39 pages • 1 hour read
Linden Hills
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Chapter 4 Summary: “December 21st”
Xavier Donnell is a successful resident of Linden Hills:
Through a mixture of patience, hard work, and premeditated luck he had managed to move up in a place like General Motors, where it was so easy to get lost among the myriad Ivy League and ivory-skinned credentials of men who were just as sharp and hardworking as he was. (98)
He lives on Third Crescent Drive but is in love with Roxanne Tilson—Lester’s sister—who lives on Fifth Crescent Drive. Roxanne is highly opinionated and doesn’t share Xavier’s vision of how to achieve in life. The first line of the chapter tells us that “Xavier Donnell was falling in love with a black woman,” implying that he would rather fall in love with a white woman (97). Xavier tries to model himself after Maxwell, the only other successful black man at General Motors, and so he invites Maxwell over for a drink to ask for his advice regarding Roxanne. Maxwell is more successful than Xavier precisely because he has worked his whole life “to make his blackness disappear” (102). This is not to say that Maxwell considers himself white; “being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all” (106).
Xavier lays his dilemma—whether or not to ask Roxanne to marry him—out to Maxwell. Maxwell says that Xavier shouldn’t consider marriage at all, stating that “there isn’t a mother’s daughter out there ready for you” (109). According to Maxwell:
“They’re [women] ready to ask a hell of a lot from the world then and a hell of a lot from you. They’re hungry and they’re climbers, Xavier, with an advanced degree in expectations. Hook up with one of them and whatever you’re doing isn’t good enough, and you’re doing damned good as it is.” (11)
At this moment in their conversation, Lester and Willie—who’ve been cleaning out the garage for Xavier’s aunt—rap on the back door and are introduced to Maxwell, who judges Willie and Lester for their poverty and lack of employment. He tells the pair that “being black has nothing to do with being poor. And being poor doesn’t mean that you have to stay that way” (113), while Willie argues that it can’t be a coincidence that “the majority of black folks in this country are poor, have been poor, and will be poor for a long time to come” (114).
Meanwhile, locked in the basement, Nedeed’s wife has found the bible of Luwana Packerville, one of Nedeed’s ancestor’s wives. In it, Luwana has written notes and messages to herself, in which she describes how her son—yet another Luther Nedeed—has become a stranger to her, and “I thus live with two Luthers in truth, and so I live alone” (121). Nedeed’s wife discovers that Luwana writes letters to herself as a source of solace. She writes about her son, saying that “it is not just that he is Luther’s son, he is Luther. And I fear that I have been the vessel for some sort of unspeakable evil” (123). Nedeed’s wife recognizes her own loneliness in Luwana’s writing and cries over her son’s dead body.
Willie and Lester are given the job of stripping the wallpaper from a bedroom in Mr. Parker’s house on Fourth Crescent Drive on the eve of his wife’s funeral. As they work, residents of Linden Hills eat dinner below, and Luther Nedeed arrives late, handing Mr. Parker a prewrapped cake that he claims his wife has baked.
Chapter 5 Summary: “December 22nd”
Willie wakes in the grip of a nightmare as “his saliva still held the flavor from the rum, butter, and raisins” of the cake he ate the night before—leftovers from the cake Nedeed had brought (146). This cake annoyed Willie because it tasted “too perfect” to have been baked at home—even by Nedeed’s wife—and so Willie finds himself wondering, “Why would Nedeed lie?” (147).
In the basement, Nedeed’s wife has found the notes of Evelyn Creton—another wife of yet another Luther Nedeed. Evelyn has written careful and painstaking notes of every ingredient she ever purchased for both her cooking and beauty regimes. Nedeed’s wife spots the unusual ingredients Evelyn Creton added to her cooking—things such as “shame-weed” (147), thought to bring happiness to a lonely house—to change the nature of her relationship with her own cold Luther Nedeed: “She had to be ashamed, a proud and beautiful woman like that, to feel driven to such measures. She had to cringe at each meal, wondering if he could taste traces of those things in his food” (188).
