Long Division

The final chapters of Part 2 lead City’s narrative through its climax, falling action, denouement, and resolution. City has been on a complex and meandering self-discovery journey throughout the entirety of this section, punctuated by his travels through time. His movements between 1964, 1985, and 2013 both deepen and complicate City’s understanding of the Intersection of Race, History, and Identity. However, the stakes of City’s journey change at the end of Chapter 4 when Baize reveals that City and Shalaya are her parents. City soon realizes that the decisions he makes in the past will directly beget the lives that he and his loved ones live in the future. City’s climactic decision to help Evan’s family forces him to part with Shalaya and Baize. Therefore, City chooses to make a sacrifice on behalf of others to alter the course of history.

This choice accelerates the narrative pacing throughout its final sequences and also speaks to the narrative’s overriding concern with vengeance versus forgiveness in the context of Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience. Evan urges the others to see his brother’s actions as a form of self-protection, saying that the Klan would have targeted him too if he hadn’t joined. Shalaya, Baize, and City note that unlike Jewish Americans, Black Americans cannot respond to white supremacy by “hiding”; they also express a desire to see Evan’s brother “suffer” as they have suffered, which sending him to another era will not facilitate. Nevertheless, they ultimately choose compassion over the desire for retribution, implying that this is the only path toward healing for both individuals and society.

Laymon’s various formal choices make it clear that healing is still very much a work in progress. The novel’s final sentence is unpunctuated, while the book’s unusual structure (itself a feature of the revised edition but not the original) ensures that readers “finish” the book in its physical middle. Moreover, Shalaya and City’s conversation about long division (and thus the novel’s title) make it clear that the book is interested in process rather than destination.

In a further metafictional touch, writing is key to that process. Throughout the novel, City has used his writing and reading of the book-within-a-book to make sense of his internal world. These literary inclinations gain new meaning in the final chapters of the novel after City is forced to part with his family. In Chapter 9, City is desperate to regain contact with Shalaya and Baize and to somehow bring them back to life. With Mama Lara’s help, he realizes that the only way to do so is to use his own words. Mama Lara asks City revelatory questions, including, “Who uses words to make folks disappear?”, “[W]ho makes people we love disappear?”, and “[E]verything that makes people we love disappear can make people what?” (132). These questions suggest that reading and writing have the power to resist or even reverse the erasure of people caused by historical patterns of subjugation and racism.

City therefore learns to use his literary sensibilities to change both the past and the future, though his efforts are incomplete as the novel concludes. Though the context implies that Shalaya and Baize might have joined City in the hole as the novel concludes, Laymon leaves the identities of those who are beside him ambiguous. This is in part a nod to the anonymity of Long Division within the text itself, but like that anonymity, it also universalizes their stories; perhaps City (whose full name, notably, means “citizen”) has been joined by all Black Americans, or even by all Americans of any race. Regardless, Laymon implies that by retelling their own stories in their own words, City and all those who are with him can come to grips with the past and imagine a more just future.