Because Where the Crawdads Sing is largely about abandonment, Delia Owens considers the importance of developing a sense of independence. Kya is only seven years old when her last family member deserts her, leaving her alone in isolated marshlands. Left to her own devices, she cultivates a form of self-sufficiency that helps her thrive by on her own. One facet of this self-sufficiency is an unyielding sense of independence that makes her distrustful of others, even when they want to help her. For instance, Kya is wary of Tate, an older local boy who reaches out to offer help. At first, she doesn’t trust Tate despite his uninhibited kindness, but as time goes on, she can’t help slowly embracing their relationship, recognizing just how necessary it is for even the most independent people to have others in their lives. Sadly enough, though, Tate also ends up leaving her when he goes to college, confirming her belief that she should never trust anybody, regardless of how desperate she is for human connection. And though Kya commits to this individualistic mindset for the majority of the novel, she eventually accepts Tate’s love when he finally proves to her—years later—that he regrets abandoning her. In this sense, Owens implies that even the most fiercely independent people have emotional needs that force them to let down their guard. People like Kya must accept others into their lives despite the emotional risks, because human connection is a basic need that can’t be ignored.
Kya has good reason to doubt that her relationships will last. After all, her mother walks down the long road leading away from their house one day and never returns. When she asks her bother Jodie if their mother will come back, he assures her that she will, saying that mothers always come back to their young. In response, Kya reminds him that they recently saw a fox desert her cubs, but Jodie claims that this is only because she was starving and injured and knew she would die if she kept trying to care for her babies. What he doesn’t understand, though, is that his own mother is going through a similar experience, running from her violent husband as means of pure survival. Unable to see this, Jodie promises Kya that their mother will come back, thereby setting Kya up for disappointment when their mother fails to return. Worse, all of their other siblings trail off, too, and then Jodie himself leaves Kya, saying that she’ll understand when she’s older. Lastly, Kya’s father never comes home after leaving one night, and she knows that she’s alone once and for all after this point. Simply put, everyone who is supposed to support Kya relinquishes this duty, demonstrating to her that it’s foolish to depend upon others.
Having learned not to put her trust in other people, Kya spends the next six or seven years avoiding human contact as much as possible. She evades truancy officers, avoids local boys and girls, and limits her involvement with the outside world as much as possible, only ever interacting with a kind man named Jumpin’ (who owns a nearby gas dock) when she needs gasoline for her boat. Throughout these years, though, she sees Tate in the marshlands and remembers how he helped show her home when she was lost one day shortly before her father left. Then, when Kya is around 14, Tate endears himself to her by leaving rare feathers for her on a stump. Finally, she meets him face-to-face, and he offers to teach her to read. Slowly but surely, they become close, though Kya is hesitant to embrace their connection, constantly feeling as if she should run away from Tate. And yet, she also experiences something overwhelmingly pleasant when she’s with him, as if “something warm ha[s] been poured inside her heart.” This, of course, is the result of actually interacting with somebody who is kind and empathetic, who wants nothing but to spend time with her. Recognizing how good it feels to connect with another person, Kya slowly lets herself grow close to Tate.
Because Kya allows herself to become emotionally—and even romantically—attached to Tate, she is devastated when he informs her that he’ll be leaving for college. However, she believes him when he promises to visit in a month, when he’s home for a short break. In retrospect, she sees this decision to trust him as a mistake, since he doesn’t come back to her when he said he would. Consequently, she vows to never love nor even trust somebody else ever again, and she also wonders why everyone important in her life has found it so easy to leave her. All in all, she decides that “needing people end[s] in hurt,” becoming a staunch individualist determined to never rely on anyone but herself.
After Tate fails to return when he said he would, Kya leads an intentionally isolated life. Even when she starts secretly dating Chase Andrews, she keeps her guard up, hesitating to let herself get too close to him. However, she eventually does become invested in their relationship, indicating that she can’t quite help but gravitate toward any kind of bond that might give her a sense of love and appreciation. Then, when Chase marries another woman without telling Kya and even tries to rape Kya several years later, she once more commits to the idea that getting too close to others is always a mistake. In this mindset, Kya refuses to accept Tate’s apology for abandoning her, even though he tells her it was the biggest mistake of his life and proves his devotion by refraining from marrying anyone else, making contact with her whenever he can without encroaching upon her private life. Later, when Kya is on trial for Chase’s murder, Tate stands by her, and she sees that she actually can depend upon him, even in dire circumstances. Accordingly, they move in together after she’s acquitted and spend a happy life with each other, suggesting that even those who crave the safety of isolation and individualism often instinctually embrace human connection.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Independence vs. Human Connection ThemeTracker
Independence vs. Human Connection Quotes in Where the Crawdads Sing
“A ma don’t leave her kids. It ain’t in ’em.”
“You told me that fox left her babies.”
“Yeah, but that vixen got ’er leg all tore up. She’d’ve starved to death if she’d tried to feed herself ’n’ her kits. She was better off to leave ’em, heal herself up, then whelp more when she could raise ’em good. Ma ain’t starvin’, she’ll be back.” Jodie wasn’t nearly as sure as he sounded, but said it for Kya.
Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws—not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.
A gnawing hunger—such a mundane thing—surprised her. She walked to the kitchen and stood at the door. All her life the room had been warmed from baking bread, boiling butter beans, or bubbling fish stew. Now, it was stale, quiet, and dark. “Who’s gonna cook?” she asked out loud. Could have asked, Who’s gonna dance?
She lit a candle and poked at hot ashes in the woodstove, added kindling. Pumped the bellows till a flame caught, then more wood.
