The Book of Night Women

The Book of The Night Women is a novel by Marlon James published in 2009 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The novel is historical fiction, set at the turn of the 19th century in Jamaica. Marlon James is a writer and professor born in Kingston, Jamaica and now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He went to university in Jamaica and subsequently moved to the United States. James writes postcolonial literature, but describes himself as “post-post-colonial.” This story explores themes relating to autonomy, resistance, cycles of violence, and freedom.

This study guide uses the e-book edition of the novel, published in 2009 by Riverhead Books.

Content Warning: This novel contains depictions of enslavement, sexual violence, torture, and murder, including the abuse and death of children. The diction reflects the fact that the narrator is a Black woman living in early 19th-century Jamaica. Slurs including the n-word are prevalent, as are other outdated and offensive terms for Black people, which are only replicated in this guide in direct quotes of the novel. One of the section titles in this novel includes the n-word, which is not obscured; however, all other instances of the n-word are obscured. The guide uses the word Black to describe people of African descent who were enslaved in Jamaica at this time.

Plot Summary

The novel begins by describing the violent birth that killed the mother of a child named Lilith. The child is given to a woman named Circe to house alongside a man named Tantalus, neither of whom cannot have children. As a child, Lilith is playful, stubborn, and clever. People call her “spirited,” which means independent and hard to control, a dangerous trait for a child born into slavery. She struggles to accept her new body and standing as she grows into a woman.

Lilith lives on Montpelier plantation where a man named Jack Wilkins is the overseer. The narrator explains that the master Patrick Wilson came back from the American Revolutionary War with mental health issues, sent his young son Humphrey Wilson to England to be educated, and let Wilkins effectively run the plantation until Patrick Wilson dies, after which his son Humphrey Wilson returns to the plantation to take over. He brings his Irish friend Robert Quinn. Humphrey Wilson’s mother, the mistress, remains at the plantation but experiences mental health issues herself after her husband dies. To prepare for a New Year’s Ball, a woman named Isobel comes to Montpelier from her family’s nearby estate called Coulibre. She is Creole, a white woman born in the colonies, and overcorrects for this fact by offering an especially brutal taste in punishment and extensive knowledge of how to correctly enslave people.

The narrator explains the dynamics of the plantation. Montpelier enslaves hundreds of people; there are those who work in the house and fields, there are drivers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and Johnny-jumpers, who enforce the white men’s policies by whipping and abusing other enslaved people. There are also white slave drivers and overseers.

The day after Circe tells Lilith she is expected to work in the fields, Lilith says she is sick and later a Johnny-jumper comes to Circe’s house and tries to rape her. She pours hot tea on him, a fight ensues, and she kills him. Circe finds Lilith at the scene and alerts Homer, a woman who works in the house and seems to know everything. Homer recruits two more women to dispose of the Johnny-jumper’s body and locks Lilith in the cellar for days. The Johnny-jumpers wonder where the man is and threaten Homer, but she tells them she knows nothing. When questioned about Lilith’s presence in the house, Homer says that the mistress told her to get more help in the house. Circe mysteriously ends up dead, bleeding out of every hole in her body, and Lilith knows that Homer did it using a form of witchcraft called Obeah. The enslavers get scared and light candles all over the plantation to rid them of the magic.

From then on, Lilith works in the house. Homer starts teaching Lilith how to read a book called Joseph Andrews. One night Homer leads her into the field and Lilith finds her way to the cave where six women meet: Homer, Gorgon, Pallas, Hippolyta, Iphigenia, and Callisto. Homer tells Lilith that these women are Jack Wilkins’s children, making them her sisters, and says that they will take their freedom by Easter. Lilith does not want to believe what they say, and to Homer’s shock, Lilith begins trying to ally herself with the white people in defense. They argue, Pallas and Callisto threaten to kill Lilith if she betrays them, and Lilith runs away. Lilith continues to make jokes and refuses to take orders or advice from anyone other than white people. She becomes obsessed with the New Year’s Ball because she finds Wilson attractive and wants to get his attention. She knows Gorgon does Obeah, so she asks her to get rid of Andromeda, an enslaved person assigned to the house who is working the ball. The next day Andromeda is found dead with blood coming out of every hole in her body. Lilith is appalled because she knows she caused it, but it works and she is given a dress to wear to the New Year’s Ball.

