The Gilda Stories

“The intimacy of her mother’s hands and the warmth of the water lulled the Girl into a trance of sensuality she never forgot. Now the blood washing slowly down her breastbone and soaking into the floor below was like that bath—a cleansing.”

Gilda stabs and kills the bounty hunter who tries to rape her, but rather than being terrified to be soaked in his blood, she feels at peace. The experience gives her a strong memory of being bathed by her mother as a child, making her feel warm and clean. This image reverses the expected implications of a murder scene and foreshadows the healing relationship with blood Gilda will have when she becomes a vampire.

“Bird gazed into the African eyes which struggled to see a white world through words on a page. Bird wondered what creatures, as invisible as she and the Girl were, did with their pasts.”

As Bird teaches young Gilda to read, she feels a connection with her over the fact that they are both outside the dominant white culture. When she refers to them both as “invisible creatures,” she means that neither of them can see themselves depicted in the words they read. Their pasts are subject to disappearance because they are not deemed worthy of representation. All the writing Gilda will do in the future is a way of reclaiming these pasts.

“There was in Gilda an unfathomable hunger—a dark, dry chasm that Bird thought she could help fill. But now it was the touch of the sun and the ocean Gilda hungered for, and little else.”

The elder Gilda’s hunger sets her apart from the other vampires the novel depicts. While the others do have a great appetite for life and experience, Gilda seems always to be seeking satiation. What once manifested as a hunger for Bird’s love has shifted and is now a hunger for the peace of true death.

“Don’t be frightened by the idea of death; it is part of life in all things. It will only become worrisome when you decide that its time has come. Power is the frightening thing, not death. And the blood, it is a shared thing. Something we must all learn to share or simply spill onto battlefields.”

The elder Gilda shares this explanation before she turns the younger Gilda into a vampire. This passage neatly sums up the ethics of the vampire world: Death is natural, power is a great responsibility, and taking blood from humans should not be about power but about connection. The reference to battlefields indicates the forthcoming Civil War and points to the importance of seeking peaceful justice as a key part of the vampire code.

“Each time I thought taking a stand, fighting a war would bring the solution to the demons that haunted us. Each time I thought slavery or fanaticism could be banished from the earth with a law or a battle. Each time I’ve been wrong. I’ve run out of that youthful caring, and I know we must believe in possibilities in order to go on. I no longer believe. At least for myself.”

The elder Gilda explains why she is choosing the true death. She has spent her life fighting for justice but has seen that fight fail too many times. The note that she no longer believes indicates that she does believe going on will be possible for others (in this case Gilda and Bird), and she is glad to know they will remain. The decision about whether to continue to believe and the question of who is capable of that belief return throughout the novel.

“‘I honor your ancestors. I honor our ancestors.’ Anthony solemnly poured sparkling wine onto the floor.”

When Gilda first arrives in Sorel’s parlor in Yerba Buena, Anthony makes a point of conducting this ritual, which he knows to be important to the Fulani people from whom Gilda is descended. Anthony is white, and the care he takes to understand and perform this ceremony shows that he has found an honorable way of engaging with people of other races. By contrast, the white vampires Eleanor and Samuel, whom Gilda will soon meet in Yerba Buena, see her as a servant or a plaything. The anachronistic presence of this ritual in the context of a bustling late-19th-century gambling parlor also indicates the fact that vampires value connections with their ancestral roots no matter where they find themselves.

“Good, I’ve need of you here. It can be so boring sometimes. Nothing but rude men tearing up the mountains looking for gold and other ways to make their fortune. I need civilized company.”

Eleanor speaks these words after Gilda confirms she will stay some time in Yerba Buena. Eleanor’s speech betrays her childishness and her expectation that the world will serve her needs. She sees Gilda as an entertainment and expresses boredom at the place she’s grown up in rather than the deep connection to her homesoil that the other vampires show. While the other vampires are nomadic, selecting their surroundings carefully according to the needs of the era, Eleanor doesn’t seem to regard leaving Yerba Buena as a possibility. Finally, her use of the word “civilized” shows that Eleanor is trapped in the mindset of a white colonizer who believes capitalist society is fundamentally superior, which is a heedless thing to say to a former slave with roots in tribal African society.

“Gilda’s hunger ablated as the piercing notes wrapped themselves around her body. It was in moments like these that oneness with the others returned. The web of music bound them through the ages, through the dark, until there was but a single future for them.”

On the streets of St. Louis, Gilda hears jazz music and feels united with mortals. The word “piercing” show that music metaphorically enters her body, making her porous to the human world, and the image of the web indicates that in some way the mortals and immortals are all part of the same future. This moment foreshadows Gilda’s eventual career as a singer-songwriter.

“Gilda put her lips to the trickle of blood and turned it into a tide washing though her, making her heart pump faster. Her insistent suckling created a new pulse and filled her with new life. In return she offered dreams. She held the girl’s body and mind tightly, letting the desire for future life flow through them both, a promising reverie of freedom and challenge. The woman absorbed Gilda’s desire for family, for union with others like herself, for new experience. Through these she perceived a capacity for endless life and an open door of possibility.”

