The Gilda Stories

Thirty-four years later, Gilda is living in a black neighborhood on the South Side of Boston and working as a beautician. In the first scene, Gilda bleaches the hair of a regular customer, a successful and indomitable prostitute named Savannah, and listens to her lively stories of black life. They are interrupted by a man who enters the shop demanding to know the whereabouts of a young prostitute friend of theirs named Toya, who is on the run from a particularly cruel pimp, Fox. The women send him away, just before Toya appears in the alley behind the shop begging for sanctuary.

Savannah and Gilda let Toya rest in the back room of the shop and plan to sneak her onto a train home the next day. Shortly after Savannah leaves, there is a knock on the door—Gilda opens it expecting to see Fox but is shocked to discover Bird standing there. They weep and hold one another, overwhelmed to be finally reunited, and repair to Gilda’s apartment, where they sleep together and take one another’s blood, “cementing their family bond” (139) as they never fully did back in Louisiana. The ritual is intense, like “a birth,” and they feel complete and connected afterward.