Where the Crawdads Sing

Kya waits eagerly for Tate’s return for several days but eventually must go about her daily routines to survive. One afternoon, she watches as some white boys harass Jumpin’ by calling him racial slurs and throwing rocks at him. She attacks the boys in retaliation.

The next day, Tate teaches Kya to read using Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. She is astonished by the ability of language to be so full of meaning, but Tate tells her that only some writing is like that. During subsequent days with Tate, she learns that his mother is not around either. At night, she practices her reading and wonders why Tate is spending so much time with a lowly person like her. The biggest payoff for Kya comes when she takes down the family Bible. She discovers the names and birthdates of family members whose names she had forgotten, making this information precious.

Readers learn the history of the Clark family that Kya does not know. Jake Clark (Pa) came from Asheville cotton wealth and met Marie Jacques (Ma) while she was visiting from New Orleans. Jake’s family lost its land during the Depression, so he sold all the remaining family valuables one night in 1932 and used the proceeds to woo and win Marie, who married him against her family’s wishes. They had four children between 1934 and 1940. Jake was a drinker and failed at almost everything he tried, including night classes to get his high school diploma and at a job with Marie’s father.

Jake enlisted to fight in World War II and ended up in France. His cowardice remained hidden by pure luck, and he came home from the war with underserved recognition as a war hero and with a leg wound. When he got back to the United States, he took his wife and children away from New Orleans to live in his family’s old fishing cabin on the marshes by Barkley Cover, North Carolina. He stopped the children from going to school regularly, and fit in perfectly with the uncouth people around him.

Jumpin’ warns Kya that people from social services have been asking about her. She is so afraid that she asks Tate if they can meet elsewhere. His plan is to hide “where the crawdads sing” (111) an expression Kya’s mother used to use that means “where only the wild things are.” They settle on an old cabin.

As summer continues, Kya reads the whole Sand Almanac, and she learns from it “[w]onders and real-life knowledge she never would’ve learned in school. Truths everyone should know” (113) about nature, the wetlands, and the marsh. Tate also exposes her to poetry, something Kya also remembers hearing her mother read.

Things change at this point. As Tate’s senior year in high school starts, the reading lessons slow. Kya invites Tate into her shack. When he is not there, Kya tries on Ma’s dress, mugs for the mirror, and reads novels about love. When Kya’s first period comes, she does not know what it is. An embarrassed Tate gives her some information about it, and she feels a sense of “[s]hame and panic” (119) that he is there to witness it instead of her mother. Mabel explains to Kya how to use sanitary napkins, hugs her, and tells her that getting a period is simply a rite of passage that makes her a woman, capable of making life.

When fall comes, Kya asks Tate how he has the time to visit her so often and if he has a girlfriend. He tells her he likes the beauty of nature in the marsh, her, and the quiet. He does not tell her that he both pities and feels a powerful sense of attraction to her. He shares that he lost his sister and mother in a car accident. He believes their deaths are his fault because they were probably going to Asheville to buy him a birthday gift. Kya tells him it is not his fault. They share a first kiss after that, and Kya becomes Tate’s girlfriend. She feels complete.

Tate is nineteen, and Kya is fifteen at this point. Tate continues teaching Kya reading and math as well as the season changes. For her birthday, he gives her paints for her marsh drawings. He spends so much time out on the marsh with Kya that his father becomes concerned and talks with Tate about the dangers of unplanned pregnancy. Tate feels torn between his physical desire for Kya and his impulse to protect her. They nearly have sex several times, but one of them always holds back. Their relationship is tested when Chase goes away to study biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kya fears he means to abandon her like everyone else, but he promises to return to see her on the Fourth of July.

Deputy Purdue tells Sheriff Jackson that he has heard several rumors that Chase was up to no good on the marsh, implying involvement with either drugs or a woman. The sheriff doubts this information because Chase was a hometown hero and comes from an affluent family. On top of that, Patti Love Andrews, Chase’s mother, wants to share some important information that may help them identify the killer.

On the Fourth of July, Kya waits all day for Tate to show up. She watches a female firefly lure a male of another species by sending the signal for mating and then eating him. She philosophizes that human morality is not a valid tool for observing nature: “judgment had no place out here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in a different light” (142-43). She is heartbroken when Tate doesn’t come.

Kya mourns Tate for three days, then gets out of bed and promises “never to trust or love anyone again” (145). She stays in her house for a month, finally driven out when she runs out of food and supplies. She is curt with Jumpin’, since “[n]eeding people ended in hurt” (145). She finally goes back to the marsh after seeing a Cooper’s hawk she nicknames “Coop.” She concludes that Tate has probably found with a smart, pretty college woman, someone she assumes he would like better than an inferior person like her.

Kya spends her days collecting feathers and learning all she can about the marsh birds. Her collection of marsh life is “a masterpiece of knowledge and beauty that fill[s] every corner of her shack” (146). The work does nothing to assuage her growing loneliness, however. Years pass in this way.