Clare travels through the Jamaican countryside in a truck with a group of anti-imperialist revolutionaries carrying concealed guns.

Boy moves the Savage family from Jamaica to New York City after Kitty's adoptive mother passes away.

Boy convinces a Georgia motel manager he is white, beginning the family's commitment to racial passing in America.

Kitty secretly writes anti-racist messages on the laundry's Mrs. White flyers and slips them into white customers' clothes.

Kitty quits her job and returns to Jamaica with Jennie, leaving Clare and Boy behind in New York.

A high school principal refuses to enroll Clare, declaring the school has no room for lies or 'in-betweens.'

Kitty dies suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in Jamaica while Clare is attending college.

Clare moves to England to study art history at the University of London.

Clare visits Jamaica and meets Harry/Harriet for the first time at Paul H.'s Christmas party.

Clare witnesses a National Front anti-immigrant protest march near her university campus and feels profoundly alienated.

Clare leaves the University of London to travel Europe with Bobby, a Black Vietnam veteran she meets in London.

Bobby abandons Clare in Paris without explanation after she reveals she is pregnant with his child.

Clare returns to Jamaica and learns she is permanently sterile after suffering a serious uterine infection.

Clare is interviewed by the resistance group's leader and officially joins the revolutionary movement.

Helicopters marked 'MADE IN USA' gun down Clare and the entire resistance group during their failed attack on a film crew.

The Savage family's migration from Jamaica to New York marks the beginning of Clare's lifelong struggle with identity and belonging. Boy's insistence on passing as white fractures the family, driving Kitty back to Jamaica and leaving Clare increasingly isolated in America. After Kitty's sudden death, Clare moves to England in search of a mother-country, but finds only alienation and racial hostility. A visit to Jamaica and a transformative friendship with Harry/Harriet awakens Clare's political consciousness and pulls her homeward. After Bobby abandons her and a uterine infection leaves her sterile, Clare commits herself fully to a Jamaican revolutionary resistance movement. The group's final attack on a foreign film crew ends in catastrophe when American-made helicopters gun them all down.

Clare Savage's journey from Jamaica to revolution.

Paul H. returns home from his Christmas party to discover his entire family has been murdered.

Christopher confronts his employer Master Charles in the middle of the night, demanding a burial plot for his long-dead grandmother.

Christopher murders Paul H.'s family with a machete and kills Paul when Paul returns home from the party.

Kitty finds a Jamaican grocery store in Brooklyn where she briefly reconnects with her homeland and breaks her silence.

Mr. B. fires two innocent Black employees after a customer complains about the subversive messages hidden in the laundry flyers.

Clare clips a newspaper photo of one of the young Black girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Boy snatches Clare's photo of the bombing victim from her hands while Kennedy's funeral plays on television.

Boy confronts Clare for not weeping over her mother's death, and Clare retaliates by declaring she is 'a nigger.'

Jennie returns to New York after Kitty's death and falls into drug addiction on the city streets.

Clare visits Gravesend with her friend Liz and discovers a statue of the colonized and renamed Pocahontas.

Harry/Harriet discloses to Clare that a white British officer raped them during their childhood in Jamaica.

Clare and Harry/Harriet share a picnic on the Jamaican coast, where Harry/Harriet points out a former slave hospital.

Clare receives urgent letters from Harry/Harriet urging her to leave Europe and return to Jamaica to help her people.

Clare visits her grandmother's overgrown, ruined land with Harriet and shares vivid childhood memories of the place.

A British man and an American man discuss their grossly inaccurate film about the Jamaican Maroons at a rum bar.

Christopher's murderous act of desperation—rooted in a lifetime of dispossession—sets the novel's violent backdrop in motion before Clare's own story fully takes shape. Kitty's covert rebellion against the laundry's racist flyers exposes the painful costs of light-skinned privilege, while two innocent Black coworkers pay the price for her actions. Clare grows up in America carrying the weight of racial injustice, symbolized by the newspaper photo of a bombing victim her father forcibly takes from her. Harry/Harriet's disclosure of their childhood rape and their shared lessons about Jamaica's colonial wounds become a turning point in Clare's political awakening. Letters from Harry/Harriet draw Clare back to Jamaica, where she walks the ruined land her grandmother left her. The British and American filmmakers drinking at the rum bar embody the ongoing colonial exploitation that the resistance group ultimately rises against.

The violence, displacement, and hidden struggles behind Clare's world.

A preacher named Brother Josephus visits the Dungle and proclaims that Christopher resembles a black, impoverished 'Lickle Jesus.'

Christopher's grandmother dies in their Dungle shack, and government workers remove her body without a proper burial.

Master Charles takes Christopher from the Dungle at age ten and installs him as the family's live-in yard boy.

Christopher discovers that the government has demolished the Dungle when he attempts to return to his childhood home.

Boy severs contact with Jamaican relatives and forbids Kitty from visiting the Jamaican grocery store to enforce assimilation.

Clare's white history teacher Miss Peterkin shows Gone with the Wind to her class, sincerely believing it is a Civil War documentary.

Kitty writes Clare a letter urging her to fill the space between who she is and who she will become.

Jennie reveals to Clare that their mother left Clare in America because Clare's lighter skin would help her prosper.

Bobby's recurring war nightmares begin to fuse with reality in Paris as his mental health rapidly deteriorates.

Harriet reveals to Clare that she has fully adopted a female identity, declaring that Harry is 'no more.'

Harriet, trained in healing arts, nurses Clare back to health from a severe post-pregnancy uterine infection.

Christopher wanders the streets of Kingston after the murders and becomes revered as a prophet figure called 'Neger Jesus.'

Harriet reveals to Clare that local Jamaican villagers are so impoverished they are forced to eat lizards to survive.

Foreign filmmakers recruit Christopher to howl on camera for their film, commanding him to 'remember, you're not human.'

Someone betrays the resistance group to a counter-terrorism operation, causing their planned attack on the film crew to collapse.

Christopher's childhood in the Dungle—shaped by a preacher's vision of a black Jesus and the government's destruction of his only home—creates the conditions for his later violence and wandering. Boy's rigid insistence on assimilation silences Kitty and isolates Clare, who later learns painfully that her mother left her in America because of her lighter skin. As Clare matures, cinematic propaganda and Bobby's deteriorating war trauma expose the layers of colonial and racial damage that have always surrounded her. Harriet's courageous transformation into a fully female identity becomes a model of self-determination that inspires Clare to stop living in between. The poverty Clare witnesses on her return to Jamaica and the film crew's dehumanization of Christopher crystallize why the resistance movement exists. The group's ultimate betrayal brings the novel's colonial critique to its devastating, inevitable conclusion.