Blackbird House

“And the next spring, when May arrived and the leaves were budding in shades of yellow and green, Coral realized that the blackbird had returned. It was some time before she recognized it, because the bird had turned entirely white. It sat in a branch of the big oak, where it could have easily been mistaken for a wisp of a cloud. It looked like something Coral could blink away, but it wouldn’t disappear. First the bird was on her roof, then it was at her window, and then, one morning, the white blackbird tapped at the door, and that was how she knew they were gone.”

This moment epitomizes the motif of the blackbird representing sorrow. As the bird gets progressively closer, Coral must confront the reality that her husband and sons died. This confrontation is necessary for her to mourn and move on, which is why the bird won’t disappear. As a result, this passage also develops the theme of Resilience Resulting From Adversity.

“The hill burned to cinders; it was indeed a blackbird’s hill, black as night, black as the look in Ruth’s eyes, black as the future that was assuredly hers.”

Following the fire that destroys Ruth’s home, this series of similes compares the appearance of the scorched hill to all things black: night, Ruth’s eyes, and the future. Each comparison is progressively more complex. Night is often associated with darkness on a literal level, like the color of Ruth’s eyes. However, the last simile implies that the blackness represents doom and sorrow: To say that her future is black is ominous and threatening, as if a storm or difficulties lie on the horizon. However, what awaits Ruth is a loving life with Lysander, suggesting that what first appears terrible (blackness) may become something wonderful (love).

“He liked to walk in the woods, and sometimes he imagined he would be better off if he just lay down between the logs and moss and stayed there, forevermore.”

This moment describes Lysander’s wanderings near his farm after his fishing accident, and his longing to stay there forever suggests a desire to no longer live. Although this moment is specific to Lysander, both Ruth and Vincent have already shown similar emotions of emptiness and hopelessness on the property.

“She’d went back to what she’d always known, and that was fire.”

Ruth, in her grief over Lysander’s death, lugs all their possessions to the pond’s edge and sets them ablaze in a bonfire. Her experience with fire begins with her home on Blackbird Hill burning but also extends to Lysander given that he’s a blacksmith. Thus, although the bonfire symbolizes the tragedy she has endured, it also represents the love she has felt. In this way, the fire is paradoxical, both sorrowful and joyful at the same time.

“The fire was blue at first; then, in a wink, it turned red. When I saw that color, it went through my heart. I had red hair, like my sister, and so I was called Garnet. Worth less than a ruby, but red all the same. Now I wondered if people whispered things about me when I walked into town; I wondered what they said when my back was turned. As I stood there, holding my sister, watching nearly everything we owned burn, I realized I would have to be careful about who I became.”

Garnet is watching her mother’s bonfire burn all their possessions and notices the red flames, even though, when hot, fire is usually blue. Considering her name, her appearance, and the town’s belief that red is a sign of witchcraft, Garnet fears being judged as a witch. Even though she doesn’t recognize her strength until later in the novel, hints of it appear here, particularly in her belief that she can control her identity.

“Now all she felt was emptiness, vast as the open sea. She carried him on a path in between the dying whales until she reached the low-water mark, where the reeds were as tall as bulrushes. The salt was so thick it looked like a crust of ice. She stood there in the moonlight, under the pink clouds, watching as the sun began to rise, breaking open the world into bands of yellow and blue, of daylight once more, inevitable daylight in a world in which there didn’t seem to be any choices. Only instinct, the sort of action a desperate woman might take on a morning such as this.”

Lucinda Parker is on a beach full of dying whales just before sunset, and she’s about to abandon her baby there. The characterization of Lucinda here is reminiscent of Vincent Hadley in Chapter 1: She feels emptiness as a result of trauma. Like Vincent doing whatever it takes to return home, Lucinda is doing what desperation dictates: preparing to abandon her baby. Furthermore, this passage highlights the lack of options women had in the mid-1800s. Her baby resulted from rape, and she alone bears the consequences. Thus, she’s “desperate” and capable only of doing the one thing her gut tells her to do.

“This bay of inevitability and of sorrow, of mistakes made and mistakes about to unfold, of all that had been lost in a minute or in a lifetime.”

This describes the beach and bay where blackfish (whales) wash ashore in droves and are left to die. It’s also the site where Lucinda plans to abandon her baby, and where Larkin, who has experienced his own tragedies, meets her for the first time. The bay symbolizes life, and the fact that what happens is inevitable suggests that humans can control very little.

“One day everything was the same, the same sky and sea and beach, and the next day, it was another world entirely.”

