Study Guide

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party Part 2, Chapter 24

By M.T. Anderson

Part 2, Chapter 24

The party is like a microcosm of the world.
The Young Men play card games; servants stand waiting for orders; Mr. Gitney's in the lab, giving talks on what they discovered in their observations of the Transit of Venus.
The women sit in the parlor, gabbing with each other and with Cassiopeia (though some of the women ignore her).
Mr. Goff, the painter, goes around offering to paint portraits of the women before smallpox settles in and possibly permanently marks their faces.
Aina, the cook, discovers there's another slave from Benin, where she is also from, so they get along famously.
There are also all sorts of romantic intrigue, including a love triangle between Mr. Goff, a lady, and her husband.
At night they hold dances, with Octavian on the violin, an indentured Irishman on fiddle, and a slave from another house on the flageolet (kind of like a flute).
Around the dancing guests are all these signs of danger: objects that can produce as much electricity as lightning; skeletons; dead animals.
And at the top of the stairs, three Young Men wait with lots of guns.
Octavian doesn't know why they're there, though he does notice though that they stand watch over whatever's going on outside the house, including the servants in the yard.

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