The gloves Kaz wears and the cane he carries symbolize his past trauma and how it both traps and serves him. Kaz’s childhood was idyllic until his and his brother Jordie’s father died, leaving the boys to sell the farm and move to Ketterdam. There, Pekka Rollins tricked the boys out of all their money. After that, Jordie died a horrific death of firepox, while Kaz survived—and used his brother’s body as a raft to swim back to Ketterdam from the Reaper’s Barge. Following this experience, Kaz found he couldn’t touch other people’s skin, hence the gloves: they keep him at a comfortable distance from other people, allowing him to shake hands, for instance, without actually touching anyone. Kaz started using his cane after he broke his leg during a robbery. His leg never healed properly, necessitating the mobility aid.
Both the gloves and the cane insulate and protect Kaz from a world he finds repulsive and dangerous. They help him develop his criminal identity as Dirtyhands, a criminal so deranged and cruel that people gossip that Kaz’s hands have claws, are bloody, or can kill a person with just a touch of his skin. And the cane itself, in addition to assisting Kaz with his limp, is a Fabrikator-made deadly weapon. But even as these effects protect Kaz from the world, the novel also suggests that they trap him and keep him from moving forward from his grief and trauma. Inej picks up on this when she asks Kaz what a relationship between them might look like and if he’d ever take his gloves off to be physically intimate with her—or if he’d ever open up emotionally. This suggests that while Kaz’s gloves and cane might protect him and help him develop the Dirtyhands persona that makes him so successful in the Barrel, they prevent him from ever moving beyond that identity and his earlier trauma.
Kaz’s Gloves and Cane Quotes in Six of Crows
“When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.”
“When Kaz got Per Haskell to pay off my indenture with the Menagerie, the first thing I did was have the peacock feather tattoo removed.”
“Whoever took care of it did a pretty rough job.”
“He wasn’t a Corporalnik or even a medik.” Just one of the half-knowledgeable butchers who plied their trade among the desperate of the Barrel. He’d offered her a slug of whiskey, then simply hacked away at the skin, leaving a puckered spill of wounds down her forearm. She hadn’t cared. The pain was liberation. They had loved to talk about her skin at the House of Exotics. It was like coffee with sweet milk. It was like burnished caramel. It was like satin. She welcomed every cut of the knife and the scars it left behind.
In his bones, he knew that she would never speak of it to anyone, that she would never use this knowledge against him. She relied on his reputation. She wouldn’t want him to look weak. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Inej would never betray him. He knew it. Kaz felt ill. Though he’d trusted her with his life countless times, it felt much more frightening to trust her with this shame.
What would Jordie say if his little brother lost their chance at justice because he couldn’t conquer some stupid sickness inside him? But it only brought back the memory of Jordie’s cold flesh, the way it had grown loose in the salt water, the bodies crowding around him in the flatboat. His vision started to blur.
Get it together, Brekker, he scolded himself harshly. It didn’t help. He was going to faint again, and this would be all over. Inej had once offered to teach him how to fall. “The trick is not getting knocked down,” he’d told her with a laugh. “No, Kaz,” she’d said, “the trick is in getting back up.” More Suli platitudes, but somehow even the memory of her voice helped. He was better than this. He had to be. Not just for Jordie, but for his crew.
There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He’d become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, bastard of the Barrel.
The gloves were his one concession to weakness. Since that night among the bodies and the swim from the Reaper’s Barge, he had not been able to bear the feeling of skin against skin. It was excruciating to him, revolting. It was the only piece of his past that he could not forge into something dangerous.
“How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?”
He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea.
Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
Kaz’s Gloves and Cane Symbol Timeline in Six of Crows
