46 pages • 1 hour read
The Gilda Stories
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Symbols & Motifs
Water
One of the few things that can kill vampires in this novel, water represents surrender. The homesoil the vampires keep sewn in their clothing can keep them safe from water if they need to cross it, but if they enter the water without that protection, it can overtake them. The elder Gilda dreams of taking the true death in the ocean, but not because she is avoidant—as she tries to explain to Bird, it’s because of the “final embrace of freedom” it will offer (32). Water symbolizes oneness, and she is “full of the need to match [her heart’s] rhythm with that of an ocean” (33). Similarly, when younger Gilda kills the bounty hunter and is soaked with his blood, water imagery depicts this as an empowering and uniting experience rather than a terrifying one. As his blood washes over her, she has a powerful memory of being given a bath by her mother—“the intimacy of her mother’s hands and the warmth of the water lulled the Girl into a trance of sensuality she never forgot” (12)—and she is so at peace she briefly feels the bounty hunter is like a lover.
Water is not totally without fear for Gilda. Reflecting on why she does not travel abroad like other vampires, she says, “while an expanse of ocean was only somewhat daunting to the others, to her it was paralyzing. It was as if she was being asked to make the Middle Passage as her ancestors had done” (198). Her roots among enslaved Africans mean the ocean itself does symbolize surrender, but an unwilling one, unlike the elder Gilda’s fully autonomous choice.
At the very end of the book, when Gilda is badly injured and Ermis must drag her body across the rushing waters of the Panama Canal, Gilda has a close encounter with surrender that echoes the elder Gilda’s. Here, the Canal represents the gaping space between life and death, and as she crosses, it she mentally communicates with Bird about whether to give in, ultimately taking Bird’s advice to continue on. That Gilda is able to cross the water safely shows that she does not choose surrender, but the imagery elsewhere presents the true death as a meaningful option with its own strength.
Reading and Writing
Writing is an important activity for Gilda and many of the other vampires in the novel. The ability to read is a significant piece of Gilda’s newfound freedom when she escapes slavery, and it is important that Bird, a Native American woman, is the one who teaches her—though much of what they read is written by white people, the transmission from one woman of color to another shows language is not the provenance of white people alone. Gilda quickly becomes multilingual and is fluent in English, Lakota, French, and Chinese, frequently seeking inspiration from the original text of the Tao Te Ching. The elder Gilda keeps copious journals to chronicle her 300 years of life, a habit the younger Gilda adopts. At one point, she uses writing as a form of truth-telling when she sends Aurelia a letter documenting her true nature as a vampire. Gilda realizes “the secret had been kept as a protection against others’ fear. The telling left Gilda lighter” (128).
Reading and writing serve as powerful tools of freedom, allowing the vampires to embrace their true nature and their community. This power grows for Gilda as her creativity expands in the novel’s later chapters—she becomes a singer, writing a vampire love song that she ultimately dedicates to Effie, and later a successful romance novelist. In writing romances, she finds “a way of sharing some of the many stories she had gathered through her long life” (220).
In the novel’s dystopian final chapters, writing also becomes a way of maintaining meaningful communication as social systems have begun to break down. Gilda dislikes the futuristic video calling technology and treasures the antiquated handwritten letters her vampire friends continue to send her. The novel makes a strong case for the importance of the written word as a means of connection, and especially as a way for historically underrepresented people like the black and Native American characters to make their stories heard.
Travel
Vampires are fundamentally nomadic, as they always outlive any sense of stasis the ever-changing world can offer; consequently, the novel is full of travel. Gilda’s life is marked by journeys before she even becomes a vampire: her mother’s Middle Passage from Africa, and her own flight from the slave plantation into Louisiana. This is also true of the elder Gilda, who has a memory of journeying through an unknown desert with her family. The elder Gilda has traveled so much she comes to experience movement as a burden, “the thing she most longed to be free of” (18). The motif of travel represents a central tension in the vampire lifestyle—it allows freedom, but it can be a source of grief as well, requiring vampires to leave behind what they love at regular intervals.
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