51 pages • 1 hour read
Crystal Smith PaulDid You Hear About Kitty Karr?
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Gold Ball Earrings
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of racism, rape, and sexual assault.
The gold ball earrings from Hazel’s grandmother are a symbolic nod to the book’s theme of The Weight of Family Legacy. For Hazel, “The earrings were her only physical connection to her lineage, her only inheritance—her only offering of wealth to any offspring” (29). At the same time, the earrings are a reminder of Hazel’s traumatic family legacy. Hazel’s rape is not the first in the family, as evidenced by Hazel’s own blue-gray eyes, which the book says are “proof of forced miscegenation generations before” (29). While the earrings are a symbol of family pride, they are also a symbol of family pain. Violence against Black women is a fundamental part of Hazel’s family legacy. The fact that the earrings end up going from Hazel to Kitty to Elise—herself a survivor of police brutality and racism—underscores this legacy.
Although they may be symbolic of a fraught family legacy, the earrings are still a valuable part of Hazel’s and, later, Kitty’s identity. After Kitty and Nathan wed, Nathan forces Kitty to replace the gold ball earrings with fancier earrings he has purchased. In this moment, Nathan establishes his dominance—one might even say his ownership as her husband—over Kitty. Kitty realizes that she is giving away a part of her identity when she makes the swap: “Trading up felt disloyal, but she let him replace the earrings with the new jeweled clusters, as if she needed another reminder that the past was truly gone” (289). Giving up the earrings becomes a part of surrendering her Black identity.
Blair House
Blair House represents the fight against systemic racism. As Lucy explains, “We siphoned donations from rich people to send to the [civil rights] movement” (383). The women of Blair House also try to sway public actions and viewpoints toward this end. For example, they convince Henry Polk to donate automobiles to the Montgomery bus boycott. Further, within the book, Blair House serves as an instrument to allude to multiple real-world moments from the civil rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the attack on the home of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Blair House is also a symbol of The Implications of Intersectionality and the dual dangers Kitty and the Blair House women face being both Black and women. The mission of the house itself is described thusly: “to champion the rights of Negro women, whose burdens were doubled, being Negro and female” (210). Again and again, the women of Blair House are reminded of the dual risk of their existence—as seen, for example, in Nina’s murder and Emma’s surgery. By bringing these women together, Blair House represents their duality and the danger that it creates.
Hanes Austen
Hanes Austen is the pen name that Kitty uses to shop around her screenplay Down South: “Hanes Austen went on to have an illustrious career at Telescope. He never set foot on the lot, but his rudeness (or quirkiness, depending on who you talked to) was excused because rumor said he was a descendant of the famous novelist, Jane” (329). The choice of pen name is a nod to the book’s argument regarding intersectionality: Kitty opts for a pen name of someone male and white to get her work seen and acknowledged since a white man’s words are more valuable or respected than a Black woman’s words. Kitty must resort to this tactic to win over even Nathan, her own husband, finally convincing him to put out a movie that isn’t “fluff” and is rooted in reality. This comes after Kitty has tried repeatedly, as herself, not Hanes, to get Nathan to engage with racial topics without success.
