Summary

Quincy Williams' mother dies. He is thirty years old, and has to arrange the funeral. The narrative covers the awkwardness of arranging these matters, such as how to move her body from the apartment to the funeral home before switching to Williams' work life, where he is known as Oscar Fate.

Oscar Fate is a journalist for a Harlem-based magazine for Black men. Fate goes to Detroit to meet a part-activist, part-radical man named Barry Seamen. There, they spend time with other Black men, all with differing opinions on what it means to be a Black man and what Black culture is (or if it even exists). Seamen gives a speech at a Detroit church, and describes five critical subjects facing contemporary civilization: danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness. After the speech, Fate thinks about all the other Black communists, revolutionaries...