Even As We Breathe

“That summer in 1942 when I met her, really met her—before I found myself in a white man’s cage and entangled in the barbed wire that destroyed my father—I left the cage of my home in Cherokee, North Carolina. I left these mountains that both hold and suffocate, and went to work at the pinnacle of luxury and privilege—Asheville’s Grove Park Inn and Resort. It sounded good to tell folks I was raising money for college; but the truth was, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just didn’t want to be doing it there anymore. And if I stayed longer, I would become rooted so deeply that I might as well have been buried.”

Cowney’s comments foreshadow not only the events that will follow, such as his detainment—referred to as “entangled in the barbed wire”—but also the existential dilemmas he faces, as when he discovers that his father shot himself outside of his barracks in wartime France—also entangled in barbed wire. Thus, barbed wire becomes a symbol of the crises and tragedies faced by father and son brought upon them by forces outside their control. His yearning expressed here reveals that Cowney searches for his identity, his direction, and the place where he belongs. His fear of becoming “rooted so deeply” in the reservation if he does not escape foreshadows how he will remain (willingly) at the novel’s end in the land of his ancestors.

“I wonder if the bones of my father are exposed and clean now. I picture a perfect white skeleton, fully intact, framed within the pine coffin—like the one I saw in anatomy class. So perfectly preserved, the bones could teach. I know it sounds odd to speak of my father like that, but you have to understand, I never knew him in the flesh. I never felt the breath of his lungs. His memory is as much a skeleton as his body.”

In this passage, Cowney reflects on some of the “bones” that hold symbolic significance for him. In visualizing his father’s unknown bones as akin to those he once saw in anatomy class, Cowney both gestures to how bones symbolize the connections between the living and the dead in the narrative more generally, and the way in which attempting to mentally reconstruct his father’s skeleton is an attempt at reconstructing his own identity and past.