52 pages • 1 hour read
Call Your Daughter Home
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Symbols & Motifs
Food
Food, or the lack of it, symbolizes the presence or absence of support and relates to the theme of Race and Status in the South. As an act of protest, Annie goes on a hunger strike, indicating her desire to cut herself off from the values of planter culture. Her choice is voluntary, but Gertrude’s starvation is not. As the story begins, Gertrude and her girls are all starving. Mary’s condition is particularly acute since she might soon die. Since Gertrude has been isolated by Alvin, no one is nearby to look out for her family.
Retta’s gift of food and shelter pulls Gertrude back into the novel’s communities. As a result, food becomes more readily available. In Shake Rag, Retta feeds and cares for Mary. In Mrs. Walker’s house, Gertrude finds preserved food to tide her family over. At the end of the story, the entire Shake Rag community accepts Gertrude and restocks her pantry while she is gone. The Homecoming Camp is a harvest festival that unites all the various subcommunities in Branchville, symbolizing a rare breaking of social barriers. As the setting for the story’s climax, the festival symbolizes the importance of community in the face of hardship.
Bodies
Dead and injured bodies are a recurring motif in the book. They are evidence of the damage being done by the Secrecy and Maintaining Appearances that prevails in Branchville. Gertrude is the first example of an injured body, when she appears with a swollen black eye from her husband’s violence. Mary’s starving, worm-infested body also attests to the violence the Pardee family faces. Her healing represents the improvement of the family’s circumstances and hope for a better future.
The Coles children’s bodies bear the evidence and shame of their father’s abuse. Buck can no longer stand this treatment and dies by suicide at the age of 12. Since no one talked about the abuse, his body is the only evidence that something was seriously wrong in his life. Lonnie, also abused, exhibits a stutter when he speaks and is afflicted with crippling self-doubt because of his father’s treatment. His difficulty speaking may symbolize the need to maintain the silence that is expected of everyone. Annie’s emaciated body after her hunger strike is also an unspoken reproach to her husband. At the Homecoming Camp, everyone is solicitous, but no one really wants to know why Annie is afflicted. They are complicit in maintaining the conspiracy of silence that predators like Alvin and Edwin require to prey on the defenseless.
Hunting
At several points in the novel, Gertrude draws analogies to hunting, a motif that symbolizes Maternal Anger and Strength. In the rural South, hunting plays a large role in ensuring an adequate food supply. Not surprisingly, Gertrude learned how to hunt as a child. Initially, the narrative implies that she is stalking a large female alligator to provide food for her family. In reality, she is stalking her husband. While the alligator is a predator, so is Alvin. He exploits the physical weakness of his wife and children to vent his frustration at life. Once Alvin begins abusing Gertrude’s daughters, her maternal instincts overpower her fear. The mother alligator destroys the evidence of Gertrude’s crime when the alligator and her children eat Alvin’s body, a symbolic act that implies the universality of maternal instinct.
Gertrude acts as the hunter again when Edwin attempted to prey on her two youngest daughters. As she prepares to shoot him, she tells the story of a panther hunt from her childhood. When she finally dispatches the most powerful abuser in the community, she says, “Mr. Coles grips his chest with his free hand and looks surprised or confused [...] The hunter is hunted” (331).
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