46 pages • 1 hour read
Jewelle GomezThe Gilda Stories
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Off-Broadway: 1971”
Gilda has moved to New York City, where she is working as a stage manager with an Off-Broadway theater company and has begun to write songs in her spare time. A fellow theater employee, a young man named Julius, is enamored with her. After a rehearsal, the two visit a café and compare notes on their lives; Julius has been involved with the Black Power movement but is not sure how to live its values fully.
Restless, Gilda briefly repairs to the vampire bar that Sorel and Anthony have opened in the city. Gilda and Anthony discuss Eleanor’s recent true death, which she chose to keep from destroying Samuel, over whom she ultimately felt guilty. On her way back from the bar, Gilda visits Julius’s apartment while he sleeps. He is dreaming of her, and she takes his blood while allowing him to fully experience the fantasy in his dreams.
The theater company’s play has a successful opening, but Julius is troubled at the cast party. He tells Gilda he had a dream about her making love to him (the dream he doesn’t know she gave him when she took his blood) and that he felt empty afterward knowing it wasn’t real and asks that they at least stay connected as friends. Gilda speaks to him with her mind, warning him her lifestyle is too big a commitment. She tries to leave, but Julius finds her on the street, and she warns him off more firmly.
Nonetheless, when Sorel returns to town from a trip to New Zealand with Bird, Gilda invites Julius to a party at the vampire bar in Sorel’s honor. Sorel is as big-hearted and joyful as always, and Julius expresses gratitude at meeting Gilda’s friends. The next day, Sorel sends Gilda a letter from Bird in which her old friend seems to sense that Gilda is considering turning Julius and advises Gilda to “make roots for yourself” (190).
This is the impetus Gilda needs to make her decision, and she goes straight to Julius’s apartment. She tells him she wants to bring him into her family and tells him the commitment will match his large-scale activist dreams. He agrees immediately, and she exchanges blood with him; in return, he gives her the feeling that she is his true mother. As dawn breaks, Gilda holds Julius and sends out a message to Bird that their family has grown.
Chapter 5 Analysis
The language Gilda uses to describe New York shows that her perception of time is starting to diverge from that of mortals. She describes feeling overwhelmed by the ambition she can sense there and not understanding why actors “struggle to achieve the same trim body, coiffured hair, and characterless movement, yet still hoped to be different from one another” (168). The desire for temporal achievement and for conformity no longer makes sense to Gilda as she grows in her vampiric maturity.
Gilda and Julius’s conversations touch on many of the black political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Julius says he participated in every sit-in when he was in college, which might refer to the civil rights movement or to Black Power, or possibly a combination of both. These movements effected huge changes in the latter half of the 20th century, bringing an end to laws enshrining segregation in the South and building on the work of early 20th-century activists like Alice Dunbar, who appears briefly in Chapter 3. Love was a major theme in the black activism of the time, and Julius feels this keenly as his desires for political involvement and his desire for a family are equally large and intertwined with one another. Initiating Julius into her vampire family is a personal decision for Gilda, and in its way, it is also a contribution to those activist movements.
