Marsh Girl Resilience

~ Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens ~

Kya is a fiercely lovable protagonist in her strength, resilience, vulnerability, and thirst for knowledge. This novel is set in two periods, but in the same geographical location – the marshes of the coasts of North Carolina. In 1952, we meet the 6 year old Kya, at the time her mother walks out on the 5 children and her husband, without saying goodbye and without looking back. One by one, Kya’s elder siblings leave their home in the marsh too, even the sibling closest to Kya in age and otherwise, Jodie. Kya is left alone with her father, who spends most of his time drinking and gambling and comes home once in awhile, and has to be treated cautiously because he is violent.

Kya feels intensely, but the novel is one which shows rather than tells. We witness her emotions through the events, such as when one day a letter arrives from her mother, after many months of silence. Since she cannot read it, she leaves it for her father, but he has destroyed it and left again.

Back in the kitchen, she looked in the trash can and found the letter’s ashes, still fringed in blue. With a spoon she dipped them up and laid them on the table, a little pile of black and blue remains. She picked, bit by bit, through the garbage; maybe some words had drifted to the bottom, But there was nothing but traces of cinder clinging to onionskin. […] Even the postmark was gone. Now she’d never know where Ma was. She put the ashes in a little bottle and kept it in her cigar box next to her bed.

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It is only in such episodes that the reader is made aware of how much Kya misses, longs for, loves her mother, and how much the loss of her mother means to her.

Kya begins to fend for herself very young, and manages to eke out a living in the marsh and teach herself most of the necessary life skills, such as cooking. When her father leaves too, and there is no more money, she collects mussels and smokes fish, to trade for a little money for kerosene and grits, and manages to survive. She attends school for a single day, and so for all her childhood, is illiterate. She longs to read, and often sits alone turning pages and pretending to read,

she thumbed through Ma’s beloved books, play-reading the fairy tales. Even at ten she still couldn’t read” p74.

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She finds a note Tate has left for her:

Kya knew the time of the tides in her heart, could find her way home by the stars, knew every feather of an eagle, but even at fourteen, couldn’t read these words

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Tate is the boy (4 years older than her) who used to know her brother Jodie, who teaches her to read. When it details Kya’s growing relationship with Tate, the novel is luminous, like the sun breaking out from behind clouds. Tate is wise and gentle with Kya, understanding and patient, deeply attracted to, admiring of, and protective towards the ‘Marsh Girl’ living all on her own. He is a lovely man, particularly in the way he never underestimates Kya, and yet anticipates her very particular needs and fears so well. He has had tragedy in his own life, losing his mother and sister young, but a close bond with his father, Scupper, who has brought up Tate with good values as well as the gift of appreciating music and poetry.

“Tate remembered his dad’s definition of a man: one who can cry freely, feel poetry and opera in his heart, and do whatever it takes to defend a woman

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There is a wonderful moment in the novel about the miracle of words when Kya reads her first sentence, coached by Tate:

Slowly, she unravelled each word of the sentence. “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much I didn’t know a sentence could be so full”.

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A huge draw of this novel is the wonder and marvel Kya has towards natural life and words.

The novel oscillates between Kya’s childhood and growing up from 1952, to a ‘present day’ of 1969. Here, the body of Chase Andrews is found, and the murder and mystery is being investigated by the town sheriff, Ed, and his deputy, Joe. Naturally, suspicion falls on Kya, not just because of her past association with him, but more so because she is the Marsh Girl, an outsider to most of the community of Barkley Cove. In her lonely life, Kya is helped by Jumpin’ and his wife, Mabel, members of the black community, in a time of tremendous segregation. This black couple help her survive and subsist, offering help and care without trespassing on her pride or compromising her need to self-isolate. There are also other beautiful little instances of kindness, such as the grocery clerk who slips Kya extra dimes and nickels in her change, pitying the little girl who comes in for grits and basic supplies, insisting her mother is fine – although her mother had left – and who still cannot count, and who is desperately short of money – and food. This novel is filled with many moments of beauty, ranging from the tiny to the overwhelming. It is a beauty which is vivid because it is edged with precarity, as beauty so often is, in the natural world. At one point, Kya asks Tate,

“What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that. […] “

“Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters”

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This review has not revealed much of the plotline, because it would be a pity to spoil the story for the reader, but in addition to Kya’s life story, there is also a murder mystery and court case in this novel. As a debut novel, it is not perfect – some of the pacing and timing could be fine tuned a little further, but it is nevertheless a huge achievement, nothing short of a triumph, in fact. Having read Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens, I fervently hope you are writing your next novel!