This passage is a good example of the way this book’s vampires use their blood-taking from humans as an opportunity to give and receive gifts. Here, Gilda has found a hopeless young prostitute in St. Louis and feels great joy at being able to impart to her the desire for life that she lacks. Shortly after this experience, renewed by the knowledge that dreams and hopes are vital, Gilda makes the decision not to tear Aurelia away from her mortal life, demonstrating the fact that vampires often learn as much from the mortals they feed on as those mortals learn from them.

“I’ma tell you, girl, don’t listen to a thing they got to say. It’s all lies. I know, ’cause I see ’em up close, if you can understand me. Close up and they be lyin’ and don’t even know it. Politicians read it off a piece of paper like the gospel and they don’t even know who wrote it. Watch what they be doin’, fuck what they be sayin’! Just like Moms Mabley say: ‘Watch the cars, damn the lights. The lights ain’t never hit nobody!’”

Gilda’s friend, the prostitute Savannah, speaks these words after she hears President Eisenhower talking on the radio. Savannah’s poetic slang and proud independence exemplify the lively spirit Gilda finds in the black neighborhood in Boston. She quotes Moms Mabley, an openly gay, black female standup comedian; the quote warns people not to pay attention to flashy distractions but to focus on the substance behind them. Savannah sees politicians up close because they are her clients, so she can see the “car” clearly and is attentive to the hypocrisy of white society. 

“[Bird] pressed Gilda’s mouth to the red slash, letting the blood wash across Gilda’s face. Soon Gilda drank eagerly, filling herself, and as she did her hand massaged Bird’s breast, first touching the nipple gently with curiosity, then roughly. She wanted to know this body that gave her life. Her heart swelled with their blood, a tide between two shores. To an outsider the sight may have been one of horror: their faces red and shining, their eyes unfocused and black, the sound of their bodies slick with wetness, tight with life. Yet it was a birth. The mother finally able to bring her child into the world, to look at her. It was not death that claimed Gilda. It was Bird.”

When Bird returns to Gilda in Boston, the language that describes their encounter is in equal parts sexual and related to birth. There are double meanings to some of the images, like the “red slash,” which could refer either to the cut through which Gilda drinks Bird’s blood or to Bird’s genitals. The description of bodies “slick with wetness, tight with life” could describe either the act of birth or the act of sex. Though the two vampires experience this as lovemaking, it is also the moment in which Bird ensures Gilda is fully born as a mature vampire. The passage shows the fluidity of family and sexual relationships common in the novel and is a good example of how inextricable vampirism is with sexuality. 

“It is a good thing to love and care for others. That’s why I travel, to learn from the people and study what they search for. But we are as we are. Our world is separate from theirs. To ignore our possibilities is to nurture only disappointment.”

This is Bird’s advice to Gilda when Gilda expresses dismay about a potential interference into mortal lives in order to kill Fox. It marks an important pivot in Gilda’s character development in which Gilda must learn to separate herself from the broader community of mortals. Bird advises engaging with and learning from mortals but being willing to leave them behind in favor of the vampire community. This quote echoes the final advice Bird gives to Gilda on the trail to Machu Picchu.

“Most of the men we marched with ran out of liberation ideas. They had a big dream about black men being free, but that’s as far as it went. They really didn’t have a full vision—you know, women being free, Puerto Ricans being free, homosexuals being free. So things kind of folded up on top of themselves.”

Gilda is describing the development of the Black Power movement to Julius. Her perspective is that the movement could never reach fruition because it was not inclusive enough. Afterward Julius briefly protests that such a vast movement would be impossible, provoking a fiery response from Gilda. The quotation reveals the book’s political stance and introduces a viewpoint Julius will come to believe as an activist once he becomes a vampire.

“We are students for all our time if we’re lucky enough to know it. But that doesn’t mean you wait for Bird to grant you some dispensation before you really live. She can be mother, father, sister, lover—but she cannot create family for you. You are part of our family and you will create others to be a part of it. This is no one’s mission but your own.”

When Gilda expresses fear at the possibility of turning Julius into a vampire, Anthony gives her this advice. His explanation shows the balance a vampire must strike between responsibility to the community and forging an independent path. His use of the words “mother, father, sister, lover” to describe Bird also hearkens back to the fluidity of family roles in the book.

“It is commitment as you’ve always fantasized it—in college dormitories when you talked of revolution, in the theater when they speak of changing the world. The reality of it can never be as one imagines.”

Gilda invites Julius to become a vampire with these words. She uses the metaphor of political commitment to describe the potentially infinite size of the responsibility required when one becomes immortal. For Julius, being a vampire does indeed lead to a deep level of political commitment in the coming years with the GrassRoots Coalition, so these words are apt. 

“My love is the blood that enriches this ground.

The sun is a star denied you and me.

But you are the life I’ve searched for and found

And the moon is our half of the dream.

No day is too long nor night too free.

Just come, be here with me.”