Violet’s thoughts right before she meets Ewan Perkins for the first time indicate her belief in fate and that some things are entirely out of a person’s control. However, her thoughts also correlate with her desire to be someone else in a different world: beautiful and loved. In addition, her thoughts foreshadow how she allows herself to believe that she’s a different person with Ewan and that they’ve created another world together. Violet lives with this idea until she realizes that Ewan isn’t in love with her, and this new self ultimately dies in a dream she has.

“I wasn’t afraid. I had read the Odyssey and I knew there was no way to escape your own fate. I knew that every monster had a beating heart, even those with scales, even those with flame-hot breath that could light the eelgrass on fire, even those who faces were too terrible to see.”

Violet explains how she went to the beach to collect clams, even though a sea monster is supposedly on the loose. Her fatalistic belief, from reading ancient texts, that one can’t escape one’s fate is literal in the moment: If the sea monster kills her, so be it, because she can’t avoid it. In addition, this belief foreshadows her undoing, which begins on this day when she meets the professor. Another way her belief provides foreshadowing is that she notes that monsters are living things (with a beating heart), and the last description she provides is how she views herself with her birthmark: as a person with a face “too terrible to see.” Ultimately, she becomes the monster: She fabricates evidence and pushes her sister into the pond because she knows that Huley can’t swim.

“While they had potato salad, George thought about telling him the truth—that George wasn’t his father, that his real father had been a better man, a smarter man, a professor, as a matter of fact—but if George West was anything, he was honest, honest to a fault. To say Lion wasn’t his son felt like a lie.”

George and Lion are hunting, and George considers telling the boy about his biological father. This passage reveals not only George’s honest and genuine character but also the kind of relationship he has with his son. His love and care for the boy over the years makes him much more worthy of the title of father than someone who isn’t even aware of Lion’s existence. In addition, his choice to not tell his son this fact is a decision of love, because the truth would only hurt him.

“George West put on his suit, the one he wore to funerals.”

George prepares to send his eldest son, Lion, off to Harvard. This moment is an instance of foreshadowing because Lion dies prematurely and with no family nearby. In addition, this moment foreshadows the metaphorical death of Violet’s tether to her son: Once he leaves for Harvard, he never returns home.

“A person thought he was headed north, only to have the ice melt away. He thought it was daylight, only to realize what he was seeing was the trajectory of stars in the sky.”

This passage suggests that circumstances are outside of Lion West Jr.’s control. He’s helping liberate camps during World War II, but he hadn’t planned to fall in love with the German guide, Dorey, and he couldn’t stop himself from marrying her. Ice melting when going to colder climates and expecting daylight but only seeing stars are both examples of the opposite of what’s expected, emphasizing that a person can’t control fate.

“The idea of the sort of horror that could exist erased everything he’d known before […] He was attracted to order in a world where there was none, and now he felt empty. When the wind came up, it cut through him in some strange way that made him feel as though he were only half a person.”

Like his father, Lion Jr. is smart and successful and used to achieving whatever he sets his mind to. As a mathematician and future professor, he solves problems. However, what he sees in the aftermath of Hitler’s camps leaves him feeling “empty”: The atrocities can’t be erased in the way his innocence has been. This realization makes Lion understand how much he doesn’t know or understand, which is why he feels like half a person. Feeling so helpless is unknown territory for him.

“Violet had the need to be alone. To get away from this woman who knew how to deal with ashes, stones, bees, pears, lye, distrust.”

When Lion Jr. and Dorey visit Violet, Dorey handles all the elder woman’s traps with ease. Violet isn’t used to someone as strong and resilient as she is. Dorey’s ability to deal with any obstacle results from the strength and foresight she gained through past trauma and adversity.

“Grace watched Jamie disappear into the blue of the field and felt a catch in her throat. Love, she presumed. A moment of realizing exactly how lucky she was, of being grateful that she was not Coral Hadley, that her son was not out on the ocean, but was instead traipsing through the snowy reaches of their own familiar acreage.”

Grace Farrell watches her son walk to the neighbor’s house. The catch in her throat and her gratitude for his safety are ironic and represent an instance of foreshadowing. The expectation is that nothing can happen to Jamie, but when he gets to the Brooks’ house, the horror he encounters strips him of all innocence. Although he isn’t physically harmed, he can’t unsee what he sees or undo what has happened. The feeling in Grace’s throat isn’t love but fear and the instinctual knowledge that something bad is about to happen.

“When she thought back to this night, she wouldn’t even remember it had been snowing, she’d only remember the look on her husband’s face, the concentration she loved, the man she could turn to, even on a night as cold as this.”

