Hot Summer in the City Book Review (Part 2: The Book vs The Movie, Day 2, Chapter 4)

Chapter 4 is only 20 pages long and dedicated exclusively to the sexual encounter between Duke and Debbie in Duke's bedroom. It tracks so well with the chronological sequence of the conjugal relations they shared in the movie, that one would wonder if it was written after the fact. Still, it is exceptionally well written, and does provide the reader with additional material and insights not found in the movie. These highlights are as follows:  

Debbie can hear Jodie's gang rape from Duke's bedroom: In the book, Duke doesn't get the bedroom door completely shut, so Debbie cannot help but hear Jodie's ongoing whimpering protests and moans and the grunts of the gang members as the three men ravish her. Debbie is frightened and disturbed by those sounds and wants to ask Duke to shut the door to block the noise, but is too afraid of upsetting him to do so.

Dialogue clean up: In the movie one can barely hear the pre-kiss verbal exchange they, share, but reading it in the book clears that up. Here is the exchange:

Duke: You're pretty.

Duke: I hope they didn't hurt you?

Debbie: No. They didn't. (The book doesn't explain why she lied to Duke about this). 

Duke comes from a large family: We learn that Duke has younger brothers and sisters, and is worried they may get killed when the great Race War begins the next day. 

The biggest value of Chapter 4 though, is that it gives the mental perspectives of Duke and Debbie towards one another, and the situation that has brought themselves together. What follows is some of the more critical character development content of each: 

Duke's Point of View:

Duke looked down on her with an almost religious reverence. He would have given anything in the world in that moment if he could have possessed someone like her, under different circumstances... He would have given anything if [the rapes] hadn't happened and things had been different... He might have won her on his own merits, the way a woman should be won..Now...with what he had committed himself to do, he knew that could never happen.

He wished also, with all his heart, that he could explain this to the white girl who might understand better why he needed her so much tonight. But he knew he couldn't. They were a complete world apart and he could never put the words together that could even begin to describe how he felt. She would just have to go on forever believing he was an inhumane black brute because he didn't have at this moment the time or the words to convince her otherwise.

Debbie's Point of View: 

She was naked now before the Negro but felt no intense fear. She had come to trust him in the last few minutes and sensed he would not hurt her intentionally. In fact, the thought ran hazily through her mind that he probably would stop if she pleaded with him. But she had no intention of doing that now. He had saved her from another horrible evening at the hands of the three depraved men and the venomous anger of the Negress, and she sensed that it had not been through desire for her alone, but from a strange compassion that had arisen in him for her as a human being. She knew because his hands playing over the softness of her now quivering flesh were asking, not demanding. And there was no other way she could repay him. 

Indeed, Debbie had no other way to repay him, but even she becomes taken aback by how her body responds to his gentle, asking hands. 

Debbie, somewhere back in the distant ages since his hands had reached for her body, had drifted into a strange unknown world of sudden, deep, soft pleasure of the flesh. She had lain beneath his hands at first in fear, then in grim realization she had a debt to pay. Now...all conscious thought of why she was here, or who her slowly flaming body was writhing beneath was lost in her memory. It no longer mattered as she felt the tiny licking flames running all around her between the softness of her inner thighs, out of the tips of her now pebble hard nipples, and down again to the burning core of her vagina where it roared in a white-hot heat like the interior of a blast furnace.

As Debby begins falling into an expected physical and emotional abyss of pleasure, the author gives a brilliant, dare I say penetrating insight, as to how this impacted Duke's state of mind and the objectives that spurned Duke on, as he proceeded to tease Debbie's body through an agonizingly pleasurable long session of foreplay. 

Duke's Point of View:

Her passion spurred his own. Disbelief buzzed through his brain that this could be happening. Last night in the car he had brutally ripped this voluptuous white girl's virginity from between her legs in a brutal rape, and yet tonight she writhing and twisting beneath him as if she was his slave...her throbbing vaginal slit presented to him in willing sacrifice...but he waited. He waited because she needed it and that's what he wanted from her even though it tortured him beyond his wildest imagination... because he knew he had conquered her soul and she was completely at the mercy of his desires at this moment...He held back the final plunge that would fuse them together in one great, wet, pulsating mass of black and white flesh, to wring from her that one final admission of surrender that would bond them together as long as she lived.

She had to remember she had done it and done it because she had wanted it more than pride itself. He would be leaving this world tomorrow, he could feel it in his bones...he wanted to leave something behind that would make him live and that something would forever be sunk deep in her belly...no matter how many times afterwards that she was fucked, his cock would always be there with the others. She would remember, and that would make him alive again...

Debbie's Point of View:

" Fuck me...Ooooooo...Ooooooh God! Ooo God! So good, so good." Debbie moans out, as Duke consummates the eternal claim he intends to make over body. Bodies joined as one flesh in the bond of desire, the author provides an intimate account of what is going on inside Debbie's mind and body:

In the white girl's face [Duke could see] the sudden and humiliating surrender of her whole being to a black boy who had snatched her off the street in the middle of the night and fucked the shit out of her, without ceremony, in the back seat of a car...now she was twisting and writhing beneath him unable to control at all her wild desire to be fucked and humiliated by that same black boy...Her nails, digging desperately in his back, slithered down and now dug demonically into his muscular thrusting buttocks, as they pounded down deep into her unprotected loins.

"I'm cumming! I'm cumming! She suddenly squealed with a high-pitched grasp of intense passion, and locked her ankles in a death grip behind his laboring back...Her body arched, she held tight to him quivering and jerking around him in a pulsating rhythm that spewed orgasmic fluid around his still hard driving cock and down the wide-split crevice of her ass, soaking his balls as they slapped hard into her tiny, puckered anus... Then with a deep soul shattering grunt that went on and on into her mouth, he exploded inside her, shooting his hot liquid sperm deep down into the liquid depths of her open and receptive womb.

CLIMAX OF THE SCENE

Of course, this scene ended differently in the movie, as money shots were considered necessary in porn movies in the 70s. Instead, movie Debby gets a huge load of sperm splashed all over her heaving belly.  As a fan of the movie and the book, the ending of this scene disappointed me most, and here's why. 

I was hoping we would get some "pillow talk" in which Debbie and Duke shared their thoughts about what happened just then between them. Had they come to feel like they were falling in love with each other? Did Debbie, out of growing attachment, try and talk Duke out of taking part in the Race War? Did Debbie, out of growing affection for Duke, start bonding with him on a Patty Hearst type level, becoming interested in changing sides and joining him in the Race War? And what were Debbie's thoughts of her fiancé Bill? Still engaged to him, in the moment did she feel any guilt about her willingly and joyfully experiencing the feeling of Duke's seed swimming inside her womb? Duke, a black gang leader, and the same man who had forcibly taken her virginity which she had been saving for Bill, only a mere 24 hours ago. 

Alas, we don't get much here, but at least we get more than is in the book. Duke is described as wanting to say nice words to her, to make her feel special, but that they come from two different worlds, he doesn't know the words to say. So he just pulls up the blanket over them and they fall asleep.