Lesson 7: Organizing Time & Space in Salvage the Bones
One of the great appeals of novels in comparison to “short stories” stems from the way the longer literary narrative form permits greater complexity, scope, depth, and intricacy. Obvious as it may be, a 250-page novel like Salvage the Bones has the capacity to represent a wider-ranging storyworld than a 30-page narrative like “Standard Loneliness Package” or TSHLOFM. While short stories, tend to focus on or cohere around a fairly singular conflict, relationship, or event, novels often present narratives with more expansive and/or richly textured storyworlds, longer and/or more intricate timelines and plots, and more multifaceted character conflicts and story events. As such, novels can convey narratives that prove dynamic in which complexity increases, conflicts evolve, shift, and multiply, and characters and relationships develop, grow, and accumulate. While novels aren’t under any obligation to pursue greater complexity, development, nuance, or scale than their shorter narratives counterparts, there’s no way around the fact that the novel’s greater volume affects our reading experience. In this lesson, we’ll consider some of the ways in which Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones organizes and manipulates time and space over its many pages in ways that craft an arguably quite immersive and viscerally stimulating storyworld.
Counting the Days
We know by now that literary narratives are often occupied with matters of time: how the passage of time is represented, how the plot orders and arranges the sequences of story events in ways that may or may not coincide with the chronology of those events, how we readers may find ourselves awaiting important information from the past in order to better understand the present, and so on. Before the narrative even begins in earnest, Salvage the Bones alerts us to the significance and value of time and space/place in the story it will tell. Consider the opening chapter title, “The First Day: Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place.” Right out of the gate, the narrative triggers our impulse to question and anticipate. What’s happening? Birth. When is it happening? The first day. Where? A bare-bulb place. The subtitle, “Birth in a Bare-Bulb Place,” uses language that’s so particular and evocative that we have every reason to expect its significance will be made clear in the pages that follow. But what to make of the much vaguer phrase, “The First Day?” The first day of what exactly?
The power of the title “The First Day” comes from the way it taps into and exploits our perception of linear time. By and large, we tend to experience the passage of time as moving forward in one direction. From our vantage point in the present, we may be aware of the past and possess knowledge about it, but we can only more toward the future—a future about which we ostensibly don’t possess knowledge. The physical experience of reading literary texts often reinforces this perception of linear progression in time. We tend to turn/scroll through the pages in one, perpetual direction from the beginning of the book to its end. “The First Day” works like a timestamp insofar as it pins the chapter’s story events to a specific moment or spot on the storyworld’s timeline. Whether or not there are prior story events that will come to matter during the course of the narrative, the chapter title reinforces the sense of moving forward, even toward something. We anticipate the future ahead. And we also know—if only subconsciously—that whatever it is that happens in that future is important and thereby gives this first day some meaning or connotation that we will be able to fully appreciate only later. In other words, we know that this is the first day of something—some kind of large-scale story event or notable sequence of story events. Logic (and our familiarity with the linear progression of time) dictates that if we encounter “The First Day,” then there are more days to come, be they “The Second Day” or “The One Hundredth Day.” What we cannot know with any certainty—unless we step outside of the narrative and flip to later parts of the book itself—how many and which specific days lie ahead.
Even though the narrative begins in medias res by dropping us straight into the middle of a major story event (China giving birth to a litter of puppies), we’ve been given the sense from the chapter title that we’re actually at the start of something, something bigger than what’s going on right here and now. By the end of the first chapter, we’ve been able to decipher its subtitle, even though the meaning of “The First Day” remains obscure. Moreover, the elusiveness of its meaning becomes more powerful when we stare down the second chapter title: “The Second Day: Hidden Eggs.” By the time we get to “The Third Day: Sickness in the Dirt,” we can likely recognize an emerging pattern. First, the plot appears to arrange story events in a straightforward chronological order. Even though the past holds importance, we gain information about the past only through Esch’s allusions and recollections, not flashbacks. Second, the chapter titles track the passage of time on two scales or timeframes simultaneously: in effect, each chapter title serves as a calendar and a clock. The main titles (“The First Day,” “The Second Day,” etc.) mark the accumulation of days passing, while the subtitles document key story events that occur within the hours of the given day. Consequently, the narrative exploits our understanding and experience of time’s linearity in order to manipulate our readerly senses of expectation and satisfaction. In other words, the narrative plays with both our desire to understand what’s happening and our willingness to tolerate not knowing for some unannounced amount of time (this is basically how narratives create suspense). We don’t know the meaning “Hidden Eggs” or “Sickness in the Dirt” or “A Steady Hand” when we begin reading the second, third, and sixth chapters; but we come to feel assured that our questions about the meaning of these subtitles will be answered by the end of these chapters. Meanwhile, for a much longer stretch of the novel, the narrative delays and forestalls our sense of gratification and knowledge by withholding the meaning of the days tallied by the chapters’ main titles.
