Fall on your Knees

Frances gets to know her mother’s family, particularly her grandfather Mahmoud and her mother’s sister Camille. Camille disparages Frances for her work in the bar. Frances is also drawn to the family’s Black maid Teresa, Ginger’s sister. She loves to watch Teresa preparing dinner.

One afternoon, Frances is surprised to see Ginger deliver a special order of his homemade Caribbean beer to Mahmoud. She then conjectures that Ginger, who makes regular deliveries to New York, might have been the father of Kathleen’s twins. Maybe this was the reason her father banned Frances from playing Black music in the house. She is determined to punish Ginger.

Back when Kathleen was in New York, Ginger had been making liquor runs there. One night, he was spellbound when he heard a woman pianist in one of Harlem’s speakeasies playing “Honeysuckle Rose.” Even his wife, Adelaide, noticed a difference in Ginger’s attitude: “Can music cast a spell?” (302).

Frances decides to go to Ginger’s house and ask for some homemade beer. Ginger balks, thinking Frances is too young.

Days later, Ginger drops off a delivery of beer to the speakeasy. When he does, he sees Frances dressed up in an orange wig and working as a sex worker. He covers his eyes, leaves, and tells his wife he is going to stop making deliveries there.

Ginger picks up Frances as she walks home from the speakeasy. When Ginger asks whether her father knows what she is doing, Frances only tells him that she is bad. Ginger corrects her, saying, “You are not bad. You’re just lost” (313).

Frances decides to give up drinking. She has saved more than $3000 in Lily’s Lourdes fund. But that is not enough, so Frances ups the prices she charges for sex. Meanwhile, Ginger’s wife begins to suspect that Frances is a threat to her family. She is jealous of the much younger, much prettier Frances. The more Ginger denies it, the more certain Adelaide is. She tells Ginger she will kill the girl if she ever shows up at the house or attempts to meet Ginger. But when Ginger tries to warn Frances at the speakeasy, the bouncer thinks Ginger is bothering Frances and beats him up.

Plagued by guilt over lying to his wife, Ginger tells Adelaide the truth about Frances and her dysfunctional family. He wants to help Frances.

The men from the speakeasy tell James that Frances is getting involved with the young Black man who makes deliveries. James cannot believe it. When they insist that Frances is seeing him, James is furious. He takes his first drink since Kathleen died. When he is drunk, he goes to the house and finds a knife. When Mercedes cannot stop him, she pushes him down the stairs.

Later that night Ginger is shocked to see a badly beaten Frances at his door. She begs him for help hiding from her father in one of the abandoned mines. Ginger agrees to drive her out to the mine. When they get there, Frances goes in alone—when Ginger goes in to make sure she is alright, he finds her waiting for him naked. She seduces him, “misery and desire […] all around him and he can only move inside her” (347). When they finish, Frances is certain she is pregnant. Meanwhile, Adelaide worries because Ginger has not come home. Taking a loaded rifle, she heads out.

Mercedes helps James get up from the bottom of the staircase. Mercedes needs to know where Frances is. Lily remembers Frances’s hiding place, but does not want to tell on her sister. She assures Mercedes that Frances is with a good person and is safe. Lily knows what no one else does: Frances, before she left, bloodied her own mouth and nose. Lily has Mercedes drive them out to the mine. Mercedes enters the cave and finds Ginger and Frances there. Ginger, “his heart heavy” (357) with guilt, wants only to go home. Frances assures Mercedes that she got what she wanted—a baby.

When Mercedes drops him off, Ginger confesses everything to Adelaide. Adelaide only wants Ginger to promise he will never leave her and their kids.

Frances, who is sure that she is pregnant, has become a worry for Mercedes. Keeping a baby born out of wedlock is one thing, but keeping a child born out of wedlock from a multiracial relationship is against the law.

Mercedes pushes the local priest to investigate Lily for her apparent ability to cure the sick. She also decides what do to if Frances is indeed pregnant: an orphanage far away from Cape Breton. One morning, she is surprised to find Ginger’s wife Adelaide at her front door. Adelaide is there to make clear that pregnant or not, Frances is to stay away from her husband or Adelaide is prepared to shoot her. The threat shocks Mercedes.

Part of Frances’s new health regimen is to walk along the beach every day. She is just beginning to enjoy a stretch when a shot rings out. She is hit, and the bullet jolts her through the air and onto the gravel beach.

Ginger’s sister Teresa, not Adelaide, has shot Frances, taking pity on “the woman who was not strong enough to live” (372). Suddenly horrified by what she has done, however, Teresa hurls the rifle down onto the beach and then hurries to Frances’s side.

Adelaide and Ginger happen to drive past the beach on their way home, so they see Frances stretched out and Teresa cradling her head. They all drive her to the hospital. Teresa admits she shot Frances.

Adelaide and Ginger drive to the Piper home with their clothes soaked in Frances’s blood, and tell Mercedes what happened. As Mercedes waits anxiously in the hospital waiting room, she thinks that if her sister was pregnant, the gunshot will surely cause a miscarriage.

Recovering from surgery, Frances tells the police not to arrest Teresa. She claims that on finding herself pregnant and unmarried, she went to the beach to die by suicide. Frances claims that she, not Teresa, fired the shot.

In the weeks after the shooting, Frances insists she is still pregnant despite Mercedes’s certainty that the gunshot wound terminated the pregnancy. James, trying to come to terms with Frances’s condition, has a mild stroke—a “pleasant, if strange experience” (387). His mind becomes fuzzy, and he is given to talking about Materia as if she were alive. Mercedes fears their father becoming incapacitated, as that would make her job much more demanding. Frances begins to show. There is no doubt she is pregnant.

Mercedes takes Frances’s pregnancy as an opportunity to talk with Lily about sex. Apparently, Frances has told Lily that the bullet caused her to lose the baby and then miraculously restored the baby to her womb.

Mercedes decides she needs additional income, so she becomes a teacher at the local Catholic school. The nuns worry about Frances’s pregnancy and try to get Mercedes to assure them the child will be sent to an orphanage to avoid scandal.

James, recovering from the stroke, makes peace with Frances. Every afternoon she plays the piano while he doses in his armchair. At last, Mercedes thinks, “we are a family. Daddy is senile, Frances is crazy, Lily is lame and I am unmarried” (399). She thinks that perhaps they will keep Frances’s baby.