56 pages • 1 hour read
Alan DuffOnce Were Warriors
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A 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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Tennessee Waltz”
Beth wakes up next to Jake, her face fully swollen and her body bruised. As she leaves her room to go downstairs, she notices how quiet the house is and assumes that the kids are in school. Only when she sees the clock does she realize that she missed Boogie’s court appearance. She quickly rationalizes that she wouldn’t have been able to go, given her appearance. She walks through her children’s rooms, recalling how Grace told her to apply for a bigger house. Beth confirms once again that she could not have made it to the appointment after comparing herself to Polly’s corpse-like doll, Sweetie.
Beth moves to her older sons’ room and takes notice of the posters of Black boxers. She sees in the boxers’ eyes the same kind of hurt that she recognizes in Jake and in his own violence. As she goes downstairs to retrieve a smoke, she also collects one of the many spare changes of clothing that she has hidden away throughout the house, intimating that once, in his anger, Jake threw Beth out of their home completely naked for all their neighbors to see. She finds four bottles of beer in her fridge and drinks all of them to dull the pain in her body. She wonders about the nature of Māori and if there is something about them that makes them “wilder, more inclined to breaking the law” (37). While drinking her fourth beer, her children return. When Grace enters without Boogie, Beth knows that the state has taken charge of him. Saddened, she considers her family: how Nig is itching to join the Brown Fist, how Abe does not like her, how Boogie is lost to her, and how she doesn’t know very much about Grace at all. She promises Grace, as Grace cries, that they’ll visit Boogie and that she will save enough money to do so. She then tries to give the little money that she has to Grace to buy a treat for herself and the other kids. When Grace refuses, Beth hides the money away. She puts a Sam Cooke album on and dances with the last of her beer.
When Jake wakes up, Beth is defiant, despite his threat of giving her another beating. He leaves the house, slamming the door on his way out. Growing more and more inebriated, Beth continues to dance in their sparse living room, singing to the “Tennessee Waltz” and feeling vain about her possessiveness toward her husband that matches its lyrics. Grace, meanwhile, looks on at her mother’s drunk antics. Grace wonders why her mother loves her father and what love means.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Jake and the Broken of Hearts and Spirits”
Jake wakes up with a desire to hurt someone. He leaves his family home to visit his friend, Dooly, so that they can go to the bar that he considers his true home, McClutchy’s. He refuses to take the bus to the bar, as he considers it beneath him, and instead has Dooly drive them. Jake muses over his character and feels proud for only giving half his dole to his wife for her to care for their home and family and reserving the rest for his own enjoyment. He mocks Dooly for giving all his money to his wife for their bills. Jake makes Dooly cruise down the street because he likes to be driven, “sort of like a king going over his kingdom making sure people still knew who he was” (48). When they arrive in Two Lakes, however, Jake grows uncomfortable, especially when they turn on Taniwha Street, where everything is lit and clean. He is reminded of the terrible experience he once had of going to a pharmacy and being judged for his dirty clothes. He grows restless and feels judged once again by the Pākeha on the streets, so he demands that Dooly speed up until they arrive in the area where there is a prevalence of Māori.
When they arrive at McClutchy’s, Jake feels at home in the loudness of the place—a mixture of music, laughter, people fighting, and things breaking. Jake is greeted by the people in the bar, some greeting him out of fear and others claiming a family relationship. The attention pleases Jake, as their appreciation of his personality and his muscularity makes him feel as if he were a deity. Among the mayhem of the place is Mavis Tatana, a Māori singer. As she sings to the drunk people in the bar, Jake judges her as better and more authentic than the international Māori singer, Kiri Te Kanawa, who sang at the British Royal wedding. Jake makes his way to the counter for drinks and realizes that he forgot about Boogie’s court appearance that morning. He quickly rationalizes his absence away, and unlike Beth, he doesn’t feel responsible for Boogie’s trouble.
As he and Dooly are plied with free drinks, their friend Mitch tells them of a fight that he had with a man. Hearing the tale, Jake’s need for violence surges. Mavis sings “El Morata,” and a woman nicknamed the Baby Killer attempts to join in. The crowd cruelly tells her off, to the extent that even Jake feels sorry for her. Once she vacates the bar, Mavis finishes her song, and the bar attendees watch a televised horse racing competition, on which many of them have made bets. By the end of the evening, Jake finds a man in the bathroom whom he’s been wanting to fight and provokes him by drudging up his time in prison. He punches the man once, and the man lands on the floor, but Jake is still unsatisfied and wants another fight.
The Brown Fists enter the bar before it closes. Their leader, Jimmy Bad Horse, is at the front, parting the people to make way for him and his gang members. The bar attendees’ deference to the gang annoys Jake, who feels as if Jimmy Bad Horse is encroaching upon his territory. Jake insults them and faces off against Jimmy, who, in the end, is unwilling to fight Jake out of concealed fear. People at the bar egg them on, and Jake refuses to back down. Jimmy finally leaves the bar after a tense exchange, his pride wounded.
