54 pages • 1 hour read
Lawrence HillThe Illegal
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Freedom State, 2018”
Chapter 5 Summary
Viola Hill is a journalist who self-describes as “blagaybulled—black, gay, and disabled” (63). She is completing her usual morning workout in her wheelchair when she is passed by a very fast jogger. His identity is not given, though his description matches Keita’s. Viola observes him as “Black. Short, tightly cropped hair, medium height […] this man had proper marathon shorts, slit up the side of the thighs” (64). The runner advises Viola to turn around because there is a mob up ahead. She doesn’t want to miss a potential story, so she rushes to the scene and finds a shipping container at the pier. She announces to the police and immigration enforcement officers that she is with The Clarkson Evening Telegram and that she wants to interview the refugees being removed from the shipping container and placed in a paddy wagon. She asks the refugees what is happening to them and why. Few answer. One young woman says she cannot wake her baby and that she needs help. Viola threatens to report the officers who are ignoring and mistreating this woman until finally, the constable approaches to help. Viola then asks a group of white people to explain why they are present and holding signs that read “Enough is Enough,” “Send ’Em Back,” and “Who Invited Them?” (66). Viola asks Constable Devlin James where these refugees (or criminals, according to the constable) will be detained. He replies, “Same place we put any other criminals. The City Jail” (69).
Viola rushes to the office to write the story. She is typically only assigned sports stories, and she hopes this will be her breakout piece. Unfortunately, her boss and editor, Mike Bolton, does not like that she wrote something he didn’t assign. He reminds her that she is a sportswriter and must go through him before writing anything else.
Chapter 6 Summary
As a punishment, Viola’s boss gives her a boring assignment covering the “Annual Awards Luncheon for the Best Essays Written by High School Students in Freedom State” (70). The winner is John Falconer, a boy from Clarkson Academy for the Gifted. His essay, entitled “North and South, We Are All Ortizians,” garners him $10,000 worth of video equipment to make a documentary about AfricTown. The donor, an elderly white woman named Ivernia Beech, hugs John and tells him to “give ’em hell” with his documentary.
After John exits the stage, Viola calls him over. She shares that she grew up in AfricTown and wonders if he realizes he is the first Black student to attend Clarkson Academy for the Gifted. She asks for a copy of his essay, which discusses the historical politics of deportation in Freedom State. Viola manages to get this story published with an excerpt from John’s essay, which begins, “We brought thousands of people from Zantoroland in chains, enslaved them here in Freedom State and used them to build what is now one of the world’s biggest economies” (75). He goes on to describe the process of deporting formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants to Zantoroland, paying a small resettlement fee to the government. He details the racial grading system the government deployed to determine who was white enough to remain in Freedom State. Anyone defined as more than 1/16th Black was forced to leave Freedom State. Some people managed to stay, and many who were deported attempted to sneak back in. Most of these people end up living in AfricTown. John writes, “People refer all the time to AfricTown as a slum, a ghetto, a township. It is none of the above. AfricTown is a community” (76).
Chapter 7 Summary
Three men from the Office for Independent Living come to Ivernia Beech’s home to assess her after she caused an automobile accident the prior morning. She believes her son, Jimmy, hopes she will lose her driver’s license so he will be one step closer to having power of attorney over her.
Ivernia recalls the morning leading up to the accident: She was driving to her favorite bagel shop and saw a “young black man […] running as fast as her car” (79). He was loudly singing a country song as he passed her. Next, she pulled in to parallel park and almost hit a woman and her baby. No one was hurt, but she damaged two vehicles. The runner reappeared and calmed her down, helping her gather her purse and sit on the sidewalk. She asked his name, and he said it was Roger Bannister. Bannister was a famous marathoner who was the first to “break the four-minute mile […] he did it on May 6, 1954. Sixty-four years ago. She remembered. She was twenty-one years old, and it was the day that she and Ernie married” (82).
In the present, Ivernia is sitting in the Office for Independent Living. Her license has been suspended and her vehicle impounded. She thinks of the runner and hopes he is not a refugee.
