Two years have passed since the night Alva stormed out of Emma Lou’s apartment and returned home to find a pregnant Geraldine. Emma Lou is now in the employ of another (former) actress, a woman named Clere Sloane. Emma Lou is as much a companion as a maid to Clere and finds the work enjoyable. Clere’s husband, a white writer named Kitchen Campbell, is fascinated by Black life in Harlem and Black American intellectuals, and he takes an interest in Emma Lou. He encourages her to further pursue her education, and she finally decides to re-enter a teachers college.

Despite the enjoyability of her job and the companionship she has found in Clere and Kitchen, Emma Lou remains lonely and dissatisfied. She gives serious thought to Alva’s assertion that her experiences of colorism and prejudice are exaggerated and that in anticipating and reacting to perceived racism, she presents herself as an unsympathetic person. However, she cannot fully agree with Alva’s position because her family members and the people in her childhood community objected so strongly to her dark skin color. She knows that colorism in Black communities is both real and insidious because she has experienced it in a way that Alva has not.