The narrative flashes to Grace who is chasing after shooting stars that lead her to the Trambert estate. Meanwhile, “The People”—that is, the Māori people whom Jake recognizes as his own from the bar—leave McClutchy’s in droves. Some go home, and many go to an open-late Chinese takeaway restaurant, despite the mixed feelings that they have for the workers there. “The People,” according to the narrator, imagine that they’re being judged and found inferior by them.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
This section of the narrative focuses on exposition of Beth and Jake’s characters as it contends with the roles that Beth and Jake want to successfully fulfill. For Beth, striving to be a good mother is a defining feature of her character, one in which she takes a measure of pride. In Chapter 5, however, Duff showcases how “broken” she’s become by her domestic circumstances and how they present barriers to her goals as a parent. Like “the cupboard mirror with the silver starting to break up behind the glass” (32), the core of her person is beginning to crack beneath a thin veneer. The guilt that she feels for missing Boogie’s court appearance is immense, but had she appeared before the court with her face as it was, the court would have recognized the abusive environment of the Heke home. Her face is “beaten to a barely recognizable pulp. […] The right eye puffed shut, nose broken – again – lower lip swollen with a deep cut about midway and leaking blood. Bruises all over” (32). Duff’s description is gruesome in its realism, and the word “again” is “broken” off from the rest of the sentence with dashes to typographically reflect her state. Beth cannot hide the violence of her home with Jake, and as a result, she must compromise on her role as a mother.
Her inability to be a reliable maternal figure is best exemplified when Duff compares her to Polly’s doll, Sweetie. When Beth visits her children’s room and sees the doll, she is suddenly struck with an eerie likeness:
Oo, Beth got a sudden new perspective of Polly’s doll, it looks like a damn corpse with its eyelids closed and blonde locks spread out beneath her. Beth touched the face, There there, Sweetie, I didn’t mean you were dead, only you look it. She touched her own face (33).
The doll is a symbol with two meanings. While it mirrors Beth’s current relationship with her husband and the domestic abuse that she endures, it also alludes to the strained relationship that she has with her children. Beth equates herself with the doll on account of the morbid state of both their faces, but in every other regard, they differ in physical attributes. Sweetie is not a Māori doll; she has blond hair, and most significantly, she is a source of comfort and protection for Polly in a way that her mother is not. When fights happen in the Heke home, Polly doesn’t go to her mother, nor even Grace; “her and Sweetie, her doll,” as Grace explains in Chapter 2, “they were looking after each other” (19). In effect, the inanimate doll comes to replace all her family members: “[T]hat doll of hers, a thing with blonde shiny hair she thought of it as her baby/sister/other mother all in one” (23). Beth does her best for her children but being a domestic abuse survivor caught in poverty undermines her credibility as a reliable maternal figure.
Jake, meanwhile, wishes to make himself the king-figure of his own Māori community at McClutchy’s. As he often feels ill at ease with traditional Māori culture, highlighting the theme of Distorted History and Disconnection from Cultural Identity, he pushes for a Māori community built around two central tenets of his distorted understanding of Māori identity: physical dominance and music. Jake is constantly on the prowl at McClutchy’s for someone to fight—be it an innocent bystander or a gang leader like Jimmy Bad Horse who enters McClutchy’s for a last drink. However, whereas Māori culture privileges the idea of warriorhood and pride, Jake typically expresses his violence in hidden spaces. When he beats Beth in their home the night before Boogie’s court appearance, all of his friends have left the house, and when he confronts “the stranger with the king-hit” (65), it’s in an empty bathroom where no one can see him attack an unsuspecting man. Duff emphasizes this point during Jake’s confrontation with Jimmy Bad Horse. While the entire bar looks on and clamors for him to punch Jimmy, Jake doesn’t fight him. Though he feels rage for the man, Jake does not attack because “this ain’t no ordinary rumble, this is revenge stuff. These areshole’ll come after you with guns, remember that” (70–71). The possibility of repercussions and losing frightens him. Although he succeeds in intimidating the man, Duff suggests by juxtaposing these examples of Jake’s characteristics that Jake’s type of violence is antithetical to Māori warriorhood.
Duff also showcases Jake’s distorted version of Māori culture through music. Music is a central motif in the story, one that typically unites people. At McClutchy’s, the two sources of music are the jukebox and Mavis’s singing. However, the jukebox is a false promise “because the barman had volume control and you didn’t know the barman and he didn’t like your music then fuck your five bucks of fifteen cents this ain’t a democracy it’s a dictatorship!” (55). This free passage without punctuation reflects the occasional stream-of-consciousness style in the novel which Duff uses to represent uncontrolled emotions. Anyone who argues and tries to impose a song on the collective at the bar is handled by the bouncers. Mavis, however, is something of a different story. Although she will eventually lead the people in Māori hymns alongside Beth in later chapters, at the bar, she is recognized as “the lone star amongst burnt-out bodies and yet representing something of you, everyone knew this” (58), afflicted with “the ole Maori shyness” (62). Though she is loved, even she is interrupted: first by the man who wants to listen to the jukebox, then by Bim the Baby Killer, who wants to partake in her song. Bim, however, isn’t allowed to sing with Mavis—no one, in fact, sings with her, unlike the Māori of Pine Block who eventually will after Grace’s death. She is alone in singing, whereas Māori culture expresses unity through music. Instead, the “music” that binds them at McClutchy’s is the sound of drunken revelry and infighting:
Shrieking explosions of laughter, exclamation, SOUND. Oh man! Dool having to shout to Jake beside and then behind him. It’s packt! with joy in his voice. Layers and layers ofem, of babbling jabbering moaning cursing swearing beer-pouring humanity – cursed by something, a stranger’d think a regular know (54).
This dynamic passage overflows with onomatopoeia—“babbling jabbering”—as well as irregular sentence patterns and exclamation marks to portray the chaotic noise of the bar. This, however, is the music and the noise that Jake loves and sees as most authentic. Such is the rhythm and melody of “The People,” as Jake calls them, of McClutchy’s, the domain that Jake arrogantly claims as his own (“I own it. I’m king a this castle” [67]), if only temporarily. His understanding of Māori music juxtaposes with the collectivity and unity that it creates later in the novel.
