A Land Remembered

Kookaben is the name 12-year-old Sol invents to market baby buzzards as expensive exotic pets to unsuspecting wealthy tourists in Palm Beach. In his sales pitch, Sol says, “They’re kookabens brought over from Cuba on a schooner. They’ll turn green and red when they grow up, and they’ll sing just like them little yellow birds in the shop” (322). Impressed by Sol’s entrepreneurial spirit but also somewhat mortified by his dishonesty, Zech says, “What you reckon them folks will do when they get back home and them things turn black and gets so big they flap right off, carrying cage and all?” (322). On first glance, the scene is a humorous aside reflecting Sol’s precociousness and intelligence. But as the character matures into a cold and calculating capitalist, the ways in which the kookabens signify Sol himself become clear. Like the baby buzzards, Sol is destined to grow up into a creature who doesn’t think twice about picking apart others’ ruined livelihoods for his own gain. This attitude emerges most clearly when Sol greedily buys up the property ruined by the 1926 Miami Hurricane for pennies on the dollar.

When Zech is six years old, he and Tobias come across a group of wild Carolina parakeets, described as “a foot long and six inches tall, with long pointed tails and yellow heads that became rich orange around their bills” (494). When Zech says, “They’re too purty to kill” (29), Tobias tells a horrific story about man’s cruelty to the birds: “[W]hen them men found out that if you kill one Carolina, then the others will keep coming back to the dead, they hunted them and shot every one in the county. Wiped them out clean” (29). The story reflects the pointless brutality and disharmony with which man engages with nature, even when it’s on display in its most beautiful and poignant form, like the parakeets.