After Grace returns home, she tells Jim the lie that Hal has left Rosalyn. The cold night refers not just to the weather but also to the murder. Jim’s claim that Hal’s disappearance isn’t their business is a sign of his tacit understanding to keep quiet and ask nothing. Thus, although she has told Jim nothing, she has told him everything, and in his silence, he’s providing support. Grace has the love of her husband in every way that Rosalyn didn’t.

“My brother was the only person I had loved in this world. I never got to tell him, but I think he knew. All the same, my love was like an anchor, too heavy to bear.”

In this moment, Maya learns of her brother’s death. They endure so much together that a heaviness, like an anchor, characterizes their relationship. The simile relates not only to the weight of her grief but also to the burden of being like him. Kal escapes their life and advises Maya to do the same, which is a difficult and heavy task.

“I’d see homeless men on the street and think they were my father, come to track me down. He never did. He didn’t believe in things like that. He believed every person had his own path, and that it was our journey in this lifetime to discover the meaning of our own destiny.”

In New York City, Maya often mistook men for her father. This represents her desire for him to find her, and her need for parental love, even now that she’s on her own. Additionally, this passage reflects Maya’s journey. She must discover her own destiny and identity. Even though she and Kal often make fun of their father, his beliefs have a wisdom that she’s starting to understand. She needs to leave home to understand what he meant.

“Dean Stanley was a good-looking kid, lanky and lean, almost a man, but when you pulled up beside him as he went on his way, there was something off-putting in his expression. It was as though he was looking at something no one else saw. As though he was staring straight into the fire.”

This characterization of Dean Stanley’s appearance indicates that although he’s physically attractive, he exudes an air of being haunted by something. In addition, this description has a hint of magical realism, connoting that Dean sees something otherworldly, something no one else can see. The phrase “staring straight into the fire” suggests that he’s visualizing Hell. Therefore, although Dean is a “good-looking kid,” something about him is ominous and terrifying.

“The words would tumble out of his mouth one after another, like stones. The words would sink down so far, they would never come back, down into the well, drowning them both before he was done.”

When Billy sees that Dean hanged himself, his first thought is about how to tell Meg that her son has died by suicide. The simile describing the weight of his words reveals the impact of Dean’s death on Billy and the heaviness of the news being beyond his control. In addition, once he tells Meg, he can’t turn back. He can’t unsay what he has said or undo what has occurred. He compares uttering the words to a force pulling them both underwater, suggesting that neither of them could ever recover from Dean’s death.

“Katherine and Sam bought their summer house because they were drowning, and this was the first solid ground they thought they might be able to hold on to.”

This first sentence of the chapter brings the narrative full circle. The couple isn’t literally drowning but figuratively trying to survive the harrowing experience of their six-year-old daughter’s being hospitalized for leukemia. As they buy the house, the reference to drowning alludes to the farm’s first owners, the Hadleys, who bought the land to get away from the sea, but John and Isaac then drowned in a storm on a final excursion out to sea. The theme of The Power of Place in Shaping Lives is evident as well, because both families (and all the intervening ones) are drawn to this place and are interconnected by their love for it, even if generations apart.

“Katherine went directly upstairs, where the rooms were hot and close. She had the feeling that love was an anchor, that it could save you when you were drowning, that all you had to do was hold tight.”

Bookending the chapter is another reference to drowning, but this time the metaphor of an anchor offers the option of rescue. Love is the anchor that can keep the sorrow, the difficulties, the adversities at bay, if a person can hold onto it. In this moment, Katherine realizes that her children need her love just as much as she needs theirs. Even though she loves Walker, she recognizes (with Emma’s help) that she hasn’t been showing her love to her son. He’s slowly drowning in loneliness, and by lying next to him, she’s his anchor.

“She was beginning to realize, if she didn’t actually like her aloneness, she was at least comforted by it. She should be grateful; she knew, she knew. She should be thrilled just to be alive. So why was it she preferred to expect nothing? Why was it she felt she’d already ruined everything? As though her life had somehow ended? There were times when she felt so insubstantial it was almost as though people could walk right through her.”

Emma’s perception of herself while living in Boston, before she returns to Blackbird House, reveals that she feels alone and “insubstantial,” as if she were a ghost. Ironically, she survived leukemia but doesn’t feel alive. This contrasts her return to Blackbird House, when she feels nostalgic and embraces magical moments like capturing fireflies. This change underscores the farm’s impact on her, emphasizing the theme of The Power of Place in Shaping Lives.