Elsewhere, Willie and Lester head to the Reverend Hollis’s house to help him move goods from a food drive to the church. The address of Reverend Hollis’s house is 000 Fifth Crescent Drive, which we’ll later learn has been named by the reverend to purposefully contradict Luther Nedeed’s own address, 999 Tupelo Drive (151, 165). Reverend Michael Hollis lives alone in Linden Hills, having been left by his wife because of his chronic adultery. Michael Hollis first became a reverend because of “the current flowing” between him and the pews—the feelings inspired by preaching to a gathered congregation—but “as the churches got larger, the boards he headed more impressive, and the budgets doubled—tripled—it took much more to enable him to reach up those pews,” and so he found himself turning more and more to alcohol to chase the feeling of “energy” that the congregation of Linden Hills, “with their plastic postures,” is unable to provide (162).
Willie remembers Reverend Hollis from when his mother would take him to the Mount Sinai Christmas party for the residents of Wayne Avenue, and so hitches a ride with him to the church. Willie immediately realizes that Reverend Hollis is a drunk, remembering “his [Willie’s] father stumbling home, smelling of licorice Sen-Sen and wintergreen Chiclets” (169). He makes it clear to the reverend that he knows this; this display of courage makes Reverend Hollis change his planned sermon for Mrs. Parker’s funeral to a powerful and stirring performance. However, this sermon is unable to touch the Linden Hills congregation, who sit “there with the stilted patience that accompanies the beginning of a business meeting” (179) and are only made uncomfortable by the reverend’s impassioned words. Instead, “there was a sigh of relief in the chapel as Luther’s even monotone soothed their ears” (184).
After the funeral, Willie and Lester head deeper into Linden Hills, hoping to knock on doors for work, when a police car pulls up beside them and the policemen pull their guns. The police demand to know what Willie and Lester are doing in Linden Hills and don’t believe that Lester lives there. Willie and Lester are about to be arrested when Norman happens to roll up in a taxi. Seeing what’s happening, Norman tells the policemen that Lester and Willie have been hired by Mrs. Howard Dumont to shovel her drive—a lie, but one that saves Willie and Lester from being arrested.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
In Chapter 4 Naylor explores race and identity politics, an idea she unpacks through the character of Maxwell Smyth and his conversation with Willie and Lester. Maxwell Smyth is a highly successful black man, but this success due in part to his lifelong endeavor to “make his blackness disappear” (102) and the power he feels from becoming race-less: “He relished the feelings of power and control as his blackness momentarily diminished in front of their faces” (103). Maxwell is an example of someone who has internalized the racism and discrimination of a society that rewards “ivory-skinned credentials” (98), and where it is far more difficult to move up in the world if you are not white. As a result, Maxwell also reinforces the stereotype that “being black has nothing to do with being poor,” implying that poverty does not arise from institutional racism and historical oppression but from laziness (113). Here, Willie argues against Maxwell, and speaks as a siphon—or stand-in—for Naylor by suggesting that society has long held this stereotype to reinforce institutional racism and oppression instead of addressing the circumstances that mean that “the majority of black folks in this country are poor, have been poor, and will be poor for a long time to come” (114).
For Willie, the cake Nedeed brings to Mr. Parker’s house is the first giveaway that all is not as it seems in the Nedeed household. Willie eats the cake and then proceeds to have a nightmare about the nameless Mrs. Nedeed, all the while tasting the “too perfect” cake (146). It is significant that the cake’s perfection exposes Nedeed’s lie, at the heart of which is Mrs. Nedeed’s inhumane imprisonment. It suggests that the idyllic Linden Hills neighborhood is also masking something inhumane, violent, and oppressive.
In Chapter 5 we meet Reverend Hollis, another character Willie and Lester meet in their descent through Linden Hills. We learn that Reverend Hollis has given his home the number 000 to contrast the number of Nedeed’s house, 999, which clearly implies that Nedeed is a Satanic figure; the number 999 has long been connected with the devil, who lives at the very center of hell like Nedeed lives at the base of Linden Hill. Although the reverend is an empathetic figure because of his kindness to Willie when he was a child, he is simultaneously an alcoholic and an adulterer. Despite being an outsider in Linden Hills, Reverend Hollis has still been degraded by living there, as he betrayed the wife he loved and now only finds solace in alcohol.
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