Conflicts & Other Expectations
The organization of time and space/place matters in a narrative only so far as we come to care about how it comes to bear on the story events and the characters that occupy, inhabit, and navigate he storyworld. That is to say, story events play out over the course of time, across the space/place of the storyworld. We know from our study of other narratives that our readerly interest and desire can be stoked through the creation of conflicts and tensions that need resolving. In many cases, this is how we come to know and invest in characters. We’re not merely interested in who they are; we’re interested in what problems and challenges they confront, what difficult decisions they face, what issues with other characters they must sort out, etc.
In the opening chapters of Salvage the Bones, we can observe three central conflicts or predicaments emerging in and around The Pit, each associated with one of the three main characters. Skeetah is entirely occupied with China and her puppies. He strives and struggles to protect the mother and her litter despite meagre resources and limited knowledge of how best to tend to their health and wellbeing. The passing hours and days serve as measurements of their potential for growth and survival. Meanwhile, Daddy proves to be similarly consumed by a singular obsession: the threat of a hurricane and his corresponding storm preparations. Much like his son Skeetah, Daddy’s priorities aren’t shared or much appreciated by other members of the family. In both cases, we observe tension between what they believe matters (and therefore demands attention and resources) and what the other family members care about (e.g., Randall’s basketball prospects). Esch—the first-person narrator whose perspective dominates our vision and access to these characters and the story events—is, in a sense, at odds with herself. Her pregnancy presents a mix of mental, emotional, and practical conundrums. We readers wonder, perhaps even worry, what all is going to happen if and when her pregnancy is made known to others (recall dramatic irony, see Lesson 2). While her brother and father actively try to recruit the family to their individual causes, Esch, by contrast, strives to keep this information to herself. Bound to the inexorable passage of time, Esch fears the point at which her changing body will reveal her secret regardless of her readiness to have it known.
As readers trying to get our bearings, we may find that these conflicts actually compete or vie for our attention and affective attachment. We may even be tempted to tacitly rank their comparative significance and invest our sympathies or anticipation accordingly. After the first handful of chapters have passed, are we mostly concerned with Esch and the challenges and consequences her pregnancy will inevitably usher in? Do we care that much about Skeetah’s dogs or feel like the stake are as high as his behavior suggests? Are we comfortable dismissing Daddy’s concerns as reflective not so much of any real, impending danger, but as the preoccupations of an alcoholic father who can’t seem to get his kids to pay a lick of attention to what he has to say? In the early stages of the narrative, some of the questions we might be asking ourselves correlate to the organization of time and space/place in the storyworld. Given the narrative’s complexity and overlapping storylines, we’re no doubt asking which of these conflicts and predicaments are actually going to matter in the long run (again, the narrative encourages us to perceive time moving toward a future that we cannot predict or fully anticipate). We might even wonder if all these competing, individual worries are evidence of a bigger overarching conflict that stems from the fact that the family simply doesn’t seem to be on the same page or working together all that well—let’s not lose sight of Mama’s absence and the ways in which her death continues to adversely affect this family. And so, we may find ourselves wondering about the possible consequences of this apparent familial dysfunction as the days progress.
Expecting…Katrina
One of the most intriguing, fascinating, and awesome aspects of Salvage the Bones is the way in which its narrative tells a story about Hurricane Katrina without revealing that crucial detail until nearly halfway through the book. “The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina” (124). When we read that line, answers to some of our questions begin to reveal themselves. Indeed, if you didn’t know anything about this novel before you started reading and if you didn’t use the nearest internet-accessible device looking for a study guide and if you didn’t browse the reading group guides and other educational materials at the back of the book, then you should have arrived at this passage without its momentous revelation already spoiled.
