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For years I longed to be with people. I really believed that someone would stay with me, that I would actually have friends and a family. Be part of a group. But no one stayed.
The greatest sorrow of Kya’s life is her loneliness – her isolation from society has caused her to behave in odd ways and to be ostracized from her community. Despite her beauty and intelligence, Kya will never truly be accepted by her town. To make matters worse, her own family also abandoned her, leaving her to survive alone in the marsh, uneducated and uncared for. However, Kya’s constant, self-pitying remarks about her eternal loneliness eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her heart is closed off, and in her certainty that everyone will leave her, she forgets the kindness and familial love shown to her by Jumpin’, Mabel, and Tate. The courtroom trial proves to Kya that she does have people willing to stick by her side.
Jumpin’, you know how it is. They’ll take his side. They’ll say I’m just stirring up trouble. Trying to get money out of his parents or something. Think what would happen if one of the girls from Colored Town accused Chase Andrews of assault and attempted rape. They’d do nothing.
Kya knows that law enforcement, the justice system, and society at large are often biased against the working class, women, and people of color, while being biased in favor of upper-class white men. Kya believes that, should she report Chase for assault, the police and the town would ultimately protect him, creating a narrative that Kya – already an outcast due to her class – is lying about the attack. She believes that people will always take the side of the golden boy over the side of a poor or Black woman. Kya’s concerns speak to an ongoing societal problem that isn’t confined to any particular time: rape victims are often perceived as liars seeking a payout or to destroy the reputation of the accused.
Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.
Where The Crawdads Sing explores the many ways that humans rely on evolutionary survival instincts that we often only associate with the natural world. We forget that we are a part of that world, but Kya is more aware than most people of how human behavior mirrors that of animals. In this passage, Kya empathizes with her mother – it’s difficult for her to forgive her mother for leaving the family, but in equating her mother with an injured vixen, she’s able to explain that behavior as a deeply ingrained survival instinct. The comparison may not fully justify her mother’s actions, but it helps Kya make sense of her abandonment. It also foreshadows that Kya will make her own morally dubious decision in order to survive.
