55 pages • 1 hour read
Karen HesseA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Leonora listens to Mr. Field’s stories about his life while she cleans his house. She offers to take him outside so he can see better to paint, even though she doesn’t like “being seen with white folks” (100), but Mr. Field tells her that he’d rather sit and remember what he’s seen before and think about it. Leonora decides that she has a lot of seeing to do before she can sit and think about it as well.
Constable Johnson complains that he has to protect 200 Black men—both from the Klan and from themselves—who have moved to Vermont to build a dam. Harvey, on the other hand, becomes more involved in the Klan’s illegal activities. In a ham-fisted gesture to support the Prohibition, he breaks into a hotel and smashes all the liquor bottles and then is forced to pay for them. This leads to another argument with Viola, who asks him if he thinks he will “save the world from the / evils of drink / by raiding the place and smashing a few bottles?” (102). In a humorous aside, Harvey becomes concerned about whether his head is small, even though it is “locust-stump” sized.
Reynard muses that the Klan has gotten its fingers into every aspect of Vermont life—schools, factories, homes, and stores—and if the town doesn’t begin to “mend the rents soon, / we’ll fall to pieces” (103). Later, the Klan sends him a threatening letter, warning him to be careful what he prints, or he may not print or say anything ever again. Rather than heed the warning, Reynard optimistically pens that sensible Vermonters will soon recognize the Klan as a lawless hate-group and ask them to “pack up their poison / and go” (108).
On the farm, Sara milks the cow and listens to Esther sing, feeling grateful for both. However, that night someone kills Sara’s dog, Jerry, who watches over Esther. Johnny comments that if a dog dies at night, the Klan is blamed in the morning. Despite the growing threats against her, Sara continues to focus on Esther and her farm. She sews a goblin costume for Esther for Halloween, and Esther and Leonora take part in the Halloween carnival. Later, Sara again expresses her appreciation of Ira, who allows Esther to take part in Halloween and only wants to keep his child happy.
Johnny’s mother sends a letter to Harvey, stating that she caught Johnny with a schoolgirl. She compares Johnny to a “lost lamb” and asks Harvey to bring the matter to the Klan so they can lead Johnny back to God’s pastures. However, when Harvey brings Johnny’s transgressions to the attention of the Klan, they ban Johnny from the group, and Harvey questions what kind of man, especially a preacher, would force himself on a child. Johnny, devastated by the Klan’s condemnation of him, decides to redeem himself both with the Klan and his God.
At the Klan meeting, members demand that the Sutters and Hirsches be run out of town. The antisemitic group is particularly angry with the Hirsches because they believe Ira and Esther are staining the reputation of Sara, a white Christian woman, by living with her. Harvey, despite his misgivings about hurting a fellow townsperson, gives Merlin a bottle of poison from his store to pour into the Sutters’ well. Merlin also has misgivings and ultimately refuses to poison the well. Harvey warns him that the Klan will come after him for refusing, so Merlin leaves town in fear for his life. Harvey then decides that he will take on the “man’s job” of poisoning the well, but he also cannot bring himself to complete the task. When he comes home, he is too ashamed to sleep in the same bed as Viola.
That night, someone (later revealed to be Johnny) shoots Ira through the keyhole of the front door as he sits at the table with Esther on his lap. The bullet misses Esther only because she leans forward to read the crossword puzzle. Leaving Esther with her father on the floor, Sara runs to Iris’s restaurant and calls Dr. Flitt, who discovers that when Ira was shot, the bullet went through his arm, across his chest, and through his other arm, landing in a water bucket. When Flitt asks who could do such a thing, Sara replies “klan” (119). Ira is taken to the hospital, and that night as she sleeps, Esther clings to Sara’s nightgown fearfully.
The next morning, Esther relates that Sara is afraid to go outside, so Esther helps her to feed the animals, and they both talk to Constable Johnson about the shooting. Ira is resting comfortably in the hospital, but Johnson worries about Esther’s wellbeing after she witnessed her father getting shot. He also wonders how a person could sleep after shooting at a father and young child. He calls for help in solving the case, and a Boston detective comes to help. The detective discovers the threatening letters sent to Ira, and he determines that Merlin, who has been missing since the shooting, was the shooter. Constable Johnson can believe that Merlin wrote the threatening letters to Ira, but he can’t believe Merlin is capable of murder.
