- Violet sits in a diner after leaving Alice's house. She thinks about another Violet.
- Nope, not another woman. Another side of herself that she calls "that Violet." This is sounding loony.
- That Violet, apparently, was the one that tried to slice up Dorcas's face as she lay in the coffin.
- We get the details of the funeral attack. Violet was pretty rowdy, and tried to punch out some ushers. Yikes.
- That Violet also let all the birds out of their cages.
- We interrupt this program to give you a handy Lit Pro-Tip: Always pay attention to birds and cages in literature. Nine times out of ten they're going to be super symbolic.
- Violet at the diner regrets letting the birds out. She misses them. She drowns her sorrow in another milkshake that she drinks in order to plump up her figure. Good idea, Violet. We're going to get a milkshake ourselves.
- Okay, there are now at least three Violets at play: Another Violet—young Violet—comes out to play. Young Violet is curvy and hot.
- Now Diner Violet is thinking about Dorcas and Joe. Did Dorcas think about Joe as a young man? Young Joe was hot as well. Did Joe do things with Dorcas that he used to do with Violet? Did he let her eat his ice cream and popcorn?
- Remember that foodstuffs and cooking are referring obliquely to sexytimes.
- Oh, gosh. Violet is really stewing about what Joe and Dorcas did together. We want to tell her to stop. She's getting riled up and thinking about why she wanted to cut Dorcas in the first place: She was angry.
- Violet comes to the angry realization that all the Violets in play at this point are all just her. She's also fuming.
- Violet mentions how Dorcas's skin was high-yellow instead of black like Violet's. Is that what Joe liked? Violet also remembers how a "golden boy […] tore up her girlhood as surely as if (they'd) been the best of lovers." Hmm. Who is this mysterious golden boy?
- Violet remembers how she decided to go mute instead of appearing crazy.
- Now she thinks back to her mother, who also went crazy and stopped talking.
- Her mother also called in her mother—a.k.a. Violet's grandmother, True Belle—to come help out around the house. Everything was okay in Violet's childhood home until her mother committed suicide.
- Violet only met her father once.
- Violet wonders why her mother killed herself. Did it have anything to do with a rash of racist violence that broke out before she died?
- Violet's takeaway from her mother's death was to never, ever have babies.
- Violet left her home for a job picking cotton. The work was brutally hard, and white people got paid more than black people.
- But the silver lining is that Violet met Joe there. He was sleeping in a tree and she was sleeping under it. He fell out of bed in the middle of the night.
- Joe was really handsome, and Violet stuck around to be with him. Fourteen years later they moved to the City.
- Violet intentionally miscarried in order to not be burdened with children in New York. And also because of her mom's insanity.
- Uh-oh… By forty, Violet really wants a baby of her own and she's completely obsessed with children.
- The plot thickens. We're back in the present, and Violet tells Alice that she kind of thinks of Dorcas as the daughter she never had.
- Alice and Violet talk more about Dorcas, and life. This is a flashback to right before the time the chapter starts, from about an hour before Violet is sitting in the diner.
- Alice reminds Violet of her grandmother True Belle, which is kind of sweet.
- Finally, after all of this time traveling, Violet leaves the diner. It's springtime in New York.