46 pages • 1-hour read
The Gilda Stories
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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Louisiana: 1850”
The book opens on the protagonist, the Girl, asleep in a barn near New Orleans in 1950. (NOTE: In later chapters, the Girl takes the name Gilda from the vampire who turns her. In this chapter only, Gilda only refers to that older vampire, while the protagonist is called the Girl.) The Girl is a slave who has just run away alone from her plantation, and she dreams fitfully of her mother’s cooking and wisdom while she tries to rest.
She is awakened by a white bounty hunter who grabs her from the straw and tries to rape her, but the Girl uses her knife to kill him. As his blood pours over her, she feels strangely peaceful. The Girl is then discovered by the farmhouse’s owner, the vampire Gilda. (The author doesn’t explicitly reveal that Gilda is a vampire until the end of the chapter, though she provides indications throughout.)
They ride to the outskirts of New Orleans, where Gilda has owned and managed a brothel called Woodard’s for the last 15 years. Young women of a variety of races work there together under Gilda’s care, including Bird, a Lakota woman who is Gilda’s co-manager, lover, and secretly a fellow vampire. While the Girl sleeps that night, Gilda uses her powers to explore the Girl’s memories of slave life and feels exhausted by the constant motion there, and by her own 300 years of life; she reflects that she is considering giving up her immortality.
The Girl adjusts to life at Woodard’s over the ensuing months, keeping quiet, doing household work, and listening to the women gossip. Bird begins to teach the Girl to read, and through their lessons the two develop a close relationship.
Three years pass, and as the Girl grows up, the Civil War draws nearer. The Woodard’s women enjoy a birthday party for one of the girls. Things turn serious when a white patron corners the Girl in the coatroom and demands to sleep with her. Gilda enters and warns him off, though she is furious afterward and must remind herself of her mentor Sorel’s words that vampiric power is about connection, not death.
Years pass, and the Girl is fully grown. She joins Bird and Gilda for a few days out at the farmhouse. One night, when Bird is away, Gilda tells the Girl that because of the pressure of the coming Civil War compounded by the many wars Gilda has already lived through, she has decided to end her life—but she wants the Girl to stay with Bird and to join her way of life outside of time. The girl senses the transformation is about connection and love, not death, and agrees.
Gilda exchanges blood with the Girl by biting her neck and then sharing blood from her own chest. The Girl becomes sick; Gilda cares for her and then leaves her sleeping. Bird returns, furious upon realizing Gilda has taken the true death in the ocean, but repeats the blood-exchanging process with the Girl to help her recover fully, understanding that Gilda wanted to pass on her name and legacy to the Girl. Though it grieves her to trade her beloved companion for a young student, Bird ultimately commits to this future.
She promises to show the Girl the principles of their lifestyle—how to take blood but not life, how to stay out of the sunlight, and how to manage her newfound strength. In the final paragraph, the narrator refers to the Girl as Gilda for the first time, and she and Bird venture west into the fields.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The past is strongly present within the Girl in the chapter’s opening paragraphs, with flashbacks of her mother pervading her consciousness as she tries to rest. In the rest of the novel, the Girl and the other vampires often feel the weight of their memories as vivid presences, and large sections of each chapter consist of adult Gilda sifting through her previous experiences. However, this is one of the only sections in the novel where two timelines interweave simultaneously. The disorienting feeling this technique creates mimics the disorientation the Girl feels as she tries to cope with life on the run and with the trauma of the bounty hunter’s attack.
Though the Girl has run away alone from her plantation, even before she has vampiric powers the novel shows she can take care of herself, killing the bounty hunter without any help. She has the foresight to steal a knife from her mother’s kitchen before running away, and she tricks the man, using his assumption that she is paralyzed with fear to get him in a vulnerable position. Even though the novel focuses on vampires, it features a number of black female mortal characters capable of extraordinary strength on their own. Beginning the novel this way signals that there will be no simplistic hierarchy between vampire and mortal power.
This chapter is unique in that it shows the passage of a number of years during which the Girl grows up into a young woman. Other chapters are isolated to periods of just a few weeks or days. The Girl makes gradual progress from section to section in each chapter, starting out almost silent and working her way up to a literate woman whom Gilda and Bird treat as a companion, if not quite an equal. By contrast, though many years pass, the vampires’ preoccupations remain unchanged. Gilda feels her desire for the true death with the same keenness the day she meets the Girl as she does when she finally decides to take it at the chapter’s end, and she and Bird have the same argument over her decision repeatedly. This difference indicates the separate ways mortals and vampires experience time.
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