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Summary
Part One: troubled about my soul
Section 3: From “Mr. Hayward was in his office on the Monday…” through “…I remember that she is, after all, only four years older than I.”
Tish and Sharon meet with Arnold Hayward, Fonny’s lawyer. He tells them that Fonny’s accuser, Victoria Rogers, refuses to change her testimony and has now disappeared, perhaps to Puerto Rico. It becomes clear that she has accused Fonny of rape. Hayward believes Victoria’s testimony has been influenced by a police officer, Officer Bell, who Hayward says is racist and a liar. Fonny’s alibi depends on Tish, whose testimony, they argue, will not be believed, and Fonny’s friend Daniel, who has since been arrested. Hayward has not been allowed to see Daniel and worries the district attorney’s office will pressure him to change his testimony. Tish cries in despair, and Sharon and Hayward encourage her to stay strong.
Tish recounts Daniel’s story. After seeing Daniel on the street for the first time in years, Fonny invites him to come to his apartment. Tish goes shopping for food, leaving the men to talk about Fonny and Tish’s struggles to find a loft. Although plenty are available, landlords do not want to rent to Black people. Daniel tells Fonny he has just spent two years in prison after being accused of stealing a car, even though he can’t drive. Because he had marijuana on him when he was arrested, he was pressured to plead guilty to avoid a tougher sentence. Talking about prison, Daniel begins to cry. Tish fixes food she knows Daniel likes, and she and Fonny take care of him.
That night and on future visits, Daniel tells Fonny and Tish about his arrest and his life in prison. He was alone on his stoop when cops arrived and pushed him inside, where they searched him and found marijuana. They take him to the precinct and book him on a narcotics charge. Ultimately, he is charged with car theft as well, he says because they must have needed a car thief that day. The day after her appointment with Hayward, Tish visits Fonny in jail. He is very upset about Victoria’s disappearance, and Tish assures him they are sending people to Puerto Rico to look for her. Fonny asks Tish about the baby and begs her to get him out of jail. They kiss through the glass.
Tish has a bad dream of Fonny driving a truck down the highway, looking for her but unable to see or hear her. She wakes to find Sharon standing over her with a cool compress, telling her not to panic. Tish lies awake thinking about how she has looked down on sex workers before but considers that she might sell sex herself to help Fonny. She sleeps poorly and wakes exhausted. Walking to the subway, she decides that if Fonny isn’t out by the time the baby comes, she may have to try sex work. On the subway, she wonders how she will be able to get to work later in her pregnancy. At the end of Tish’s workday, Ernestine arrives and says that Victoria has been located in Puerto Rico and that someone will have to go there.
Analysis
The scene in Hayward’s office centers on the importance of remaining strong in the face of despair, a recurrent message throughout the book. In this meeting, Sharon and Tish learn that two important witnesses, Victoria and Daniel, are unavailable—a serious blow to their case. Victoria has run away, and the district attorney has arrested Daniel and is refusing to let Hayward speak to him. These actions indicate a clear attempt to undermine Fonny’s case and serve as an example of the corruption of the justice system. In the face of these setbacks, Tish begins to falter, but both Sharon and Hayward admonish her to remain strong. The novel argues that remaining strong in the face of despair is part of becoming an adult, as evidenced by Sharon’s telling Tish that she needs to be a woman at this moment. Resisting hopelessness is a necessary part of providing Fonny with the strength he needs to withstand imprisonment without suffering a spiritual death, something both Sharon and Hayward impress upon Tish. In this way, resisting despair is linked thematically to the power of families to create strength.
While in Hayward’s office, Tish reflects on the nature of time, which is a motif throughout the novel. Sharon refers to Hayward’s efforts to “buy time,” but Tish sees time as Fonny’s burden. In jail, Fonny is “doing time,” forced to wait with no way to make things move faster. At the same time, Tish’s pregnancy puts a deadline on their efforts to free Fonny, establishing a six-month window to get him home in time to see his baby born. Tish thinks of the two of them as trapped in time, both in terms of their past together and their present—and perhaps future—separation. The novel uses the insistence of time as the engine driving the story, adding to the narrative tension and giving the story its structure. In this passage, Tish lays out starkly that time is inseparable from life, since the only way to buy time is by trading away months of Fonny’s life.
This section of the book contains Daniel’s story, which functions as a demonstration of the absolute control the criminal justice system exerts over the lives of Black men and the destructive power of false imprisonment. Daniel arrives back in Fonny and Tish’s life as a man nearly broken by the experience of his incarceration. His arrest is an example of the capricious cruelty of the police, who pick him up on his stoop without explanation, accusing him of a crime he could not possibly have committed, and ultimately charging him for the marijuana they find in his pockets. Both this arrest and the sexual violence he experiences in prison leave him traumatized and in a state of terror. While his story seems to have a possibility for redemption, as Tish and Fonny care for him and allow him to grieve and process his trauma, he is arrested and imprisoned again to keep him from testifying in Fonny’s favor, a further example of the power the justice system has to control Black men according to its whim rather than the law. Daniel’s story functions as a cautionary tale for what may happen to Fonny if he is unable to get out of jail.
