the novel. It’s not until Nigel and Araminta help stage the festival attack, in full view, that he finally must accept Nigel’s actions. It’s telling that Upon this realization, his first instinct is to blame Supercargo, whose presence is never even confirmed. He can’t admit that his own behavior drove Nigel away from him and toward other sources of community.
In Chapter 37, the narrator finally achieves the goal he’s been striving for since the beginning of the novel. PHH signs a deal with Seasons, and Octavia gives him his long-awaited bonus check—but it’s far too late. Penny is dead, and Nigel has fled the City, so there is nothing left of the little family the narrator desperately sought to protect. Up until this point, he dutifully jumped through every hoop Octavia provided, destroying his life in the process. Once she hands him the check, however, he realizes her casual cruelty in withholding it for as long as she did. The check’s amount is inconsequential to her, and it could’ve been handed over at any time, yet she held it over him to continue exploiting him. Earlier in the novel, the reader learns that Sir was once an indentured servant; and, although the narrator boasts a prestigious title, he has essentially been fulfilling the role of an indentured servant for Octavia. The parallel is strengthened by her refusal to let him quit Seasons.
After Nigel’s flight from the City, the narrator still excels at Seasons, but his life is empty of relationships after his remaining family leave the country amid worsening conditions for Black people. The discovery that he used his newfound wealth to get demelanization surgery blindsides the reader; his focus has always been on Nigel getting the procedure, and he never seems to consider it for himself. It’s a sudden twist, but it makes sense for a man who has always hated being Black and never felt any kinship with the community. After aligning himself with groups whose laws exponentially worsen the lives of the City’s Black residents, he opts out of the Black experience for good.