The profundity of this passage compels us readers to look forward and backward at the same time. We look forward suddenly able to foresee the imminent danger that threatens the Batiste family. Knowing that the storm is in fact Hurricane Katrina requires that we revise our expectations about what may happen moving forward in the narrative. Given our historical awareness of Hurricane Katrina, we must update our sense of the narrative’s most urgent and pressing conflicts, tensions, and concerns.
At the same time, we also look backward spurred to rethink everything we have read to this point in light of this critical new information. We realize that regardless of how easy-to-dismiss Daddy’s fears have been, the Batiste’s have been under serious threat all along:
“‘This year’s different,’ Daddy said […] ‘Makes my bones hurt […] I can feel them coming.’” (6-7)
“Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer” (46)
The early scene in which Skeetah, Randall, and Esch go to the store to buy dog food now takes on a haunting quality. We may recall how Esch noticed all the other customers buying up batteries and water and other supplies. As she waited amid the long checkout lines, she thought, “I feel like I should have a basket, wonder if these people look at us, they wonder where our supplies are” (28-29). At the time we read the passage, we may not have thought much of her observation. But what about now? Now, we suddenly realize the stakes of their unpreparedness and the ease with which Daddy’s anxiety and concern went unheeded. We also (finally!) have a plausible way of explaining the chapters’ main titles and the circumstances toward which the day-by-day plot progression has been steadily moving.
The news that Hurricane Katrina is growing not only forces us to adjust our view of where the narrative has been and is heading, but also changes our connection to the characters and their actions moving forward. Even as the hurricane coverage begins to saturate the news, Skeetah remains entirely focused on China and the dogfights about to take place. Esch, for her, part seems unsure; she remains preoccupied with the physical impact of her pregnancy and the emotional impact of the drama involving Manny, though she’s starts to wonder about veracity of her father’s earlier storm predictions.
“The TV is low […] On the screen, there is a map of the Gulf, and Katrina spins like a top, as if the long arm of Florida has just spun it loose.” (155)
“The air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us.” (163)
In Salvage the Bones, we know what’s at stake the minute we discover that Hurricane Katrina is part of the story being told, because we have prior knowledge of real, historical events that are suddenly brought to bear upon the fictional storyworld. In fact, we can even go so far as to pinpoint the days, the month and the year during which these story events take place history (Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi as a category 5 hurricane in late August 2005). However, none of this knowledge about Hurricane Katrina come from the content of the narrative itself. Instead, it’s knowledge that exists and is available to us outside of the narrative that we readers bring to the fictional storyworld. This is an example of information that we can describe as paratextual. And there’s a lot of different kinds of paratextual material—basically, content and information that exists outside of a narrative text that nonetheless impacts our encounter with and reception of that narrative text. Recall the old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover”: a cover illustration is paratextual but can still influence our reading experience.
For the first half of the book, there’s hints and clues and at least some recurring motifs that allude to the possibility of an impending hurricane. But because Esch is narrating the story in ways that downplay his anxiety and his behaviors, we’re encouraged to share her outlook and probably don’t put much stock into Daddy’s worrying. When we discover that it is actually Hurricane Katrina that’s been growing and developing as a storm, we have a revelatory experience that comes not from Esch, but from our access to paratextual information about the historical scale and significance of the actual hurricane. Keep in mind, that Esch cannot reveal this information to us readers any earlier, because she simply doesn’t possess have it. For the final 5-6 chapters of Salvage the Bones, we readers not only possess more information than the characters about the gravity and scale of the situation, but we continue to read while knowing or at least anticipating that certain story events are likely coming that the characters have no power to foresee or avoid. So, when Esch thinks to herself, “Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us,” we find ourselves in the extremely exciting but terrible situation of knowing that a much larger, much more urgent and dangerous threat looms than what the Batiste’s can possibly recognize or prepare for. And just like that, whatever conflicts, concerns, other tensions we thought might matter most are totally eclipsed and so too are our expectations for what’s coming.
