46 pages • 1 hour read
Jewelle GomezThe Gilda Stories
Jewelle GomezFiction | 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 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Rosebud, Missouri: 1921”
Aurelia, a new character, is basking in the glow of a successful Church Circle she has just held in her parlor with the famous speaker Alice Dunbar in attendance. She is good friends with Gilda, who has bought a nearby farm in the prosperous black neighborhood of Rosebud, Missouri, and has been posing as a young widow like Aurelia for the past three years. As the two women clean up after the guests, Gilda delights in Aurelia’s enthusiasm but feels herself holding back—she is worried about sharing too much with a mortal. Meanwhile, Aurelia is full of plans to create a local program to help the poor.
Alone on the hunt that night, Gilda encounters two white men on horseback who try to attack her. Filled with anger, she kills one and almost kills the other after lashing him with his own horsewhip but decides to keep him alive after feeding on him. As she goes home, she regrets her fury and the taking of a life.
The next day, Gilda suggests Aurelia should seek the help of one of their neighbors in building her plans for the poor. Aurelia brushes off the suggestion, saying “Why? I’ve got you” (119). This creates uncertainty for Gilda, who has been realizing she may need to leave Rosebud soon and reconnect with her vampire family. She tells Aurelia to make plans alone. Aurelia expresses dismay, and looking at her, Gilda feels a strong desire to turn Aurelia into a vampire. Instead she breaks away and says she needs to travel to St. Louis that night.
Gilda journeys to the city, where she takes the blood of a young and hopeless prostitute and “felt such sorrow at this diminished capacity for life” (123) that she plants the desire for a meaningful future in the girl’s mind. This experience reminds Gilda of her own hopes and plans and makes her realize she cannot turn Aurelia and rob her of her local dreams.
On a drive with Aurelia the next day, Gilda tells her disappointed friend she must leave. As they say goodbye, Gilda suddenly hears Bird calling out with her mind and knows that seeking her old companion is the right path. Before Gilda leaves, she writes down the full truth of her life in a letter she sends to Aurelia as a parting gift. As the chapter closes, she prepares to head east to meet Bird.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Aurelia provides the novel’s connection to the burgeoning artistic and social movements of the Harlem Renaissance. She invites one of its major female figures, the author and activist Alice Dunbar, to her Church Circle with Gilda’s help. Dunbar, a mixed-race black woman who had a number of lesbian affairs throughout her life, was heavily involved in movements for suffrage and anti-lynching and also wrote poems, short stories, and journalistic pieces. She represents the flowering of black women’s thought after the end of slavery, and Aurelia is so inspired by her that she begins her own local activist movement.
The encounter with the two white men on horseback shows Gilda fully in her power as both a woman and a freed slave. The men, who may be nightriders—white men who policed Southern towns at night in search of free blacks to punish—think they’re going to “teach one more niggah a lesson” (113) and probably plan to sexually assault her. Instead she displays superior physical power over them both and uses one man’s whip against him, turning a symbol of slavery on its head. Gilda also communicates with their innocent horses and sets them free, ending an instance of animal’s slavery to humans as well.
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