Amanda Hamilton Character Analysis

This is a poem written by Amanda Hamilton, a poet who is published in the local paper and of whose work Kya was a longtime fan. Tate finds the poem hidden in a secret compartment beneath one of the floorboards in Kya’s shack in the aftermath of her death. As he looks it over, he sees that the handwriting matches Kya’s, finally realizing that Kya was Amanda Hamilton—she had been publishing poetry under a penname. More importantly, though, this poem confirms that Kya actually did kill Chase, despite the fact that the jury found her not guilty in the case. When she writes that “Luring him was as easy / As flashing valentines,” readers will recall the time that young Kya watched a female firefly attract a male firefly of a different species by posing as a potential mate before eating him whole. This, of course, was the fly’s “secret call to die,” which Kya herself sent to Chase when she “lure[d]” him to the fire tower, no doubt promising to have sex with him. Instead of actually engaging in intercourse, though, she gave him “a final touch” before encouraging him to come one step closer, at which point he fell through the open hatch in the tower.

That Kya based this murder on the behavior of female fireflies is in keeping with her devotion to nature, since she always took cues from the things she observed in the marsh. Moreover, she clearly appreciated the female firefly’s ruthless power, since she herself ended up using her sex appeal to eliminate Chase—an act that ensured her own survival, since he was a threat to her safety. In the same way that the firefly ate her potential mate as a way of sustaining herself at any cost, then, Kya killed Chase as a means of self-preservation, viewing the matter not in terms of morality, but in terms of life or death.