Lesson 8: Close Reading – Esch
Not only does Salvage the Bones begin in medias res without any situational context or exposition, but the narrative also drops us readers straight into the consciousness of an unnamed first-person narrator. For a full paragraph, we’ve got nothing to work with that in anyway orients us to the setting or circumstances of the scene and story events. Instead, we are completely at the mercy of the narrator’s perspective, and thus kept at a distance from the story events despite paradoxically gaining such close proximity to her thoughts, feelings, and observations: “China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way” (1). Not until we get to the second paragraph, when the narrator recalls Junior’s birth and Mama’s death and then notes, “Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help,” can we start piecing together some sense of the narrator’s identity. This narrator doesn’t introduce herself; she merely points out those around her or on her mind. She doesn’t need to introduce herself, of course, because who the heck would she be introducing herself to? Surely not us readers. Indeed, the first-person narration used in Salvage the Bones is so intensely focalized—that is so say so consistently and almost exclusively shaped by or through its representation of this narrator’s perspective and consciousness that it doesn’t even feel like there is a story being told, per se. Instead, we readers are kind of just there, on the scene, watching story events play out and the storyworld expand on the horizon.
It’s not until the second chapter, while she’s in conversation with her brother Skeetah, that we even learn our narrator-protagonist’s name: Esch. But even before we can name her, we are gaining a sense of her: we can start to calculate her age and locate her place in the family structure and glean something of the place in which she lives. We know that she’s got a ponytail what she calls, “my one good thing. My one odd thing”—it may not be the most vital biographical detail, but it nonetheless contributes to her realness and roundness. In truth, beyond our ability to draw up of sketch of her, we quickly gain an incredibly strong, poignant impression of her personality, her worldview, her manner, and her outlook. In effect, Salvage the Bones presents a distinctive and dynamic first-person narrator who proves to be no mere passive observer recording and telling us the tales of other characters. Through a combination of first-person narration and elaborate uses of voice and focalization, the narrative discourse underscores Esch’s role as protagonist and heroine. Her story events are front-and-center, and her interpretations of and outlooks on her surroundings—not to mention her self-reflection and introspection—dominate our attention and radically affect our ability to observe, react, and make sense of the other characters and their story events.
Unsurprisingly, Esch is neither omniscient nor objective. Her narration offers an account of story events inflected by her experiences, her own thoughts and feelings, and her own sense of priorities, worries, preoccupations. Our interest and understanding of Skeetah and China and the puppies and Randall’s basketball game and Daddy’s drinking—it’s all subject to the amount and kind of attention Esch gives them. Regardless of which characters or story events come to the foreground, we readers always rely upon Esch’s point of view. Though Salvage the Bones may encompass more than just her story, it is always and entirely Esch’s narration. And so, our experience of the stories told over the course of the novel always stem from the experiences of Esch, a poor Black 15-year-old motherless girl living in coastal Mississippi who discovers she’s pregnant and who, along with her brothers and father, may be under threat from a developing hurricane. To put things somewhat differently, in Esch, we encounter a protagonist—a heroine and a narrator who embodies a voice, thoughts, feelings, perspectives, experiences that often go unheard, unacknowledged, or undervalued.
Because we don’t have a third-person narrator that might have a wider breadth of knowledge than the characters themselves, the questions we have and the information we desire can sometimes compete with Esch’s preoccupations and personal priorities. And yet, as we try to orient ourselves to the storyworld, decipher characters’ motivations, and keep track of potential cause-and-effect links between story events, we also experience Esch’s own efforts to ask and answer questions about the circumstances that surround her and the experiences, thoughts, and feelings she’s having herself. Again, because of the intimacy and close proximity to Esch created by the narration, we find ourselves reading a narrative that’s very much contoured to her desperate desire to make sense of her life and the world. There are tremendously high stakes to “what happens” in this narrative, and we’re compelled to realize that Esch is constantly striving to grasp how and why things work the way they do. At 15 and under very challenging circumstances, she attempts to interpret the world according to the way she imagines and presumes adults must understand it.