Reynard takes a public stand against the Klan and states that they must go. Leonora also recognizes that the Klan has gone too far when they burn down the Great Bethel African church in Chicago. She tells her father that with all the church burnings and the shooting here in town, the Klan is giving white people a bad name. They laugh until they cry from grief, the first time they’ve been close since Leonora’s mother died.
Viola takes action by selling all of Harvey’s records, donating the money to a home for the elderly. She tells Harvey she is trying to buy back his good name.
Leonora undergoes a dramatic shift in this act, realizing that her previous viewpoint regarding white people could be just as biased as the racism that surrounds her in the town. During her visit with Mr. Field, she remarks that “the more time i spend with mr. field / the more i learn” (99). Mr. Field shares with Leonora the hard details of his long life: He never completed school beyond 6th grade because he had to work, and he joined the Union in the Civil War when he was young because he had strong feelings against slavery. During the war, he was imprisoned in Andersonville prison, the most notorious and deadly military prison of its time. However, his experiences have not made him bitter; he “sits and thinks about it a while. / till he figures it out” (99). Observing Mr. Fields, Leonora decides she should think longer about what she observes rather than react immediately. Leonora decides that, like Mr. Field, she needs to “see” more before she can sit down and rest with the memories of what she sees.
In other words, Leonora recognizes that she has been making decisions about people without the experience she needs to make those judgments, and she reacts instantly rather than thinking things through. This epiphany leads her to offer to take Mr. Field outside to paint, even though she says that she “never do like being seen with white folks” (100). She recognizes that Mr. Field is different, and if he is different, then perhaps other white folks are, too. This understanding leads her to have compassion for the other groups persecuted by the Klan, such as immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. Once she reaches this point, she can let go of most of her anger and resentment, so that even when she feels “that old rope of dread / dragging up the ridge of my spine” (125) at the news of the Klan burning down the Great Bethel African Church, she is able to make a small joke that the Klan is “just giving white folks a bad / name” (126), a statement that causes her father to laugh, then cry, and allows father and daughter to heal the gulf between them.
Tension builds in this Act, leading to the climactic moment when Ira is shot. Sara foreshadows the danger that Esther will be placed in when she thinks of “how silent my world would be / without esther” (104). Sara also notes soon afterwards that the President’s young son died “the same year that brought me esther” (109), yet another reference to death in connection to Esther. Leave-taking is mentioned multiple times in reference to Esther; when the dog Jerry dies, Esther says that he “went away to have the long sleep” (105). She also talks of leaving “the fresh air of sara chickering the first time,” (105) and how, without Jerry, “i did have to tell my feet to make one step / and one step more / my feet did feel so lonely” (106). The last time Esther was this lonely, she attempted to get on the “heaven train” to see her mother, and her despondency at the death of her friend and focus on leave-takings appear (misleadingly) to be foreshadowing her own death.
Harvey and Viola’s exchanges grow more heated, particularly after Harvey gets involved in raiding and smashing up a hotel in town. When Harvey admits to Viola that it felt good to destroy the liquor bottles, she sarcastically asks him “did it feel $400 good, harv?” (102). Harvey has no reply, but he does “run his hand over the bulge of his belly / beneath the straining vest” (102); this allusion to his weight symbolizes the heaviness of his conscience, and after he is unable to poison the Sutters’ well, he admits, “i never thought it’d come to / this. thought i’d be helping the law, / not breaking it” (120). As Harvey grows more distant from Viola and takes part in secret Klan dealings, he speaks alone in the next few poems. He makes no judgments against Johnny initially when he receives the letter from Johnny’s mother, but immediately after that poem, he states “imagine a grown man / a preacher / forcing himself on a child” (113). His disillusionment with the Klan and its members peaks when he asks Merlin to poison the Sutters’ well; although he tells Merlin that the poison won’t kill the Sutters, he admits that it will make them “pretty sick,” and Merlin notices that Harvey “didn’t look too happy about any of it” (115). His concern with the size of his head also reveals that the townspeople may be turning against him, as he wonders aloud to Viola if his head is small, a reference to small-mindedness. His final break with the Klan occurs, however, when after failing to poison the Sutters’ well, he finds that he is too ashamed to share Viola’s bed. The next poem features the couple’s voices together again, and Hesse describes him as a lumbering mule, an animal noted for its stubbornness but also for its loyalty.
