Blackbird House

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary: “India”

Maya Cooper voices this chapter, which is set in the early 1980s. She recounts her family story, beginning in 1969 when her parents, John (who calls himself Risha) and Naomi fall in love with Blackbird House. Even though it’s tumbling down, and the locals consider it haunted, they deem the blackbirds on the roof a good omen, so they buy it and start a family there. Before arriving, the couple moved around a lot. After Vietnam, Risha experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and struggled to maintain a job. However, when he fell in love with Naomi, they left the city and ended up in Cape Cod. During this time, Risha became a devotee of Maharishi, a Hindi leader known for transcendental meditation.

Both Maya and her older brother, Kalkin (Kal), are born in the summer kitchen, a shed separate from the house. They don’t have a typical upbringing. Their father rarely works, while their mother supports the family through her weaving. This income is insufficient, so the children endure the hardships of poverty: few possessions, little food, tattered clothing, and minimal heat. Angry with their parents, Kal doesn’t let their circumstances deter him. Both kids often visit the Lanahans’ house when invited for dinner and stay there to watch television. Maya claims, “We hated our farm, our parents, our lives” (157) and says they’d do anything to stay away. At 16, Kal vows to leave for Los Angeles, California.

Although Risha grows marijuana, neither Maya nor Kal smokes pot, and they never get into trouble at school. Most kids envy their family’s lack of rules, but Maya and Kal hate it. Kal works multiple jobs to save for his escape to LA, which happens two weeks after his high school graduation. At the news of Kal’s departure, Naomi assumes she did something wrong as a mother, while Risha accepts Kal’s decision as fate. Maya scoffs at her mother for making many mistakes and laughs at her father. She thinks of his “fate” to travel to India and how his dream has stalled at the Cape.

In California, Kal gets work with a movie producer, while in Massachusetts his sister grows bitter and lonely. Attempting to understand her parents, Maya travels to Long Island to meet her Aunt Judith. However, Maya learns nothing, noting only that Judith calls her mother a “bleeding heart.” Desperate, she calls Kal, pleading for him to come home. He tells her to work hard, improve her grades, and apply to college. In anger, Maya calls him selfish. Two weeks later, Kal dies in a car accident. The news breaks Maya, so she retreats to the Lanahans’ house and refuses to go home. They take her in, and when Risha comes for her after a week, Maya pretends to be sleeping. She’s angry that her parents spread Kal’s ashes on the property and doesn’t want to talk with her father. As Risha stands there, she imagines the feeling of drowning.

For the rest of the school year, she stays with the Lanahans and ultimately earns a scholarship to Columbia. The only time she returns home is to tell her parents of her departure. Naomi hugs her and invites her in. Risha is nowhere to be seen. When Maya notes his absence, she mocks him by asking if he went to India. Her mother slaps her, and Maya leaves. In New York City, vestiges of home remain with her, but Maya returns only after her father dies of cancer, sitting where they scattered Kal’s ashes, meditating, and counting blackbirds. Maya offers to take her mother to India, but Naomi declines. She has already scattered Risha’s ashes among the sweet peas. When Maya stands in the field, she realizes that she has come full circle, returning to a place she tried to escape, a place that is part of her, no matter how much she denies it.

Chapter 10 Summary: “The Pear Tree”

This chapter centers on the Stanleys, a Boston family that vacations at Blackbird House in the summer. The townsfolk make no effort to welcome them, since everyone dislikes Louis Stanley for firing Billy Griffon, a local carpenter who began renovations on the house. Although cordial to Meg, Louis’ wife, folks keep their distance, especially avoiding their son, Dean, who “spooks” everyone.

When Dean is a teenager, the Stanleys rehire Billy to convert the old summer kitchen into a space for the boy. The town criticizes Billy’s decision; however, recently divorced and needing money, Billy takes the job as an opportunity to get revenge by overcharging them. After meeting with Meg, however, Billy softens, and though he quotes a high price, it isn’t as outrageous as he’d intended.

On the day his materials are delivered, Billy sees Dean with a bow and arrow in the woods. However, when he blinks, the boy is gone, and Billy gets the chills. In September, Billy begins work. The property is quiet except for the call of the blackbirds; the pear tree sweetens the air. One day, Billy smells tar instead of sweetness and sees that the pears are turning red. He steals two, but instead of eating them (fearing that something bad will happen) he places them on his windowsill until they rot. Increasingly enthralled with the project, Billy does beautiful work. However, Louis Stanley accuses him of using overly expensive materials and refuses to pay the full bill. The town pities Billy for getting burned twice by the same man, but no one knows that Meg sent him the final payment.

Drawn to the farm, Billy visits in the winter, long after his work is done. He stands outside the shed, convincing himself that even though he gets the chills there and he stole two pears, nothing bad will happen. The next summer, Billy takes a job in Maine, so he doesn’t see the Stanleys again until the following year, when Dean is 16. Louis rarely visits now, so it’s just mother and son. People want to hate Dean because of his dad, but they can’t. One day, he stops at the side of the road and picks up a dead rabbit, sobbing openly. In addition, something is unsettling about the boy, as if he sees “something no one else saw. As though he was staring straight into the fire” (181).

