41 pages • 1 hour read
Esi EdugyanHalf-Blood Blues
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary
In 1940 Nazi-occupied Paris, Sidney “Sid” Griffiths, the bass-playing narrator, describes his nighttime attempts to make a jazz recording at a nearby studio, along with bandmates Charles “Chip” Jones, who plays drums; Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, who plays trumpet; and Bill Coleman, who also plays trumpet. A perfectionist, Hiero deliberately destroys each disc they record; however, Sid manages to preserve one disc without Hiero noticing. They return to the apartment of a woman named Delilah, where they’ve been staying, careful not to be caught breaking curfew.
The next morning, having drunk a lot of cheap French “rot,” Hiero makes a drunken decision to go looking for some milk to calm his stomach, over Sid and Chip’s objections. Feeling some concern for “the kid,” as Sid thinks of him, Sid decides to accompany Hiero instead of waiting for Delilah to take them later, as he usually did.
Sid pauses his narration to provide some context. As an American of mixed European and African ancestry, Sid is often assumed to be white. Hiero, on the other hand, is described as a German-born, dark-skinned Mischling, or person with one African and one German parent, viewed as inferior by the Nazi party. Along with Chip, who is African American, they left Berlin for Paris, hoping to escape persecution.
Sid and Hiero make their way to a nearby tobacconist, only to find it closed. Hiero insists that they go even further to another café. After arriving and drinking some milk, Hiero tells Sid that he wants to keep working on the record, despite considering quitting, since he is stuck waiting for his identity papers to arrive. As Sid goes to the bathroom to vomit, he hears a noise in the café. Hurrying back, he watches from the corridor as a group of “Boots” (German soldiers) check the identity papers of the café’s occupants, eventually singling out Hiero and one other person, a Jew. The Nazi soldiers leave a few francs with the barkeeper and leave, taking Hiero with them.
Part 1 Analysis
Edugyan’s opening places readers in medias res, in the middle of the action; we don’t know these characters very well yet, or how they came to be where they are, but we do gather hints that Sid, the narrator, has misgivings or regrets about Hiero’s arrest, though his reasons for feeling as he does remain murky. This sets up the remainder of the novel, in which we gradually come to understand the complex relationships between Sid, Chip, Hiero, and Delilah. Indeed, virtually all the novel’s major themes are introduced in Part 1, including the controlled chaos that is jazz music, the bigotry that drives the Nazi offensive, and the strained-yet-brotherly relationship between Sid and Hiero. Of course, as we later discover, Sid leaves certain key details out of the account as he first tells it here.
In addition to setting the stage, this opening section establishes a laidback, vernacular tone. Sid is well versed in what he calls “Baltimore bar slang” (5), and this influence pervades the text, with Sid referring to men as “jacks,” women as “janes,” his bass as an “axe,” and so on. His narration is also fraught with moments of witty humor and striking imagery, as when he says that Hiero “shove his hands up so deep in his pits it like he got wings” (10), or when he compares walking through cigarette smoke to “wading through cobwebs” (13). Moments of frivolity are balanced by moments of genuine pathos and reflection, including Sid’s recollection of anti-Semitic violence in Berlin.
Edugyan situates the story historically. Though Chip, Sid, Hiero, and Delilah are invented characters, others who appear in the novel, such as Bill Coleman and Louis Armstrong, are based on real people. Similarly, conditions under the Nazi occupation of Paris are accurately represented, including such details as the establishment of a curfew, which the musicians break to work on the record.
