54 pages • 1 hour read
Lawrence HillThe Illegal
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Freedom State, 2018”
Chapter 31 Summary
John arrives in Calder’s office, asking for a favor: to grant Keita Ali a minister’s special permit so that he can remain in the country. In exchange, John offers to obtain the USB stick and hand it over to Calder. John then reads parts of the memo that Yvette exposed when she went through Wellington’s briefcase and asks Calder to decode it. He explains that “it looked like someone was sending cash to Zantoroland officials on two levels: two thousand dollars for each ‘Illegal Returned Before Landing’ and ten thousand for ‘Information Leading to Deportation’ of each Zantorolander dissident hiding in Freedom State” (321). After this discussion, Calder says Keita has until June 21 to get the USB stick to him. If he does, then he will receive a special permit to remain in the country.
Chapter 32 Summary
Keita returns to Ivernia’s house to find police cars surrounding it. He turns around and goes straight to AfricTown to avoid getting caught. There, he asks Lula to hide him for one month. She grants his request as long as he agrees to appear in her upcoming demonstration. She also agrees to have a security vehicle accompany him on his training runs. Mitch comes to see Keita in AfricTown and explains that the government is closing a loophole; it will soon be illegal for noncitizens to receive any financial reward for winning a race in Freedom State. The upcoming 10-mile race will be Keita’s last chance to win money.
Chapter 33 Summary
Ivernia has a short exchange with Jimmy. He comes to her door, and she refuses to let him in. She asks what reward he will receive for alerting the police to Keita’s presence in her home. He gets nothing unless Keita is caught, convicted, and deported. He then asks for money. Ivernia turns him away and ignores his plea for help.
Chapter 34 Summary
Lula’s demonstration attracts a large crowd. She has arranged for it to occur in Ruddings Park, just across from the prime minister’s office, so they can hear her chants. She demands fresh water, sewer systems, teachers, and justice for AfricTown. Keita makes an appearance onstage as the famous marathoner, as promised. He runs into Candace, who is on horseback, patrolling the crowd. She tells Keita he is not safe there and advises him to leave. Viola and John are both present, covering the story. Viola is forced on stage and then humiliated by hecklers calling out insults and throwing bottles at her. These hecklers, it will turn out, are plants the prime minister sent so he could document Black and white people fighting to make the demonstrators look bad.
Before the chaos breaks up the demonstration, Lula calls out, “Mr. Prime Minister, we are waiting for you. But our followers cannot wait any longer. They all long to know what is in our lost and found from the Bombay Booty in AfricTown” (333). Wellington responds to this statement by asking the chief of police to break up the demonstration, arrest the demonstrators, and search and confiscate their goods. Keita is almost caught by Devlin James, but Candace gets there in time and pulls rank, telling Devlin to let Keita go.
Chapter 35 Summary
Prime Minister Wellington and Lula discreetly meet at a donut shop. It is revealed that long ago they both lived in AfricTown and were lovers. Lula is the only person who knows that Wellington is not white, which is why she has such power over him. If anyone found out, his career would be over. Wellington asks Lula to stop demonstrating. She asks him to stop the police raids and to give AfricTown water and electricity. He demands his ID back and the USB stick from Keita. Lula agrees to retrieve them—and gives him two years to complete the electrical and water work, or she will expose him.
Chapter 36 Summary
Viola insists on traveling to Zantoroland to research the Yvette Peters story. She convinces her boss to send her there. Viola tells Keita, and he asks her to find out anything she can about his sister. He also suggests she look in his father’s yellow teapot at his old home for information on the story Yoyo had been working on.
Once in Zantoroland, Viola starts with Yvette’s grandmother, Henrietta Banks. She then travels to Keita’s home, where she finds notes hidden in the teapot. The notes reveal that Yoyo had a source named Twain, who had information about the amount of money made on deported and returned dissidents: “Twain said Zantoroland enlisted spies on the ground in Freedom State to find out where refugees were hiding. The only ones Zantoroland really wanted back were the dissidents” (346).
Viola publishes a story about Yvette and her grandmother, and the prime minister decides he has had enough of her. He calls his people in Zantoroland.
