A book. A movie
Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 book by Delia Owens was her first novel. It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list for 2019 AND for 2020. Okay, so Where the Crawdads Sing is not on this week's New York Times Best Sellers List, but it was on that list for more than 168 weeks.
Owens has a BS in zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis. Her studies of African wildlife behavioral ecology have been published in such scientific, peer-reviewed journals as Nature, the Journal of Mammalogy, and Animal Behaviour.
Although most of her field work was done in Africa, it's safe to say that she knows where from she speaks in describing the world of Where the Crawdads Sing. And she describes the saltwater marshes of the North Carolina coast beautifully.
In the Prologue she sets the scene, and the scene is as great a part of the story as the human characters.
"Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows
into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea,
and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace--as though not built to fly...."
"Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in
clammy forests. [....] There are sounds of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is
quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the
rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."
As in all good murder mysteries, Owens gives us a body.
"On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp....
A swamp knows all about death, and doesn't necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly
not a sin. But this morning two boys from the village rode their bikes out to the old
fire tower and ... spotted his denim jacket."
But is it murder or is it suicide? If it is murder, who dunit?
Kya's story begins the first of two timelines in 1952. She is six years old, the youngest of five children.
"The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines
with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet except for the low, slow flap of
the heron's wings lifting from the lagoon. Kya [...] heard the screen door slap. Standing
on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of
worn-out suds."
The sound of that screen door shutting was her mother leaving. In the following weeks, Kya's oldest brother and two sisters left, too. Her brother Jodie, seven years older than she, was the last to leave her alone with their father.
"She knew by the way [Jodie] spoke that Pa had slugged him in the face."
"'Kya, ya be careful, hear. If anybody comes, don't go in the house, they can get ya there.
Run deep in the marsh, hide in the bushes. Always cover yo' tracks; I learned ya how. And
ya can hide from Pa, too.'"
When I first heard about this book, I was skeptical about so much of the story. A six-year-old left in the care of a physically abusive, alcoholic? The local authorities were aware of the situation and they did nothing?
My initial skepticism of that part of the story evaporated pretty quickly when compared with my own experiences.
I worked for Oklahoma's welfare department in the 70s, some twenty-five years after this story starts. I'm sorry to say, things were not much different. We had a sexually abusive family. The abuse was documented by older children who had gotten themselves out of the home. They provided us with photos. We took the photos to the local assistant district attorney and were told he didn't want to look at them. Nothing was done. And that was not the only time families were treated differently by the law. Not because they were "swamp rats," like in North Carolina, but because they were "white trash."
Then there was the question of how a six-year-old could survive without parental care and guidance.
For a period of time after everybody else left, her father stopped drinking so heavily. He taught her about fishing and operating his boat. He had been injured in World War II and received a weekly disability check from which he gave her small amounts of money to buy food and fuel for the boat. But he took to drink again, coming home less and less often until he just never came home again.
The people in the village, for the most part, ignored her or ridiculed her. Over the years, when the authorities took note of Kya, they attempted to literally catch her and put her into "normal" situations like school or a group home. Attempts, she saw as trying to trap her like an animal.
There were a few people in the Barkley Cove community who did befriend her, albeit mostly from a distance -- Jumpin' and Mabel, the African American couple ran the town's equivalent of a convenience store. They treated Kya with kindness and respect and provided what parental guidance she received. Tate, the son of a fisherman, taught her to read and provided her with books from the library. And Chase Andrews, whose daddy owned the local Western Auto store, fed Kya's dream of being accepted in Barkley Cove.
The salt marshes of North Carolina were Kya's natural habitat. Kya was smart. She learned about life, about survival, from those saltwater marshes. Kya mostly did what she could figure out on her own to do. And, like her mother, she was a talented artist, drawing and painting and describing her world.
The second timeline weaves in, around, and through Kya's life. It starts in 1969 and covers the investigation of Chase Andrews' death, Kya's murder trial, and the rest of her life.
The local authorities decided that the manner of death of Chase, a football star and the only child of the closest thing to society in Barkley Cove, must be murder. His status in the community must surely make him immune to suicide, and he was too athletic to just fall from the old fire watch tower. Someone must have lured him up there and pushed him to his death. Chase's clandestine relationship with Kya, the swamp girl, while planning to marry a more acceptable Barkley Cove girl, made Kya the most obvious perpetrator. Her low status, also made her the least able to defend herself -- a slam dunk conviction for the prosecutor and a satisfying solution to the mystery for the townsfolk.
And now it's a movie!
Where the Crawdads Sing, the film is visually stunning. It was filmed in the saltwater marshes of Louisiana, and they are beautiful. Filled with the natural world, neither the book nor the movie mentions dangers from animals native to saltwater marshes -- I'm thinking, mosquitos and ticks and alligators, all of which can cause death either by disease or predation. Both the book and the movie focus on the most dangerous animal in nature. Man.
Where the Crawdads Sing, the movie, deserves very high marks.
Kudos to the Producers led by Reese Witherspoon. They knew what they had and produced a movie faithful to the original story.
To Polly Morgan, Director of Cinematography, for the lush photography.
To Screen Writer Lucy Alibar for fitting the story into the movie's two hour and twenty-five minute time frame.
To Casting Director David Rubin for putting together this wonderful cast.
To the actors including, but not limited to
Jojo Regina as Little Kya Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya
Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt Harris Dickinson
as Jumpin' and Mabel as bad boy Chase
Kya's defense attorney
And certainly, high marks to Director Olivia Newman who knew what she had when the actors gave her good performances.
Both the book and the movie are excellent. Truth be told, you can only read the book. Or you can only see the movie. Each is worth your time on its own. Me? I'm glad I did both.