Esch’s Similes and Metaphors
One of the recurring ways she conceptualizes and interprets the world around her is through the logic and structure of comparison. As Esch thinks through what she sees, experiences, and feels, she’s frequently making comparisons between whatever is right in front her that she doesn’t fully understand and something more agreeable, accessible, familiar, or otherwise comprehensible. Esch, though she dabbles in metaphor from time to time, loves to think in similes—good old-fashioned comparisons between two not quite similar things, using like or as. Consider just a small sample of Esch’s early similes and metaphors:
“Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower.” (2)
“I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.” (4)
“Every time I dozed, the truth that I was pregnant was there like a bully to kick me awake.” (37)
“The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of a living salvaged over the years.” (58)
Such figurative, metaphorical thinking serves as a means of making what’s unfamiliar, alien, or even scary and unsettling more familiar, normal, and comprehensible. Esch takes something like the blossoming of a flower, or the metamorphosis frog eggs into tadpoles and uses these points of reference and comparison to formulate an understanding or an acceptance and acknowledgement of what’s happening. To think about frog eggs and tadpoles becomes a mental pathway by which she can wonder about human ova and embryos—something she knows exists but can’t see and can’t quite grasp. At times, this type of thinking seems a demonstration of incredible imagination and creativity. At other times, it might suggest a desire or need to keep some of the realities of what’s going on in her world at a distance or at least deferred.
Esch’s Myths
Perhaps an extension of Esch’s mental and emotional efforts to orient herself to a world she doesn’t fully comprehend can be observed in her fascination with Greek mythology. We know that she’s reading about the subject, and the stories and characters she’s encountering utterly captivate her. In the absence of a mother or any other strong female confidant, these narratives have a significant impact on how Esch perceives the world and her place within it.
“I am small, dark: invisible. I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen.” (28)
“In every one of the Greeks’ mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in a ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” (32)
“In Mythology, I am still reading about Medea and the quest for the Golden Fleece. Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by the throat. I can see her. Medea sneaks Jason things to help him: ointments to make him invincible, secrets in rocks. She has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with all her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind. He makes her double in two. I know her.” (38)
These myths, their stories, and especially their women provide an extremely important framework or heuristic for Esch’s sense-/meaning-making efforts. She recognizes Medea, she imagines herself as Eurydice. The narratives recounted by these myths provide her with structures and patterns and ideas about cause and effect that she can apply to her own circumstances and thereby craft some logical, rational approach to what’s going on. The tales of the relationship between Jason and Medea might provide Esch with a way of deciphering whatever it is that’s going on between her and Manny, for example. Medea and the other Greek heroines about whom she’s reading may model a certain type of female subjectivity to which she, Esch, can aspire as she strives to determine for herself who she is and how she should think, feel, and act. In a way, that we might find at once totally fanciful and totally reassuring and familiar, these ancient Greek myths provide narrative templates and archetypes for Esch to use as she crafts and tells her own story of mythical proportions:
“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hand the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept in the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered…” (255)
Lesson 9: Close Reading – Skeetah
While there’s no debate that Esch’s first-person narration helps cement her status as the protagonist and heroine of Salvage the Bones, Skeetah consistently attracts our readerly attention and fascination—always attracting our gaze and raising questions, many of which seem nigh unanswerable. The precision and intensity with which Esch’s perspective focuses our attention on her brother convey not only her strong—if sometimes hard to appreciate—sibling affection and attachment, but also an overarching confrontation with the sheer challenge of truly understanding another person regardless of how well you know them or love them. Because Esch’s cares often steer our readerly cares, Skeetah quickly emerges as one the narratives roundest, most complex, and most significant (compelling? challenging?) characters. Keep in mind that the depth of internal thought and contemplation we might gain from a first-person narrator like Esch also introduces compromises: less complete and capacious knowledge and idiosyncratic viewpoints, opinions, and bias.