The Klan’s violence finally forces other characters to take a public stand against it. Merlin is uncomfortable with the Klan’s rhetoric against the Hirsches, because although the Klan states that the Hirsches “stained a pure / christian woman / by mixing their jew selves / up with her,” Merlin knows that “the shoe man and his kid, they’re just living there” (115). This realization of the Klan’s fallibility—and its racism—shatters Merlin’s belief in the Klan, causing him to defy them and flee town.
Reynard also progresses in his stance against the Klan. He begins with a warning to the town that they need to mend the rents that the Klan has caused in the town, recognizing that his insistence on “neutrality” caused him to ignore how quickly they could “work their fingers into the fabric of the state” (103). Even after a retaliatory letter from the Klan threatens his life, he optimistically states that the same people who welcomed the Klan will soon ask them to leave. However, it is only after the shooting of Ira that Reynard writes a blistering rebuttal:
persecution is not american.
it is not american to give the power of life and death
to a secret organization.
it is not american to have our citizens judged by
an invisible jury.
it is not american to have bands of night riders
apply the punishments of medieval europe to
freeborn men.
the ku klux klan must go (125).
This poem is significant in many respects. As the owner and editor of the newspaper, Reynard is the public voice of the town. Although the murder attempt is the climax of the novel, this poem is the pivotal to the narrative: From this point on, the townspeople are galvanized against the Klan, and the poem aptly points out the difference between the true justice of America through the courts of law, and the unsanctioned vigilante justice of a racist hate group. The poem employs the use of anaphora, in which a phrase or word is repeated at the beginning of consecutive lines. The repetition of the phrase “it is not american” (125) produces a rhythm similar to a thundering public speech, emphasizing what is and what is not American. The final line, set apart from the rest of the poem, reads like a final judgment. Reynard’s stand is now unequivocal.
Esther becomes less oblivious to surrounding danger when her father is shot. Throughout the novel, she uses childlike euphemisms for death: Her mother takes the “train to heaven” (58), the kittens go “far away,” the young man shot in New York “did sleep so still” (17), Bossie the cow has “the living coming out of her” and Jerry the dog goes away for the “long sleep.” However, when her father is shot, she describes accurately that “he has the bad kind of breathings / and all the blood kept / rushing out of my daddy” (117). She sleeps that night fearfully clinging to Sara. The next day, she states that Sara was too afraid to go outside, but the reader might discern that Sara knows Esther needs a distraction, and Sara pretends to be afraid to entice Esther outside to do chores. Esther’s terror is evident; she stays home from school, and she is still dressed in her night clothes when Sara is working outside. Sara’s ploy works, and Esther is happy to see Sara smiling and “chasings off of her afraid / like a big horse, rolling off the itchings” (123).
Johnson is one of the few characters who does not undergo a dramatic change in this Act. He reveals his racism when he complains about having to protect the Black men working at the dam from the Klan, and he even more tellingly states that he will also have to protect them from themselves. Johnson does, at least, show concern for Esther’s mental wellbeing after the shooting, as well as indignation that the shooter could rest after such a heinous act. When he calls in outside help in the form of a detective from Boston, he says that all the town’s dirty secrets are uncovered; even if he is not outright complicit in hiding those secrets, his remarks shows he is at least uninterested in uncovering them during the normal course of his duties. Hiring outside help to solve the crime permits Johnson to avoid pointing the finger at any Klansmen, allowing him to retain his self-protective neutrality.”
By Karen Hesse