Christmas celebration passes and New Year’s comes next. Lilith feels ready and excited, but for three days leading up to the ball she sees an unidentifiable dark woman watching her. She thinks it could be Homer, but Homer denies it. During the ball, Lilith turns around quickly and burns Isobel’s chaperone with hot soup. Wilson immediately attacks her, and Quinn pulls him off so he does not lose himself in front of his guests. Quinn tells a slave driver to punish her, and the man named McClusky and his friends beat and rape Lilith in a shed.

Lilith wakes up in Homer’s bed sobbing and in pain. Homer and the other five women tend to her wounds. Three days later, Quinn drags Lilith out of Homer’s room, hangs her from the cotton tree, and whips her 30 times. From this day on, twice a week when Isobel visits, Lilith gets 10 lashes. Every time she is whipped, the six women gather in Homer’s room, treat her wounds, and sing to her. The scars form a quilt on her back. Eventually, Jack Wilkins speaks to Wilson, and the whippings stop.

To circumvent Wilkins’s request for them to stop whipping Lilith, they send her to Isobel’s family’s estate called Coulibre. Isobel’s father and stepmother are similar to her—violent, angry, racist, and shameless. Their family enslaves a handful of people to do housework, childcare, and farmwork. A playful, resilient girl named Dulcey helps Lilith learn the ways of Coulibre. Then the masters whip Dulcey to death within weeks of Lilith’s arrival. At Coulibre, Lilith finds another copy of Joseph Andrews, which assuages her loneliness but makes her feel bitter that she cannot laugh, love, and hope the way white people do. She keeps seeing a woman at night in doorways and wondering what she wants.

One day when Lilith is bathing and sexually pleasuring the enslaver Roget, he criticizes her. Under her breath, Lilith responds that he should do it himself, but he hears her. He begins to attack her and she drowns him. When his wife hears, Lilith chases after her and pushes her down the staircase, killing her. Then Lilith lights the place on fire to conceal what she did. She burns the white children and some of the enslaved people working in the house. Those who did not burn are killed for what she did, and she is taken back to Montpelier. Isobel begins living at Montpelier because her family is dead. She is losing her mind, staying in bed for days wearing the same clothes and screaming at people. One night, Lilith sees her riding off in men’s clothes. Early the next morning she comes back dirty, drunk, and smelling strange.

Lilith is traumatized by what she did—she sees, smells, and hears the dying children constantly, but denies her involvement to Homer and the rest of the Montpelier women. She attends more meetings in the cave with Homer and tries to express that revenge will not give them what they want. She questions their plans and eventually questions whether they just want to destroy something or build a future. Meanwhile, Robert Quinn brings Lilith to live with him in his home. The first night he begins to have sex with her, and despite herself, she thinks it feels good. He calls her Lovey and she begins to care for Quinn. She feels inner turmoil about Quinn’s fate in the rebellion that the six women are planning.

When the white men find the body of a woman, who was killed to preserve the secrecy of the rebellion, they whip Homer and the rebellion begins. Lilith poisons Quinn’s tea to delay his action but does not kill him. The enslaved people working in the field easily kill the slave drivers, and the smoke in the air makes it clear that other plantations have fulfilled their promise to do the same. The rebellion is chaos. Enslaved men enter the main house and rape Isobel. Homer herself kills the mistress. They burn the fields and kill Quinn. Lilith, afraid of what people will do to her, goes to Wilkins’s house and defends him against the enslaved people coming to kill him. Lilith is captured and put into a cage with other enslaved people who rebelled at Montpelier, but she is soon called into the main house because Wilkins says that she defended him. She is ordered to take care of Isobel.

Wilson orders the slow crucifixion of the surviving enslaved people of Montpelier and then leaves the estate. Lilith is never officially freed, but she lives nearly free in Wilkins’s house. The narrator reveals that she is Lilith’s daughter, Lovey Quinn. She recounts each of the six women’s fates and then explains that Lilith taught her to read and write. Lovey knows that her task is to tell their story.