Even though they play meaningful roles in story events, the other members of the Batiste family and other noteworthy characters, like Manny and Big Henry, tend to be flatter and, in some cases, nearly one-dimensional. Their behaviors and what they have to say give us pretty tidy straightforward impressions of who they are—at least from Esch’s point of view. For example, Manny certainly seems to be an exploitative jerk who’s willing to take advantage of Esch or alternatively dismiss her as he sees fits. Is this assessment of Manny’s character a projection of Esch’s perspective? It sure is, and, in the absence of other perspectives, we have little else to go on. If we think about the difference between flat and round characters as a function of how a narrative tells a story, then we may note that Manny’s singularity positions him as a clear and obvious object of frustration and derision for Esch. He serves as a cut and dry antagonist, whose predictable actions and behaviors enable Esch’s mixed emotions and inner turmoil to stand out as more complex, dynamic, and rich by contrast.
While our understanding of Skeetah is also mediated by and through Esch’s perspective, we quickly realize that we’re encountering a much more complex and complicated character. Some of this complexity can be attributed to Esch. She is trying to understand, support, love, protect, and cherish the company of her brother, but it’s also clear that she’s find him at once magnetic and challenging. Even without Esch’s perspective, we may very well find Skeetah’s actions and ideas—as presented to us through his quoted speech—complicated, contradictory, concerning, contentious, contemptible, and so on. His roundness and lifelikeness derive in part from the ways he frustrates our (and Esch’s) ability to neatly sum him up or pin him down. Such roundness makes him compelling insofar as it makes him feel human. He’s flawed, fickle, temperamental, somehow brave and cowardly, somehow selfish and selfless. Through Esch’s narration, we get the feeling of whole, coherent person.
Skeetah’s Significance
“I’d always assumed he missed more than half of what went on at the Pit; seemed like all I ever saw around him, once he brought home a pit he told me he stole out of somebody’s yard when he was twelve, were dogs […] We lost each other, a little. And now I wonder what Skeetah’s seen, what he’s been paying attention to when his dogs are sleeping, when he’s between dogs […] He’s the odd one.” (33)
“Before China had these puppies, I’d go days without seeing him. Days before I’d be walking through the woods […] and I’d stumble on Skeetah, training China to attack and bite and lock on with an old bike tire or a rope. Or China’d nap while Skeetah ate razor blades, sliding them between the pink sleeve of his cheek and tongue and back out of his lips so fast I thought I was imagining it. I asked him why he ate them once, and he grinned and said, Why should China be the only one with teeth?” (60)
Part of what makes Skeetah standout has to do with the way in which he is such an object of fascination for Esch, and thereby becomes an object of fascination for us. It’s clear from early passages like those quoted above that Esch doesn’t quite know what to make of her brother. The mystery or elusiveness Esch associates with Skeetah could be attributed to typical ways in which sibling relationships evolve as they grow from childhood to young adulthood, etc., but there’s also a pronounced feeling that Skeetah operates according to his own worldview—one which cannot be easily decoded or predicted by Esch or us readers.
Skeetah’s (Symbolic) Actions
For much of the opening third of the narrative, at least, our view of Skeetah stems almost exclusively from his all-consuming focus on and dedication to the health and welfare of China and the litter of new puppies. All other concerns and, quite frankly all other family members, are cast aside in service of fulfilling the needs of these dogs. Skeetah is compelled (and acts as though entirely self-justified) to forgo other priorities to get the best dog food, to set out and steal the deworming agent, and to salvage scrap materials not for the sake of reinforcing the house but in order to erect shelter for the dogs. Even when Skeetah gets in the fight with Manny during Randall’s basketball game, whatever amount of that conflict started with Skeetah’s desire to defend Esch gets quickly subsumed by the conflict over Rico’s claim on one of China’s puppies. Under the influence of Esch’s perspective, we come to notice how these dogs serve as projections or extensions of Skeetah’s masculine pride and the problematic “chest-thumping” that comes with it.
