45 pages • 1 hour read
Nalo HopkinsonMidnight Robber
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 4, Pages 233-256Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4
Part 4, Pages 233-247 Summary
The main narrative resumes with Tan-Tan experiencing morning sickness. Abitefa asks her about her sickness, and Tan-Tan explains that it is Antonio’s baby, which she calls a “monster” and Abitefa calls “a gift from daddy tree” (233). Abitefa reveals that she has a type of sonar that allows her to see the baby, stun small frogs, and know when the interdimensional shifts occur.
Tan-Tan seeks an abortion and asks Abitefa to come to the nearest human village with her. Abitefa can only walk with her to the edge of the bush. Tan-Tan plans to use the wedding ring Antonio gave her to pay for abortion drugs, and she stops to vomit again before reaching the village called Chigger Bite.
The village is poor, even poorer than Junjuh, and Tan-Tan finds a man named Al who will talk to her. She asks him to take her to the doctor, and he agrees to give her the tour of “the nastiest, meanest of all the exile settlements on New Half-Way Tree” (241). Al flirts with her until his mother catches up with them and beats him with a switch.
Tan-Tan steals the switch and hits Al’s Mamee with it, as if possessed by avenging spirit. Al starts to lead his mother away, but Tan-Tan stops them and gives a Robber Queen-style speech—her dialogue tags switch from Tan-Tan to Robber Queen. After learning there is no doctor in the village, Tan-Tan returns to Abitefa.
Part 4, Pages 247-256 Summary
Missing her eshu A.I., Tan-Tan thinks about the past and cries in bed. After a sleepless night, she feels like she must “make up doublefold for what she’d done to Antonio” (248) and resolves to go back to Chigger Bite to help more people like she helped Al confront his abusive mother.
The next scene opens with Tan-Tan sneaking around behind Chigger Bite’s rum shop. A couple of months have passed since her first visit; the narrator mentions Benta and Chichibud are unconcerned about her staying out late and even give her a machete. Tan-Tan sees the owner watering down drinks and decides to avenge this wrong.
Tan-Tan enters the shop and orders a drink. While pretending to fumble for Antonio’s ring to pay, she pulls her machete on the owner and announces that he has been cheating the customers. At her suggestion, the customers take the liqueur out of the back and compare it with their watered-down drinks.
The angry clientele discover she is right and take the straight liqueur while Tan-Tan makes the owner drink all his water at once. She announces she is “Tan-Tan the Robber Queen, the terror of the bad-minded” (254), takes a drink for herself, blows a kiss at Al, and returns to Abitefa.
When Tan-Tan tries to drink her stolen rum, her two-month pregnancy makes it taste spoiled and she curses the monster child. Abitefa likes the alcohol and tries to fly after getting drunk. They laugh and Tan-Tan retells the story of liberating the alcohol.
Part 4, Pages 233-256 Analysis
Up to this point, Tan-Tan’s unborn child has existed only in the parts narrated by the A.I. This section marks the beginning of Tubman’s existence in the main third-person narrative.
Tan-Tan becomes possessed by the Robber Queen masque, the “woman-of-words” (246), again and acts on behalf of others. She punishes a woman for abusing her son and a rum shop owner for watering down drinks. This emphasizes the connection between the pre-Lent carnivalesque and excess.
While ridden by the Robber Queen, Tan-Tan aids in the creation of her own myth. She says, “I born behind God back, under a next sun...The birds of the air raise me” (254). The divine and animalistic elements of her self-definition are mythic, creating a larger-than-life character for the villagers in Chigger Bite to expand with more anansi tales.
This section foreshadows that the house eshu—riding Granny Nanny—is the first-person narrator, reminding the reader of how omnipresent the technology was on Toussaint. Tan-Tan feels as though she has been “stripped of the sixth sense that was Granny Nanny” (247) because an A.I. is another form of sensory perception.
