Achille Timeline and Summary

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• Achille chops down a tree to make into a canoe. He shapes it himself and names it In God We Troust [sic].
• Hector and Achille argue over Helen. The two draw their cutlasses.
• Achille and Helen fight in the marketplace. She claws and bites him; he tears her yellow dress.
• Achille goes conch-diving (illegally) to provide more money for Helen; he sees her hanging out with Hector on the sea wall.
• Achille dives to find the legendary Spanish galleon that is supposed to be in the harbor.
• Philoctete attempts to make peace between Hector and Achille. No luck.
• Achille takes a job tending Plunkett's pigs.
• During a hurricane, he imagines Hector and Helen together; afterward, he salvages his boat.
• We learn the history of his ancestor, Afolabe, who earned the nickname "Achilles."
• Achille hates the "blockos" that have come to the island because they're changing their village.
• He fights with Helen because of Hector, and he also accuses her of "whoring." It's not his classiest moment.
• He puts out to sea with his mate and sees a swift that appears to pull the boat further out to sea.
• He sees the ghost of his father coming up out of the sea and realizes that the swift has come to bring him home to Africa.
• Achille's boat is brought to the shores of Africa, where he's taken up river by a warrior to the settlement of his ancestors.
• Achille meets his father and they introduce themselves; Achille can't define his name.
• He takes up life in the settlement until there's a raid. He kills an attacker.
• When he returns to the empty village, he finds Seven Seas grieving in a hut.
• Achille hears the griot sing about the captivity of his people and their survival.
• He runs across the bottom of the sea to get back home; when he awakens, he's on his boat.
• As he cleans his boat down, Achille sings Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier," a song from one of the "blockos" that he can't get out of his head.
• Later, he helps Seven Seas rake and burn leaves in his yard. He ditches an ancient totem.
• Achille appears to the narrator as a figure in Winslow Homer's painting The Gulf Stream.
• He chats with Hector in his grave and lays an oar and the rusty bailing tin to rest with his friend.
• Achille attends Maud's funeral.
• Helen helps Achille put on her yellow dress and stuffs the chest with rags for the Boxing Day dance.
• Then Philoctete and Achille dance and pass a cap to catch coins from the onlookers.
• Achille and Philoctete take to the sea to find a new place to fish, since the commercial trawlers have cleared the seas.
• After two days of sailing, they nearly run into a coral reef, but a whale miraculously saves them.
• Achille's last scene is a slaughter of fish. He saves a piece of dolphin for Helen.