“China is white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah as black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does” (162)
“We all fight, said Skeetah. Everybody.” (169)
“Make them know make them know make them know they can’t live without you, Skeetah says. China hears.” (175)
By the time we get to “The Eighth Day,” it’s clear not only that Skeetah is involved in a dogfighting subculture, but that he is emotionally provoked and enervated enough to fight China before the surviving puppies have even been weaned. Randall’s attempts to change Skeetah’s mind are totally futile even though the consequences are predictable, and China is injured in gruesome fashion. Everything leading up to this point seems to support Esch’s observation that Skeetah’s love for China is unparalleled and impossible for others to fathom. But what to make of this? Is Skeetah’s love marked by an undying, irrational devotion to China? A willingness to forgo or sacrifice or take risks on her behalf? Is this a kind of heroism or extraordinary commitment? If that’s the case, then how could Skeetah be so ready to endanger China while she’s still recovering from giving birth and nursing the litter? Even the others around him, who seem not to object to the inherent cruelty of dogfighting—that’s not the debate on the table among them—ardently resist and question Skeetah’s decision to subject China to a fight.
As Esch struggles to reconcile Skeetah’s paradoxical actions, so, too, do we readers. Why does he do this? How does he rationalize his choice? These may be questions we cannot or should not try to answer, despite how pressing and urgent these questions might feel. For many readers, this perhaps the moment in the narrative when Skeetah becomes utterly unknowable. It is not that we don’t observe and acknowledge his decisions and actions; it’s that we realize—as is often the case in real life, that one’s ability to truly know someone else is rare, fleeting, and perhaps all but impossible. And this is one of the things that make Skeetah such an amazing character. Not amazing as in “good,” but amazing as in demanding our attention and fostering our astonishment. Skeetah’s refrain during the dogfight “Make them know, make them know make them know”—which is also the subtitle of the chapter—is eludes easy explanation. Whether we can deduce whatever it is that Skeetah wants to make known, we can at least observe the energy and conviction with which Skeetah (using China as a proxy or surrogate) tries to express himself, stake a claim for himself, and establish his subject-position in his particular corner of the storyworld.
Skeetah’s Moral Code?
We cannot confidently or even ethically claim to identify or understand Skeetah’s values or morals any more than Esch can. And as tempting as it may be, we should resist the impulse to judge Skeetah—or any literary character, for that matter—according to our own moral codes and standards. Instead, we might aspire to understand such morally complex characters on their own terms, which in Skeetah’s case is surely difficult. The devotion and the certitude with which Skeetah commits himself to China and her puppies is profound, and we might try to unpack why Skeetah thinks, feels, and behaves this way. What enables or led to Skeetah holding the welfare of China above that of his family or himself? How has China become an anchor in his life—a life that might otherwise be totally adrift? These are fair questions to contemplate.
“‘I ain’t leaving them in the shed.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It ain’t strong enough is why not.’ … ‘This is a house, Skeetah. For humans. Not for dogs.’” (211)
“‘Everything deserve to live,’ Skeetah says. ‘And her and the puppies going to live’ […] ‘Everything need a chance, Esch […] Everything.’” (213-14)
“‘I failed her,’ he said. ‘No you didn’t’[Esch said] ‘Yes’ [he said] ‘You didn’t fail us.’ [Esch said]” (238)
“Not if. When [..] ‘She’s going to come back to me,’ he says. ‘Watch.’” (258)
When Skeetah makes the case that China deserves the same quality of shelter during the hurricane as the rest of the family—“Everything deserve to live…Everything need a chance”—it perhaps gives the impression that Skeetah is being hypocritical. This is a young man who just engaged China in a dogfight two days prior. How could he risk the dog’s life and then argue for the sanctity of that life? But for Skeetah, as we saw in the earlier passage—“We all fight…everybody.”—life itself constitutes a fight and struggle for survival. That every living thing deserves to live and that every living thing merits a chance suggest that according to Skeetah’s worldview the inviolable right to life is also a right to fight for that life, to fight for oneself or on behalf of those you care for and love, rather than being doomed from the outset, with no real chance, no real agency, and no real power. When Skeetah sacrifices China to save Esch and the rest of the family, the significance of that sacrifice need not be measured according to our readerly beliefs about the comparative value of human and animal life. Instead, we might try to acknowledge the gravity of Skeetah’s choice in terms of his beliefs to whatever extent we can identify them. And we can perhaps find a modicum of empathy for him when we see through Esch’s eyes, observe both his pain and the improbability of that pain being alleviated.
Question 1
How does Esch’s pregnancy foster/contribute to a case of dramatic irony?
Question 2
Who finds Daddy’s wedding ring still attached to one of his amputated finger?
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