Summary
At the start of this chapter, we see the same image of Paula yelling at Little in the pink light of her room. This time, we hear her say, "Don't look at me!" We cut to Chiron, now a full-grown man, waking up from this, a bad dream. He is muscular and wears a do-rag and diamond earring—a dramatic transformation from the skinny boy we saw last. Chiron ices his face, echoing the scene in which we saw him recovering from being beaten; this time, it appears he is merely getting dressed.
Chiron drives down the street in an old-school car that resembles Juan's (complete with his crown dashboard ornament). A man gets in and begins talking with Chiron about girls. Chiron plays along. They make a stop, and Chiron pulls out a gun just in case, echoing the scene in which Juan pulled a gun when Little knocked on the door.
Chiron picks up a boy named Travis, who is apparently a dealer for Chiron, a drug lord who goes by "Black" now. Later, Travis counts a pile of money, and Chiron gives him a hard time when he appears to come up short of what he owes. Chiron eventually admits that he's only messing with Travis, saying, "Can't be on the corner if you can't take a nigger fucking with you."
In the middle of the night, Chiron gets a call from Paula, who leaves a voicemail asking him to come see her. He gets several voicemails like this but ignores them. Days later, he gets a call and assumes it's his mother. He answers and seems upset, but the caller turns out to be Kevin, who hasn't seen Chiron in a decade or so. Chiron is mostly speechless and tells Kevin he moved to Atlanta after what happened. Kevin apologizes for what he did to Chiron, and Chiron swallows his tears. Kevin tells him he remembered Chiron when a man who resembled him played a song on the jukebox at the diner where he works as a cook. He invites Chiron to town, promising he'll cook him dinner and play the song. He hangs up as Chiron fails to speak. Chiron leans back on his bed.
Outside the diner where he works, Kevin smokes and seems to think hard on his phone call with Chiron. He looks directly at the camera, exhales smoke, and goes back to work.
The next morning, Chiron awakes and seems to feel his penis for the first time in a while.
Chiron visits his mother, who lives at a treatment center for addicts. Chiron admits to her that he has trouble sleeping, and Paula urges him to talk to someone about it. She asks if he still sees Teresa, and he answers that he does. He asks Paula when she plans on going home, and she replies that she's going to stay at the center to help others.
Paula asks Chiron about his job and seems to understand that he's a dealer. He senses her judgement and gets angry. Paula apologizes, teary-eyed, and explains that she knows she wasn't there for him when he needed her. Chiron starts crying too, and Paula tells him she loves him, saying, "Your heart ain't gotta be black like mine, baby."
Paula tries to light a cigarette, but her hands are too shaky. Chiron lights it for her and wipes a tear from her face.
Analysis
When we meet Black at the start of this new chapter, we are instantly shocked by the changes in his appearance and lifestyle. In the time since we last saw him, he has been to prison, gotten muscular, and taken up "trapping" in Atlanta. Even so, certain aspects of his life parallel those of his childhood. Perhaps the most obvious of these is that he's clearly adopted Juan's lifestyle, accented by the presence of the crown ornament we see on Juan's dashboard in the first shot of the film. Chiron also ices his face at the start of this chapter, echoing the scene in which he does so to recover from his injuries from Kevin's punches. On a larger scale, these radical differences with seeds of similarity built in are a microcosm of the ways in which Chiron's problems seem (literally) far away, yet are still emotionally present for him.
The start of this chapter also focuses heavily on the themes of parenthood, redemption, and identity that we have watched develop throughout the film. This is primarily expressed in the scene in which Chiron and his mother reconnect. In many ways, Chiron's and Paula's roles have entirely reversed at this point in the film, since Chiron is now a drug dealer and Paula is now clean, perhaps marking the dissolution of the film's antagonist. Even so, certain aspects of their relationship remain unchanged, including their historic role reversal wherein Chiron takes care of Paula, acting as more of a parent than a child; this is particularly at work when Chiron lights Paula's cigarette for her, as her hands are too shaky. Although he doesn't say anything, this scene almost functions as the first step in a process of forgiveness and redemption between Chiron and Paula. This act of kindness reveals his care for his mother despite her flaws.
The film's existing themes of love and fate also play into this section, since Paula seems to sense that Chiron has, in many ways, lost hope in love. In attempting to gain forgiveness for her missteps as a mother, she also seeks to give Chiron the freedom to experience love and life. When Paula tells Chiron she doesn't want his heart to grow "black" like hers, she is engaging with our ongoing questions about whether Chiron has a real chance at being himself or falling in love—a question that is magnified when Kevin calls Chiron.
Of course, Paula's words also gesture at the film's existing motifs of black as a metaphor for hardness or performed masculinity, versus blue as softness or vulnerability. This is at work throughout this chapter of the film, titled "Black" after Chiron's new nickname, since Chiron seems to have shed any scrap of vulnerability, exchanging it for a harder persona. Even so, we see blue spill through into Chiron's world, particularly when we cut to Kevin outside the diner, perhaps foreshadowing a day when Chiron might let his guard down and be vulnerable again.
This chapter also marks the film's first real experiment with breaking the fourth wall, as the sequence where we meet Kevin as an adult for the first time features a shot in which he stares at the camera. Because this scene directly follows the first time Kevin reaches out to his former lover and friend in a decade, Kevin's stare feels pregnant with meaning and even confrontation. In this moment, Kevin appears to dare the viewer to judge him, making this a fracture in the diegetic world of the film. Thus, this shot functions almost as a portal between the closed world of the film and the world of the viewer.
