Chapter XIX Summary

In chapter nineteen, it is spring in Harlem and Jake looks at pretty brown women and at children playing. Jake walks from Harlem over the bridge to the Bronx. There he sees a park where couples hold hands and dandelions grow wild amid the grass. Jake thinks of spring and love and all the girlfriends he has had since his adolescence, including the long lost brown woman.

On another day in Harlem, Jake and Billy Biasse (the Wolf) walk out of a salon and see their old friend Yaller Prince, who is confronted by a brown woman and black man. The woman used to be a prostitute under the control of Yaller. Yaller, who is a pimp, dropped her in favor of another woman, and now she wants her revenge. She eggs on the other man, Obadiah, to assault Yaller, focusing...