46 pages • 1 hour read
Jewelle GomezThe Gilda Stories
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Down by the Riverside: 1981”
Ten years have passed, and Gilda is still living in New York. She has begun working as a lounge singer and has found a wonderful group of black women friends. As the chapter opens, she has been singing at a party given by one of the women but is perturbed by the presence of a young woman named Effie who always seems to stare at her when she performs. She feels desire for Effie but closes herself off from her. (Effie is a fellow vampire but conceals her true nature until the end of the chapter.)
When she goes home from the party, Gilda returns to her apartment, which she now shares with Julius. He is traveling but has painted vibrant scenes of the world’s great cities on the apartment windows. She has a brief and friendly interaction with her gay male neighbor, a man named Marcie whom she admires. They banter, and he gives her a beautiful scarf that she wears to the club the following night.
Gilda sings a new song she’s written—a love song from one vampire to another, though a mortal audience wouldn’t recognize it as such. She introduces it by saying “It’s dedicated to someone, of course, but I’m not sure who yet” (201). Afterward Gilda sits with her friends and again experiences Effie’s intense but unreadable energy. Gilda departs from the group and reaches out into the city to feel Effie’s presence, as she usually can with mortals, but is unable to find her at all.
A few days go by. Gilda finds a particularly strong young man to take blood from but is startled when she is unable to enter his thoughts. In fact, the blood-taking almost kills him. She quickly finds Anthony at the bar so she can discuss the incident, and he greets her with the unsettling news that Samuel has arrived in New York on a revenge mission. Gilda realizes her strange blood-taking occurred because Samuel is trailing her. Anthony believes Samuel means to cause her suffering, though when she asks why and in what way, Anthony says “He’s probably not certain himself” (209).
Gilda walks home uneasily and finds Effie on her doorstep. Once inside Effie says abruptly, “You must say that you do not care for me, then I will leave” (212). Gilda is puzzled until Effie speaks to her through her thoughts, and then Gilda realizes she, too, is a vampire. Overjoyed at the mutual recognition, they make love urgently.
The next morning, Effie begins to advise Gilda about Samuel, having sensed the whole story through Gilda’s thoughts. Effie insists that Gilda must leave the city and her ties to her mortal friends there, an idea that Gilda resists—but Effie says she must learn to see things at a greater distance than mortal time offers. They agree to leave Samuel to Sorel and to depart for Effie’s home in New Hampshire.
As the chapter closes, Gilda sings her vampire love song to Effie at a going-away party held by their mortal women friends, and she feels a new sense of peace that her life will take a different course from theirs.
Chapter 6 Analysis
Gilda’s new profession as a singer shows her finding her own voice in public and making connections to a literal and historical community of black artists. Earlier chapters have shown her feeling moved by music and the written word, and in the previous chapter she works behind the scenes in a theater, but never before has she willingly stepped into the limelight or created anything to share with the wider world. The chapter’s title, “Down by the Riverside,” is the name of a black spiritual originally sung by slaves that became a standard of the civil rights movement. It’s one of only two chapter titles that refers to anything other than a physical location. Though it might refer to New York’s Hudson River, metaphorically it means Gilda’s location in this chapter is in the flow of black musical history.
The brief interaction Gilda has with her proudly gay neighbor Marcie is important in part because of the year in which the chapter is set: 1981. Homosexuality was not accepted by the mainstream at the time, and the burgeoning AIDS crisis, which began in 1981, exacerbated that prejudice. The author makes a deliberate choice not to buy into any of this and instead depicts Marcie as a kind, funny, self-possessed man who makes Gilda feel at home in Chelsea. The novel primarily depicts homosexuality amongst women, but in this brief foray the author makes a point of extending the book’s utopian community to include gay men.
Julius’s paintings of cities on Gilda’s windows add beauty and color to her world, but they also represent her unwillingness to travel, which is increasingly unusual since almost every member of her vampire family spends all or most of this chapter on the road. The paintings symbolize the richness of her interior world, which she has built over the years through her extensive reading and her memories of the past. Simultaneously, the fact that they block her windows indicates that she is trying to keep her world small. Julius’s paintings reflect the central conflict of this chapter; Gilda’s need to loosen her ties to the mortal world and consider the possibility of life elsewhere.
