How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I could see plainly then that it was a heavy-bodied peacock shuffling from side to side on a low branch. Apparently the creature was too dull-witted or terrorized to escape, or possibly already injured. The children pursued it ferociously, jumping up and pulling at its long tail feather, ready to tear it to pieces. The boy with the stick hit hard against the belly and they all shrieked. He hit it again. I couldn't see the stick but I heard the sickening whack when it made contact.
I looked away. I'd arrived in Grace, arrived at that moment in my life, without knowing how to make the kind of choice that was called for here. I'm not the moral guardian in my family. Nobody, not my father, no one had jumped in when I was getting whacked by life, and on the meanest level of instinct, I felt I had no favors to return. Especially to a bird. It was Hallie's end of my conscience that kept pinching me as I walked.[...]
"Stop it!" I yelled. My heart was thumping. "You're killing that bird!"
The boy froze like a rabbit in headlights. The other kids, down on their knees, stared too. [...] When I was ten I'd demolished a piñata exactly like this one[.] (2.28-32)
Hello, Codi's trauma. Codi's got a funny relationship to violence—and to her own morality. Notice how she imagines that Hallie is actually the one responsible for any good action she does. Also notice that Codi is super suspicious of Grace: she's convinced this is the type of town where children in large groups maim animals for fun. This scene foreshadows the fact that it's actually the kind of town that loves to have parties and eat candy.
Quote #2
Curty lay his hypnotized rooster on the block and held its feet, keeping the rest of his body as far away as possible. It never regained consciousness. Emelina swung the axe over her shoulder and brought it down on the mark. The pink, muscular neck slipped out of the collar of feathers as if the two parts had been separately made. The boys hooted and chased after the body as it thrashed across the dirt. But I was fascinated by the head: the mouth opened and closed, silently, because the vocal cords were in the part that had been disconnected.
[...]
I can't believe you're watching this," she said when both boys were settled down to plucking feathers. [...] "You used to have a hissy fit when we'd go over to Abuelita's and she'd be killing chickens," Emelina said. "Remember? Even when we were big, twelve or thirteen."
"No, that was Hallie. She's the one that had such a soft heart. We've always been real different that way." (4.25-30)
This scene is in part another example of how Codi believes that she's an evil monster with a heart made out of mine tailings—but it's also about how death and violence are a part of normal life.
Quote #3
This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in the woods near here, picking fruit, a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they're American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It's a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. [...] The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from the sky? We're defenseless from that direction, we aren't meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, "Thank you, Holy Mother, it's not my Alba." But it was Alba. Later, when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba's two younger sisters. They kept saying, "Alba braided our hair this morning. She can't be dead. See, she fixed our hair." (16.56)
None of this stuff is made up: the U.S. really did send troops to Nicaragua to support a revolution that had serious war-crime problems just because the revolution was the capitalists and the government was the socialists. That's Cold War politics, and Kingsolver makes this scene as painful as it can be. We get young girls, killed and violently disfigured by U.S. soldiers, whose deaths are long and excruciating, and Kingsolver lays this all at the U.S. taxpayer's door. It's pretty rough—no wonder Codi doesn't want to believe it, even when the news is coming from her sister.