The next morning, Viola receives an email from Anton Hamm, confessing all of his crimes and his participation in the scheme between Zantoroland and Freedom State. He says he wants her to have the information in case something happens to him, as he is planning to confront Rocco Calder. She then calls Mahatma Grafton, the journalist at The New York Times who had been working with Yoyo. He confirms that yes, Yoyo discovered the same money exchange that Hamm is referencing. He tells Viola to get out of Zantoroland right away. Suddenly, two armed men break into her hotel room and take her to the Pink Palace, where she discovers that George Maxwell is not one person but a code name for anyone “working behind the scenes on behalf of the government” (351). She is placed in a cell with Charity, Keita’s sister. Charity cries with relief after hearing Keita is alive.
In the morning, Viola is interviewed by one of the George Maxwells. He says her punishment for spying on Zantoroland will be death. She is then kept in the cell for days without any information. Viola bribes a guard with $100 to let herself and Charity sit on the patio for fresh air. There she gets a cell signal and sends out a group text saying she and Charity are being held in the Pink Palace and their lives are at risk.
Chapter 37 Summary
John desperately tries to find Viola because he wants her at Wellington’s meeting with Keita on June 21. John is sure that if they work together, they can produce “a killer work of journalism” (357). Mitch and Ivernia devise a plan to get Keita’s presumed race winnings from the Clarkson 10-miler wired to Charity’s captors immediately after the race.
Chapters 31-37 Analysis
In exploring Race, Privilege, and Power, this novel borrows from postcolonial literary theory by exploring a reversal of power and portraying power from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. For example, the powerful people in Freedom State are largely depicted through Viola’s journalism and John’s documentary, as in Chapter 34. Lula, Queen of AfricTown, gathers a group of demonstrators across the street from the most powerful office in Freedom State. Yet the prime minister appears more afraid than the people. Lula shouts, “Mr. Wellington. We know you can hear us out here. We know you are at your fourth-floor window, looking out at us. Come speak to us” (330). Meanwhile, Wellington is hiding behind closed blinds, watching and listening to the demonstration. This scenario very clearly reveals who holds the real power, as Lula is not afraid to go onstage and threaten the prime minister; meanwhile, he is afraid to even show his face in a window. This establishes how important AfricTown and Lula really are.
Viola demonstrates her own power when she remarks that she is “here [in AfricTown] to report the story, not to become it” (331). Like John and his documentary, she uses her role as a journalist to cast a critical eye on conditions in the place where she grew up. This gives her a power that others, like Yvette, lack. She can look from the outside in and become a force for change, demonstrating The Power of Marginalized Voices. Viola’s position is so powerful that Wellington plants racists in the crowd to treat her terribly. Only a deeply fearful man would pick on someone his plants call a “dyke faggot gimp freak” (332). As Viola is forced to crawl off the stage to safety, the following scene shows a paranoid and incompetent group of men huddling in an office and calling the police to break up the demonstration. This is an example of the novel’s satire, as it makes fun of the people in power and, by granting the real power to people like Viola and Lula, upends the idea of power altogether.
Chapter 35 delves into a very real historical legacy: the US’s “one-drop rule,” which deemed that anyone with “one drop” of Black blood was Black themselves. The rule had practical relevance during slavery, ensuring that children born to Black women raped by enslavers would be enslaved themselves. However, the practice was also one way white people subjugated Black people even after slavery was abolished. In the fictional Freedom State, if a person possesses more than a certain percentage of “Black blood,” they are considered Black and sent to Zantoroland. This otherizes Black people, rendering them foreigners even if they have lived their entire lives in Freedom State.
Prime Minister Wellington’s character exemplifies but also satirizes this concept, as readers discover that he is not white (at least by his own definition) after all. He has been “passing” all along: “[C]ertainly the rugby team that he had led to the world championships didn’t know. Three decades earlier, it was still a whites-only team. No mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons. He had passed over to the other side, and with flying colours […] even his own wife did not know” (338). The historical significance of race means that this one secret (that Wellington’s mother was not white) is a constant threat to Wellington’s power and status. As the sole keeper of this secret, Lula has enormous power. It is a significant shift, seeing as she is a Black woman, and although she cannot access power in the traditional sense like a “white” man can, she garners a great deal of it from keeping and threatening to expose this secret.
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