A Brief History of Seven Killings

Nina Burgess is a young Jamaican woman whose brief encounters with the Singer and Josey Wales on the night of the ambush puts her into mortal danger. She spends the rest of the novel fleeing the worsening chaos in Jamaica and hiding from the vindictive and terrifying Josey; her experiences in New York City develop the theme of Diaspora and the Promise of Escape.

Although she is unemployed when the novel begins, Nina comes from a suburban middle-class family. Nina’s family has connections to upper class society, as evidenced by Nina’s sister Kimmy, who gets them access to a party thrown by the Singer’s record label. Nina and Kimmy compete for their parents’ affirmation. When Kimmy calls Nina in Part 2, she criticizes her for waiting outside the Singer’s house, believing that Nina wants to have sex with him. Nina accuses Kimmy of having double standards, but Kimmy gets her mother’s support by organizing an intervention for Nina. In reality, Nina is at the Singer’s house to leverage her past sexual relationship with him to get help with acquiring visas so her family can escape to Miami following a robbery at their house.

Nina is characterized as avoiding the news. She believes it is futile to learn about politics, which only confirms her sense that conditions are getting worse. During the ambush of the Singer, Nina has a face-to-face encounter with Josey, who threatens her and causes her to think that he will track her down and kill her as a witness. This changes the tenor of her political avoidance, which shifts from a desire to avoid the stress of current events to a desire to avoid reminding herself of Josey’s existence.

After fleeing Kingston, to protect herself from being found, Nina assumes a number of false names and identities over the course of a decade: Kim Clarke, the mistress of white American extractive industry worker Chuck; Dorcas Palmer, a caretaker for young children and the elderly, and Millicent Segree, a student nurse. Thematically, taking on these many identities prevents Nina from ever being her true self—a metaphorical commentary on the harm of self-effacing assimilation. 

Nina’s romantic history reflects her shifting attitude towards her escape from Jamaica. In Jamaica, she uses her sexual desirability in transactional relationships. She wants to solicit the Singer to help her family flee Jamaica, a dynamic that recurs in her relationships with two American boyfriends, Danny and Chuck. When she reaches New York, she no longer needs to trade on her sexuality. Instead, her sexual identity becomes a measure of authenticity. First, she has a one-night-stand with a light-skinned Black man desperate to prove that he is Jamaican; however, he attempts to force her into having sex. Later, Ken Colthirst, an elderly man who becomes her client, encourages her to practice a different kind of authenticity: not to worry about being noticed in public because people forget one another after brief encounters. 

Nina ends the novel on a positive note, reconsidering her distance from Jamaica. After the death of Josey, she approaches opportunities to reengage with her identity, such as talking to the wife of the injured Ranking Don, going to a Jamaican restaurant, and calling her sister for the first time since leaving.

Weeper is the right-hand man of Josey Wales through the first three parts of the novel. In Part 4, he enforces Josey’s drug trafficking operations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This pits him against Josey’s Bronx enforcer, Eubie Brown, who becomes his rival for Josey’s approval.

Josey favors Weeper because of their compatibility as working partners. Josey describes Weeper as intimidating, and someone Josey can understand through his eyes. Weeper wears glasses, which remain cracked after being broken in incarceration. Like Josey, Weeper is an educated man; he is an atheist, having studied the work of British philosopher Bertrand Russell during his incarceration.

Weeper is bisexual, having sexual encounters with both women and men throughout the novel. His exploration of his sexuality is a major element of his character arc, beginning with a romantic relationship with another man during Weeper’s incarceration. Josey disapproves of Weeper’s queerness. When Weeper moves to New York, he feels that he has escaped Josey’s oversight, allowing him to explore his sexuality with greater agency and discretion. In Part 4, this results in a relationship with the blonde man who distracts Weeper from his duties before Josey’s arrival in the city. Weeper assures himself that being in New York means that he can do anything he wants, playing into the idea of diaspora and the promise of escape.

Weeper is assassinated by hitman John-John K as part of Eubie’s elaborate plot to unseat Josey as the head of the Storm Posse. First, Eubie paints Weeper as an incompetent enforcer in a bid to replace him as Josey’s right-hand man. Simultaneously, Eubie pledges loyalty to drug kingpin Griselda Blanco in exchange for her help with Weeper’s murder. During his last moments, Weeper connects with John-John over their shared loneliness as queer people. He tricks John-John into letting him freebase pure cocaine, which allows him to die by overdose. This causes Josey to doubt whether Weeper was assassinated, allowing for the possibility that he died either by accident or by suicide.