Billy buys a puppy as an excuse to walk by the Stanley property, and one evening, he trespasses, allowing his dog to swim in the pond. However, when he hears Meg crying, he bolts. Billy feels as if something’s about to happen, and, when he looks up, he spots a white blackbird but only for an instant. Soon after, the police are called to the farm because Dean ripped the shelving and bed off the wall and barricaded himself in. When the policeman, Cody Maguire, calls for help, Meg orders him off the property. Cody obliges but is visibly shaken from the encounter.

Thereafter, Billy drives by regularly. On one of these excursions, Billy’s dog starts barking, and when Billy blinks, he sees Dean, who has hanged himself from the pear tree with a belt. Feathers litter the ground beneath the boy. Unable to leave the sight for Meg to find, Billy cuts the boy down. Walking to the house, he notes the sweet peas and the catbird calling and knows he’ll never forget. When Meg tells him to get rid of the pear tree, he doesn’t argue. He waits until all the leaves and fruit have fallen and then chops it down.

Chapters 9-10 Analysis

The blackbird motif continues to signify not just sorrow but the strength necessary to overcome it. When the Coopers first see the house, blackbirds are perched on the roof, chattering: “Twenty-four blackbirds in a row on the roof of the house, one for every hour of every day. One of the birds appeared to be white, and surely that must be a sign of good fortune to come” (152). Maya’s mother, Naomi, is certain that the birds are a positive omen, and this fortuitous sight factors into their purchasing the house. Maya disagrees with her mother and views the birds as ominous. When she recalls that day, Naomi describes the sound, in an unusual simile, as “like a bruise that was healing, nothing put peace and harmony” (151). This unusual simile spotlights a healing bruise as positive. Typically, a lesion signifies pain and damage, and during the healing process, the mark changes colors and is ugly to behold. Nevertheless, Naomi describes this transformation as peaceful. The juxtaposition of Naomi’s statement with that of the typical view of bruises highlights that the blackbirds represent not only sorrow or tragedy but also resilience, again underscoring the theme of Resilience Resulting From Adversity. To find peace and solace in the aftermath of an injury is equivalent to persevering and finding the silver lining amid tragedy. In this way, the birds are harbingers of pain as well the path through pain.

The blackbirds are also chattering on the day that Billy begins renovating the summer kitchen in “The Pear Tree,” and even though he’s unaware of it, they signal tragedy on the horizon. One evening, while walking the property, Billy hears Meg crying: “The dog was barking, and when Billy looked up he saw a big white bird in the old oak tree. He blinked, and then all he saw was a cloud” (182). The bird seems ghostly, and Billy doesn’t know whether it’s real. However, the white blackbird continues to signal sorrow, much like it did for Coral Hadley many years earlier. The tragedy that unfolds is Dean’s death by suicide, and when Billy finds the boy hanging from the tree, the ground beneath him is covered in feathers. The suggestion that the blackbird was there indicates that life must go on.

Strength stemming from trauma is evident not just in the motif of the blackbird but also in Kal in the chapter named “India.” Both Maya and her brother are bitter about their parents’ neglect and their impoverished life:

Kalkin seemed harder with every year, as though he had a shell around him, one nothing could penetrate. The cold no longer affected him. He never wore a winter coat. He refused to bother with a hat or an umbrella. He was invincible, that was Kalkin, and he would manage to outwit our parents someday (156).

Kal fights against his parents in ways that he can: working multiple jobs, getting good grades, and leaving. These acts are his “shell,” which provides resilience against poverty. His enduring the cold weather symbolizes this perseverance.

Overall, the novel’s structure, specifically the shifting point-of-view of these chapters, has the effect of zooming in and out on trauma and sorrow, as well as highlighting The Power of Place in Shaping Lives as a theme. The first-person perspective in “India” conveys Maya’s bitterness and suffering and how she eventually comes to terms with her upbringing. In fact, her mother’s view of the blackbird song sounding like a bruise healing mirrors Maya’s personal journey: She needs to leave Blackbird House and her family to heal and to recognize that this place has shaped her identity. After her father’s death, she reflects, “I had gone in a circle, trying to escape myself” (172). The line of a circle is perpetually connected, with no exit point, so when Maya notes that she’s “trying” to leave, she understands that separating herself from this place is impossible. When the narrative shifts to the broader third-person omniscient perspective in “The Pear Tree,” the impact of place and the sorrow it brings zooms back out, extending beyond just the house’s inhabitants and into the community. Although it’s not Billy’s house or his family, the Stanley’s tragedy significantly impacts him. He develops an attachment to the place and to Meg, who treats him well. This broader perspective illustrates that one person’s trauma isn’t theirs alone and that a place can impact many within its radius.