Chapter 8 Summary
The narrative returns to AfricTown, focusing on John. Though only 15, he lives alone in half of a shipping container that he rents from his landlady, Lula DiStefano. His mother is currently in a psychiatric hospital, which is why he lives alone. Lula pities him and goes easy on the rent. She also pays the remaining balance of John’s tuition and expenses, but in return, she “owns him for life” (86). He works as a cleaner in her brothel each morning before school. John details the conditions in AfricTown, where people live in a collection of shipping containers (owned by Lula) with very little electricity and no indoor plumbing. John wants to capture these details in his documentary, and he asks a woman on the street for an interview. She is carrying a baby on her back and tells him she is a single mother who walks to Clarkson to clean houses. They discuss fathers, and John says that when he has children, he will not abandon them.
After filming this brief interview, he arrives at Bombay Booty, Lula’s brothel. He cleans the floors and toilets before leaving for school. As John walks through Ruddings Park, he crosses paths with an exceptional runner who says he is training for the Buttersby Marathon. The runner declines being filmed, but John sneaks a few seconds of footage anyway. It’s not clear if this is the same runner sighted by Viola and Ivernia earlier, though his description is quite similar.
Chapter 9 Summary
Back in Bombay Booty, John has hidden himself inside a closet in one of the brothel bedrooms with his recording equipment. He wants to get raw footage for his documentary. From the closet, he witnesses two women, Yvette and Darlene, discussing their work. He learns that Lula makes the unauthorized women do risky things for extra money, like stealing a client’s ID. Yvette tells Darlene that she is currently taking half pay so that Lula will get her a citizenship card and passport. John feels guilty that because his mother is white, he automatically received citizenship.
Darlene leaves, and Yvette’s client enters the room. John is shocked to see that it is Prime Minister Graeme Wellington. When Wellington steps out of the room, Yvette opens his briefcase. She exposes a memo addressed to “bossman” from “whoa-boy.” The memo references the sale of refugees, although John and Yvette don’t understand that. She also removes Wellington’s citizenship card and hides it in the closet, where she discovers John. John is terrified, and she tells him to stay quiet “or [he’s] dead” (104). When the prime minister returns, he can tell that Yvette opened his briefcase. He begins to strangle her when Lula enters and stops him. She calls him by his first name and tells him she will handle Yvette’s punishment because she “runs her own show” (106). Two bouncers remove Wellington, but before he leaves, he demands Yvette’s full name: Yvette Peters.
Lula is angry that Yvette got caught because she now has to make it up to the prime minister and has probably lost his business. Lula asks what Yvette found in the briefcase, but Yvette says she doesn’t understand what she saw. She says Lula should ask the boy hiding in the closet. Lula finds John, his pants soaked in urine from fear, and he explains what he has done. She slaps him across the face and tells him he is fired from his cleaning job. He will instead serve as her personal videographer, recording “certain incidents” and then deleting them from his computer immediately. She demands the footage he just recorded, and he provides her with a USB stick. Lula thinks she has the only copy, but John has another hidden in his shoe.
Chapter 10 Summary
Viola is awoken early by her editor. He has a story he wants her to pursue. A mother has reported her daughter’s death and wants answers. Viola meets the grieving mother, Mrs. Peters. She tells Viola that she hasn’t seen her daughter Yvette in two years but has heard she is a sex worker at Bombay Booty. She tells Viola that she came home to a message from the ministry stating that Yvette died in a Zantoroland prison of “natural causes.” She has no idea why her daughter would be in Zantoroland. Mrs. Peters mentions that while she has citizenship, she never got around to securing Yvette’s citizenship papers.
Viola reflects on her own childhood and the drunk driver who struck her and her mother when she was eight years old, leaving Viola in a wheelchair without legs and her mother dead. Lula DiStefano was a helpful benefactor to Viola after the accident, so she uses her personal connection to call Lula and get more details about the story. Lula tells Viola not to quote her or say a word about Yvette being a sex worker, or else she will have her men hurt Viola. Viola quickly puts together the best version of the story she can before rushing off to cover the Buttersby Marathon.
Chapter 11 Summary
The narrative returns to the scene from the Prologue: As Keita nears the end of the marathon, he suffers racist insults from his competitors. He decides to sing to break the spirit of the runner on his heels. He chooses a country song, the very same song that Ivernia heard Roger Bannister singing. He sees a beautiful female racer, who gives him a high five. With this encouragement, he sprints ahead of the second-place runner, putting a great distance between them.
