The white tendrils infecting New York City represent outside forces that can manipulate a community to stoke prejudices within it and to homogenize it. When characters, Manny first sees the tendrils, he recognizes that they exist not only in humanity’s baseline reality but in another dimension as well, suggesting that they are an outside, alien force. When Manny next encounters a tendril, it has infected a person, and its symbolic meaning becomes clearer. The tendril, attached to the back of a racist white woman’s neck, convinces her to harass Manny (a light-skinned Black man), accusing him of being a drug dealer. When Manny orders the creature manipulating the racist white woman to appear, she transforms into the Woman in White—the novel’s antagonist, an entity from a parallel dimension seeking to destroy New York City. In the novel, great cities are living creatures that choose human avatars to represent and defend them, and Manny is the avatar of Manhattan. The Woman in White uses the tendril to draw out the white New Yorker’s anti-Black prejudice and turn her against Manny, a fellow community member who is in fact their community’s defender.
Throughout the novel, the Woman in White uses the tendrils to manipulate prejudiced New Yorkers to attack the city’s human avatars. Attacking the city’s human avatars is against New Yorker’s best interests, as the Woman in White’s goal is to destroy New York, whereas the avatars are trying to save it. At the Woman in White’s behests, a tendril-infected right-wing art collective called the Alt Artistes attacks the Bronx’s avatar, Bronca Siwanoy, when she refuses to display their bigoted art in the gallery she directs. In another instance, Conall McGuiness, a tendril-infected, misogynistic neo-Nazi, sexually assaults Staten Island’s avatar Aislyn Houlihan. Ironically, the attack makes Aislyn more willing to trust the Woman in White, who appears to Aislyn as another woman, and, therefore, a source of solidarity. The tendrils also thrive at sites of gentrification, such as local restaurants razed to make room for condos, or Starbucks locations in up-trending neighborhoods. This suggests that prejudice drives gentrification: people gentrify neighborhoods—making them homogenous and conforming—when they refuse to accept those neighborhoods’ preexisting diversity.
Tendrils Quotes in The City We Became
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
“The Better New York Foundation—”
“Jesus, really?”
“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”
Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.
Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .
. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.
Tendrils Symbol Timeline in The City We Became
