The Gilded Ones

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-8

Chapters 9-17

Chapters 18-25

Chapters 26-31

Chapters 32-37

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

Deka

The first-person narrator of The Gilded Ones is Deka, who is 16 when the novel begins. Throughout the book, she learns about her true identity and lineage. At first, all she knows is that her mother was from the South, which is where she gets her dark skin and curly hair, as well as some subtle premonitions. Much of the novel is her reflections and reactions or, in other words, her “thoughts are always spinning” (259).

Deka’s deeper differences are initially revealed when the deathshrieks try to rescue her from the Ritual of Purity. Once the villagers learn she can control the deathshrieks, they murder her repeatedly and sell her golden blood. This is where Deka begins to question all the teachings of the men. Deka believes her suffering at the hands of the villagers helps her understand women who are not as powerful as she is, being the chosen one.

White Hands facilitates Deka’s escape from the cellar and offers the life of a warrior but does not reveal Deka’s true nature until the end of the book. Once in training and in battle, Deka becomes more powerful and confident. Without knowing her divine origins, she seeks to unite the alaki and investigate the deathshrieks rather blindly accepting that they are evil. She is motivated by a quest for love, both romantic and platonic, which she obtains by the end of the novel.

Most significantly, Deka’s characterization is an avenue for investigating passing. She says, “Like the goddesses who created me, I am completely divine—a creature neither deathshriek nor human, with the ability to mimic both. I can be whoever I want to be” (380). Forna’s use of fantasy creatures explores the issues of blood quantum and passing during and after the institution of American chattel slavery. Texts like William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Lydia Maria Child’s Quadroons discuss the fates of women who might be able to pass as white but carry the blood of enslaved Africans. Deka cannot pass as white, but she could pass as human or deathshriek. Her “ability to mimic both,” references a seminal text on racial identity in America, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both by Werner Sollors.

White Hands/Fatu

Like Deka, White Hands’s true identity and lineage is not revealed until late in the novel. At first, Deka nicknames the emissary of the emperor who saves her from the cellar White Hands because of the white gauntlets she wears. Other people call her the “Lady of the Equus” (94) for the horse lords that she associates with, and the emperor calls her cousin when Deka first meets him. White Hands is secretive, has an “ever-present amused look in her eyes” (248), “loves her indulgences” (248) including an “ever-present water pipe” (289), and excels at battle, “dancing an effortless ballet of death as blood rains over her” (385).

Off the battlefield, White Hands is “cunning” (384), a “spider on a web, dangling threads that [Deka initially has] no idea how to connect” (294). Eventually, Deka learns that White Hands is truly the Gilded Ones’s “Firstborn” named “Fatu of Izor, mother of the house of Gezo, true empress of Otera” (367). She created and oversaw all the alaki training grounds in order to prepare warriors to defeat the men who overthrew the goddesses, gynocentric society, and female monarchy to establish a patriarchal society. White Hands (who prefers Deka’s nickname to Fatu) helped inseminate Deka’s mother, Umu, with the tears of the goddesses to create Deka as part of her plan to destroy the emperor and jatu who imprisoned the Gilded Ones and killed deathshrieks.

Britta

Britta is Deka’s best friend: The first person she accepts as a friend after her traumatic experiences in the cellar. White Hands picked Britta, a “cabbage farmer’s daughter” (125), to be Deka’s protector. Britta’s dialogue is rendered as a dialect with phonetic spellings, and she often is found “chattering ever more cheerfully” (59), the more talkative counterpart to Deka, who is constantly lost in her own thoughts.

While Britta “can be very childlike at times” (301), Deka says she’s “the one who’s forever there by my side, ready to support me, to push me when I’m being silly, to laugh with me when I need cheer” (306). During the campaign with the emperor against the deathshrieks, Britta is mortally wounded, but Deka is able to use her magic to control Britta’s blood and command another alaki to get Britta to safety. This is the only time Deka uses her powers on her bloodsisters, in the name of love. Britta survives and continues to stay by Deka’s side even after she becomes romantically involved with Keita.

Keita

Keita is Deka’s uruni—her partner as a warrior—and her romantic interest. At first, Keita reminds Deka of Ionas (her childhood crush who betrayed and killed her), in height but not skin tone: Keita has dark skin and Ionas has light skin. However, Keita proves that he is “not like Father and the other men I once knew, the men who abandoned me, tortured me to enrich themselves. I know I can depend on him to fight for me, defend me” (305). Both Ionas and Keita kill Deka with a sword, but Keita takes Deka’s dismembered body to a healing salt lake where she can be with White Hands and deathshrieks to prepare for battle against the emperor.

White Hands and Keita are distantly related; Keita is of royal blood, the Lord of Gar Fatu after his father’s death. While he initially becomes a uruni to avenge his family by killing deathshrieks, Keita changes his mind when he learns the truth about alaki and deathshrieks. Once the emperor becomes his enemy, Keita is abducted and imprisoned. After Deka saves Keita, he asks to remain by her side, giving her the ability to consent rather than insisting the barely consensual ritual at Jor Hall be followed. Deka, of course, accepts and at the end of the novel the couple have given each other their first mind-blowing kisses.