We Cast a Shadow

“I had lost count of how many drinks I’d had over the last few hours, which meant that by now my blood was probably 75 percent alcohol by volume. And that was on top of the dissipating effects of the Plum I took that morning. I told myself on each awakening that I could quit anytime I chose. But I knew better. Those petite purple pills, which turned my nervous system into a tangle of pleasurably twinkling Christmas lights, had become a constant companion.”

To cope with the pain of the daily racism he endures, the narrator develops an addiction to painkillers called Plums, eventually spiraling to his near-fatal overdose. His substance use highlights a tendency to suppress his feelings in order to tolerate his objectively almost unlivable circumstances.

“There were many unknowns in my pursuits of happiness, but one thing I understood: law firms like Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux didn’t hire, let alone promote, angry black men. If this was a competition, I needed a new strategy. The shareholders wanted entertainment. They wanted a good time. They also wanted subservience. They did not want to feel threatened. If I was going to win, I would have to demonstrate I was willing to give them exactly what they wanted.”

This is the first example of the narrator’s characteristic willingness to bend to the racism of those around him when it helps further his personal goals. He originally arrived at Octavia’s party in a beautiful, elaborate Roman centurion costume, one he was proud of, but after realizing that the party is a competition between himself and fellow Black lawyers Franklin and Riley, he decides that his best chance of winning is to perform the firm’s racist stereotypes of a Black person rather than displaying beauty or pride.

“Nigel’s general shade stabilized to an olive tone so that he might be mistaken for a Venetian boy who spent his summers cartwheeling across the Rialto Bridge, but the birthmark colored from wheat to sienna to umber, the hard hue of my own husk, as if a shard of myself were emerging from him.”

Nigel’s birthmark is the driving factor behind the narrator’s extreme determination to get a promotion; the money will afford him the surgery to get rid of the mark. Here, he describes the mark as a part of himself emerging from his son, highlighting his distaste for his own Black identity and his fear that Nigel will endure a life as hard as his own.