These are the lyrics of a song Gilda writes in 1980s New York. The first time she sings it at a club, she says, “It’s dedicated to someone, of course, but I’m not sure who yet” (201). The lyrics describe a love between vampires. It directly equates love with blood in a reference to the embodied experience of being a vampire but also a violent image—the blood “enriches” the ground, requiring the listener to imagine it pouring out in the first place. The line recalls a song made famous by Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit,” which describes a lynching tree as having “blood on the leaves and blood at the root” (Holiday, Billie, performer. “Strange Fruit,” composed by Abel Meeropol. Commodore, 1939). The song would be familiar to Gilda’s New York audience of black lesbian women.

“She closed her eyes for a moment and was distracted. All her thoughts closed in on themselves. Where ordinarily there was a spectacle of color and sound for Gilda during the exchange, now there was nothing but the sensation of drowning in a vacuum. She felt the man’s flesh at her mouth, heard the sound made as she took the blood, but it was all beyond her conscious reach.”

This is Gilda’s experience of taking blood when Samuel is trailing her in New York. As he blocks her thoughts, the strong connection she normally feels to those she takes blood from is broken, and she loses control. The words “drowning” and “vacuum” show how empty this experience is and underscore the danger of Samuel’s detachment.

“One would think that our life would make such decisions easy. But I look into their faces, and no answer comes to me. Or the answer is no. I can never be certain so I back way, come close again, then retreat. I keep hoping to see the need for this life in their eyes as I did with Julius. But it seems their needs are bigger than the simplicity of longevity.”

Gilda expresses confusion to her new lover Effie about how to know when to bring a new mortal into the vampire life. She is describing the dance she does with mortals—creating and then losing closeness. Her description of longevity as “simple” indicates a phase in her own understanding of vampirism; Whereas previously she struggled to understand immortal life, she aged out of her own humanity so long ago that now mortality is the puzzle.

“Gilda remembered other times she had taken leave of newly made friends and for once felt no sadness. Their lives went on within the cycle that was their nature. As Julius had become her brother, Effie would be her sister. For the first time the years ahead seemed rightfully hers.”

As Gilda settles into a future with Effie, she begins to feel at peace with leaving behind mortal friends. This is a turning point for her character, marking the moment when she is fully comfortable being more vampire than human. As the last lines of Chapter 6, this passage shows her departure for New Hampshire is not a running away, as her previous moves have often been.

“When she looked into the mirror her familiar image formed easily, reminding her of what the Fulani people had always known: the spirit was just that—an intangible thing that did not die with the body. Her essence as an African still shown through her soft, wide features.

She saw not just herself but a long line of others who had become part of her as time passed. The family she had hungered for as a child was hers now. It was spread across the globe but was closer to her than she had ever imagined possible.”

Gazing into the mirror as a mature vampire, Gilda feels that she fully embodies the community she has built over the years. She sees her deep human ancestral roots as well as her vampire family. Gilda is entirely comfortable with herself now and feels at home. The last line refers to the explosion of technology she has witnessed in recent years, allowing instant communication with her traveling friends. In a chapter in which Gilda experiences frustration at having her secret literary identity discovered through technology’s encroachment, the last line explores the potential for technology to help deepen connections in a diaspora, which is a major preoccupation of Afrofuturism.

“‘Who was that old dude you used to quote, about the tightrope?’

‘Papa Wallenda. “Life exists only on the high wire. Everything else is just waiting.”’

‘Right on!’”

The optimistic Julius reminds Gilda of a quotation from the patriarch of a famous family high-wire act. The quotation means that when you practice a thrill-seeking art, you only truly yourself when practicing it. Julius is comparing Papa Wallenda’s family to Gilda’s vampire family and their lifestyle to a high-wire act in order to encourage her to take a risk, move away from her secluded New Hampshire cottage, and explore life on the road.

“They think because I’m deaf, I’m stupid. They think they love me because they don’t make fun of my deafness. They don’t see that this is not enough to be called love. Doing nothing can never be called love. My mother said her gran’ma taught her that. Did I ever tell you every one of us got Nadine in our name somewhere? She said gran’ma named her for a special gift someone had given her many years ago…”

Gilda sees these words in a letter Nadine has written to her as she’s preparing to leave New Hampshire. Nadine’s words underscore the novel’s philosophy of love as an active practice—tolerance is an insufficient replacement for working to uplift those with fewer resources. In her last lines she tells Gilda she is named for “a gift” given to her great-grandmother. Nadine doesn’t know that the gift is the hope Gilda helped Aurelia find during her widowhood (the origin of the name Nadine is “hope”).

“‘I believe I’ll run on…’ Ermis sang, the lilt of her voice providing the music to the old gospel song.”

When Gilda says she wants to explain more about the vampire life to Ermis after turning her, Ermis immediately begins to sing this song. The full lyric is “I believe I’ll run on—see what the end’s goin’ be.” That Ermis responds with this particular song shows her connection to the black musical traditions of which Gilda is also a part, and it also shows her desire to continue committing to life, no matter what may come.