Dead Birds

Throughout Other Voices, Other Rooms, our fine, feathered friends take quite the beating. Birds, which can be symbols of freedom because they can defy gravity, (unlike us poor earthbound human beings) are slaughtered left and right in the novel. If you think that might send readers a message about a lack of liberty at the Landing, you'd be right.

The first bird to meet an untimely demise is the blue jay in Joel's room when he wakes up after his first night at Skully's Landing:

The bluejay hopped down the arm of the chair, pecking at Joel's discarded shirt. Miss Amy pursed her lips, and took five rapid, lilting, ladylike steps…

The poker caught the bird across the back, and pinioned it for the fraction of a moment; breaking loose, it flew wildly to the window and cawed and flapped against the pane, at last dropping to the floor where it scrambled along dazedly, scraping the rug with its outspread wings.

Miss Amy trapped it in a corner, and scooped it up against her breast. (1.2.4-6)

Welcome to Skully's Landing, Joel! It's basically Creepytown, USA.

Miss Amy seems, at first, to be a dainty, proper lady. The "ladylike" steps contrast greatly with the violent action that follows them (thank goodness for that ellipses!). The bird doesn't even know what hit it, and even after she's hurt it, Miss Amy scoops it up to comfort it. It's unable to escape because it's physically incapable, just like the paralyzed Mr. Sansom…who's also been "scooped up" by Miss Amy.

The blue jay turns up again when Joel sees Randolph dipping its feathers into glue and creating a cardboard bird:

[…] there feathers were so arranged the effect was of a living bird transfixed. "Each feather has, according to size and color, a particular position, and if one were the slightest awry, why, it would not look at all real." (2.10.22)

Randolph seems to be obsessed with recreating life by controlling the feathers meticulously, but Joel is not convinced. He criticizes Randolph's artwork:

"The other one, the real one, it could fly. But this one can't do anything… except maybe look like it was alive." (2.10.25)

The difference between a real bird that can fly (and therefore escape) versus a fake bird that Randolph can control but isn't really real is like the difference between true love and Randolph's obsessive traps and lies: he wants to keep Amy, Ed, and Joel near him, but he must do it by taking away their freedom.

Other birds that meet their maker are the chicken hawks that Zoo shoots to protect the chickens. Randolph doesn't like the noise she makes by shooting them, but she seems to be the only one aware of the danger: "them hawks fixin to steal the place off our hands less we shoo em away" (2.6.5). Maybe this is like her constant awareness that Keg could come back for her, while everyone else seems to laugh off her traumatic assault.

Finally, just before Jesus Fever dies, he asks for a fire even though it's the heat of summer. The unseasonal fire causes a problem for a nest full of chimney sweeps that have hatched in the chimney, and they fall into the fire and die before they learn to fly. Perhaps this is a symbol of Joel, who, as a child, is trapped at the Landing before he learns to spread his wings and escape.