36 pages • 1 hour read
Brown Girl in the Ring
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Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Brown Girl in the Ring is set in a future Toronto during an economic collapse, leading investors, businesses, and the government to move to the suburb cities. The poor are left behind in the core hub of Toronto, described as a “cartwheel half-mired in muddy water” (3). With the government exiting the city center, the people left behind engage in the large-scale Riots. The surrounding suburban cities create walls to protect themselves from the rioting people in the city center. The only available way out of the city center is through water or by plane.
In the opening of the novel, Douglas Baines, a Vulture from the Angel of Mercy transplant hospital, visits the Toronto city center to acquire a human heart for the politician, Premier Uttley. He seeks the help of Rudy and his posse who reign over the city center with their main office in the CN Tower. Rudy agrees to help for a substantial fee. He promises to locate a young person’s heart, soliciting the services of a former medical practitioner by the name of Tony to perform this service.
Chapter 1 Summary
Ti-Jeanne arrives at the Burn, a dangerous neighborhood in Toronto’s city center. She has her child, Baby, with her. Under Mami’s orders, she drops off eczema medicine for Mr. Reed. During her trip, she encounters Rudy’s posse, which is comprised of Crapaud, Jay, Crack Monkey, and her former lover and Baby’s father, Tony. She tries to avoid them and runs into Crazy Betty, a mentally ill woman who tries to take Ti-Jeanne’s baby. To escape, Ti-Jeanne walks into Roopsingh’s Roti Parlour with Tony following behind. When she enters the roti place, she experiences a realistic and terrifying vision where she faces a large monstrous figure called the Jab-Jab with a “[f]ace like a grinning African mask” (17). When the vision fades, she is back at the roti place. Her visions have become increasingly potent and her “gears slipping between the two worlds” (19), which scares her, although she keeps this fear to herself.
Tony continues to follow Ti-Jeanne out of the roti place. He tells her that Rudy has called upon him for a job but that he wants to leave the posse. He wants Ti-Jeanne to run away with him. Ti-Jeanne has not told Tony that Baby is his child, but she still loves Tony. She tells him that she will consider leaving her grandmother’s home and running away with him if he can ensure that he will have a job and a place to live wherever they go.
Rudy tells Tony that he knows that he has been stealing some of his “buff”—an addictive drug made “from poison toad and some herbs” (27)—during his deliveries. Tony pleads for forgiveness, which is what Rudy expects. The posse boss tells Tony that he wants him to make it up to him by acquiring a human heart. Tony has no choice but to do what Rudy tells him.
Chapter 2 Summary
Ti-Jeanne returns to Mami’s place just as Baby starts to become agitated. Mami berates Ti-Jeanne for not feeding Baby sooner and proceeds to test her on natural medicine properties and bush doctor remedies that she has learned through Afro-Caribbean cultural and familial practice. Ti-Jeanne wonders why Mami insists on teaching her these natural remedies and “old-time nonsense” (36) when Mami has a stockpile of Western medicine. Although she does not mention encountering Tony to Mami, she secretly worries about his safety.
Meanwhile, Premier Catherine Uttley is sick in the hospital, awaiting a new organ for her failing heart. She recalls the moment her policy adviser, Constantine, told her that she could improve her polling numbers by acquiring a human heart instead of the common porcine one, which is the only available type of organ transplant following the Riots. With the spread of the Virus Epsilon, which jumped from pigs to humans, distrust of porcine organ transplants has increased. Constantine proposed that Uttley use the human heart transplant operation as an opportunity to introduce a bill to bring back human organ donations. He showed her that projected polling numbers weigh overwhelmingly in her favor. He said, “Voters’ll eat it up” (40). She agreed to this plan.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The setting of the novel highlights the intense class stratification in Toronto after the Riots. With the more affluent residents moving to the surrounding suburbs, the poorer residents remain in the city center. This stratification points to how city planning and distribution of resources contribute to the connection between health, medicine, and power. Suburb residents have regular hospital access, while poorer residents must turn to traditional remedies to heal them. While the lives of those in the suburbs and the city center seem separate by city design, the health needs of the more affluent residents eventually impact the poorer residents. Such is the case when Premier Uttley, a well-reputed politician, seeks a new human heart. As human organ donations are near obsolete after the Riots, Uttley’s associates turn to Rudy to secure a human heart, knowing that as a crime boss, he will acquire the organ by preying on someone vulnerable. Uttley and her associates remain removed from the violent process by deferring to Rudy, a man who prizes profit over human lives. While Uttley and her associates stand to gain an election win from this endeavor without ever having to face the gruesome activities that will take them there, Ti-Jeanne’s entire family suffers precarity, torture, and death in the hands of Rudy and his posse. These opening chapters establish how, despite the post-Riots city design’s intention to keep people across different economic statuses apart, the entanglement of affluent and poor is inevitable.
These opening chapters also present early tensions between modern and traditional medicine. After the Riots, modern medicine has become unreliable in the city center. Mami’s stockpile of modern medicine is unused because its instructions are difficult to understand without the interpretation of medical professionals. The residents of the Burn rely on Mami’s traditional remedies to heal them, placing faith in her methods over modern medicine. However, Ti-Jeanne is skeptical of Mami’s natural remedies in the beginning of the novel. In the first chapter, Ti-Jeanne slips anti-inflammatory cream and vitamin B tablets along with Mami’s herbal remedy for Mr. Reed, a Burn resident. Ti-Jeanne believes that Mami’s herbal remedies can be imprecise in contrast to modern medicine, which is typically considered more reliable.
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