Racing in the same marathon is Rocco Calder, minister of immigration. As he runs, his assistant calls his cell phone, as does the prime minister’s assistant, Geoffrey. Rocco dislikes Geoffrey because he is young and conservative. Rocco calls him Whoa-Boy during their call to irritate him. Geoffrey is calling to brief Calder on Yvette’s death; he wants to ensure Calder doesn’t say anything to anyone, especially media, about Yvette. Calder hangs up and focuses on finishing the race, hoping to beat his goal time to win a bottle of expensive alcohol off a bet with his friends. He then notices a beautiful woman running alongside him.
Sergeant Candace Freixa is from AfricTown and works for the Freedom State police department. As she passes Keita, she high-fives him and then hears the second-place runner call him the n-word. Next, she is hit on by Calder. She almost tells him off but realizes just in time that he is the minister of immigration.
Viola is taking photos and watching the race from the finish line. Intrigued by the lead runner, she hopes to find the story on him.
Chapters 5-11 Analysis
Part 2 demonstrates a shift in narrative style as readers are introduced to many characters who reside in Freedom State, each of whom is given their own chapter and voice. Though none of these characters are particularly developed, each represents an opinion on the state of affairs in their country. Through the voices of Viola, John, and Ivernia, it becomes clear that Freedom State is not as free or advanced as its government would have people believe. This use of rotating perspectives thus establishes The Power of Marginalized Voices to expose corruption and injustice.
Readers are also introduced to AfricTown, an impoverished community in the heart of one of the world’s richest nations. Comparison of Keita’s small but clean and functional home in Zantoroland to the living conditions in AfricTown raises the question of whether it is actually preferable to live in Freedom State as an undocumented Black person: “There were about a thousand [taps], or one for every fifteen shipping containers, with an average of seven people in each container. Some of the containers had windows, but none of them had bathrooms” (90). Refugees ostensibly come to Freedom Land seeking safety from political oppression, but the virulent racism of Freedom Land makes this a gamble at best.
Hill uses the documentary to depict AfricTown and its inhabitants through the lens of John’s camera (and point of view). The novel reads a bit like a screenplay as a result, with the reader hiding in closets and hearing secret conversations. John’s intense focus on details helps the reader understand this fictional world. The camera also becomes a way for John to silently disrupt his country’s political narrative, much as Hill’s novel aims to do with his own political climate. John imagines his documentary as an exposé, something that Freedom State’s upper classes will watch. As such, he attempts to document the culture’s hypocrisy. John states, “People who would watch his documentary needed to see, up close, how hard-working people […] were in AfricTown” (91).
Identity politics emerge as a theme connected to issues of Race, Privilege, and Power, as in John’s ambivalence toward his community: “The country had deported all the black people it could after the abolition of slavery, but try as it might, it could not prevent the descendants of its slaves from returning boat by boat, year after year…but Freedom State would not admit, acknowledge, or legalize them, so they clustered in AfricTown [ …] AfricTown, Oh AfricTown. His country’s moral blight. His home” (100). Beyond the traumatic history that surrounds the community, John reveals that he is insecure about his identity as a boy from AfricTown because he straddles the line between white and Black and doesn’t know where he fits in. He attends a gifted school as the first Black student in its history, but he doesn’t feel Black in AfricTown because his mother is white. John’s character helps illuminate the enduring legacy of postcolonial politics and the concept of “passing.” In many formerly colonized countries, the racist practice of privileging people based on the lightness of their skin prevails, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly. For John, who identifies with the Black community, this privilege is unwanted.
Conversely, those whose Blackness is not in doubt must do extraordinary things to attain a measure of societal acceptance. For example, Keita cannot simply be welcomed into Freedom State as a good runner. He must be the best marathoner and consent to “ownership” by a white man to enter Freedom State. Viola similarly feels like an outsider, and she attempts to write about her community rather than live in it. Like John, she wants to excel in her field and become an award-winning journalist. None of them are allowed or able to sit comfortably in their skin; they are always striving both to distinguish themselves and to achieve a sense of belonging.
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