“Ah swannee, girl, what’s a’ this? Looks like ya went an’ got all growed up. Cookin’ and all.” He didn’t smile, but his face was calm. He was unshaven, with dark unwashed hair hanging across his left temple. But he was sober; she knew the signs.
“Yessir. I fixed cornbread too, but it didn’t come out.”
“Well, ah thankee. That’s a mighty good girl. Ah’m plumb wore out and hungry as a wallow-hog.” He pulled out a chair and sat, so she did the same.
“Lawd, we gotta do something 'bout that child. Ain’t nobody gonna buy them fish; I can cook ’em up in stew. Our church can come up wif some clothes, other things for her. We’ll tell ’er there’s some family that’ll trade jumpers for carpies. What size is she?”
As Kya had crept closer, she saw it was a hen turkey on the ground, and the birds of her own flock were pecking and toe-scratching her neck and head. Somehow she’d managed to get her wings so tangled with briars, her feathers stuck out at strange angles and she could no longer fly. Jodie had said that if a bird becomes different from the others—disfigured or wounded—it is more likely to attract a predator, so the rest of the flock will kill it, which is better than drawing in an eagle, who might take one of them in the bargain.
[…]
Kya ran into the clearing, throwing her arms around. “Hey, what ya doing? Git outta here. Stop it!” The flurry of wings kicked up more dust as the turkeys scattered into brush, two of them flying heavy into an oak. But Kya was too late.
But they backed down the steps, ran into the trees again, hooting and hollering with relief that they had survived the Marsh Girl, the Wolf Child, the girl who couldn’t spell dog. Their words and laughter carried back to her through the forest as they disappeared into the night, back to safety. She watched the relit candles, bobbing through the trees. Then sat staring into the stone-quiet darkness. Shamed.
Her impulse, as always, was to run. But there was another sensation. A fullness she hadn’t felt for years. As if something warm had been poured inside her heart. She thought of the feathers, the spark plug, and the seeds. All of it might end if she ran. Without speaking, she lifted her hand and held the elegant swan feather toward him. Slowly, as though she might spring like a startled fawn, he walked over and studied it in her hand. She watched in silence, looking only at the feather, not his face, nowhere near his eyes.
She went around reading everything—the directions on the grits bag, Tate’s notes, and the stories from her fairy-tale books she had pretended to read for years. Then one night she made a little oh sound, and took the old Bible from the shelf. Sitting at the table, she turned the thin pages carefully to the one with the family names. She found her own at the very bottom. There it was, her birthday: Miss Catherine Danielle Clark, October 10, 1945. Then, going back up the list, she read the real names of her brothers and sisters […].
Kya dropped her eyes as her whole body blushed. Of course, there’d been no Ma to tell her, but indeed a school booklet Tate had brought explained some. Now her time had come, and here she was sitting on the beach becoming a woman right in front of a boy. Shame and panic filled her. What was she supposed to do? What exactly would happen? How much blood would there be? She imagined it leaking into the sand around her. She sat silent as a sharp pain racked her middle.
"Can you get yourself home?” he asked, still not looking at her.
“I think so.”
“It’ll be okay, Kya. Every girl goes through this just fine. You go on home. I’ll follow way back to make sure you get there.”
Reading her message, the second male was convinced he’d found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.
Kya watched others. The females got what they wanted—first a mate, then a meal—just by changing their signals.
Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.
On some level he knew she behaved this way, but since the feather game, had not witnessed the raw, unpeeled core. How tormented, isolated, and strange.
[…]
Kya’s mind could easily live [in the environment of a biology lab], but she could not. Breathing hard, he stared at his decision hiding there in cord grass: Kya or everything else.
“Kya, Kya, I just can’t do this,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
After she moved away, he got into his boat and motored back toward the ocean. Swearing at the coward inside who would not tell her good-bye.
She knew from her studies that males go from one female to the next, so why had she fallen for this man? His fancy ski boat was the same as the pumped-up neck and outsized antlers of a buck deer in rut: appendages to ward off other males and attract one female after another. Yet she had fallen for the same ruse as Ma: […] sneaky fuckers.
“It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in what ever 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.
“Maybe some primitive urge—some ancient genes, not appropriate anymore—drove Ma to leave us because of the stress, the horror and real danger of living with Pa. That doesn’t make it right; she should have chosen to stay. But knowing that these tendencies are in our bio logical blueprints might help one forgive even a failed mother. That may explain her leaving, but I still don’t see why she didn’t come back.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I grew up in Barkley Cove, and when I was a younger man I heard the tall tales about the Marsh Girl. Yes, let’s just get this out in the open. We called her the Marsh Girl. Many still call her that. Some people whispered that she was part wolf or the missing link between ape and man. That her eyes glowed in the dark. Yet in reality, she was only an abandoned child, a little girl surviving on her own in a swamp, hungry and cold, but we didn’t help her. Except for one of her only friends, Jumpin’, not one of our churches or community groups offered her food or clothes. Instead we labeled and rejected her because we thought she was different. But, ladies and gentlemen, did we exclude Miss Clark because she was different, or was she different because we excluded her? If we had taken her in as one of our own—I think that is what she would be today. If we had fed, clothed, and loved her, invited her into our churches and homes, we wouldn’t be prejudiced against her. And I believe she would not be sitting here today accused of a crime.
The Firefly
Luring him was as easy
As flashing valentines.
But like a lady firefly
They hid a secret call to die.
A final touch,
Unfinished;
The last step, a trap.
Down, down he falls,
His eyes still holding mine
Until they see another world.
I saw them change.
First a question,
Then an answer,
Finally an end.
And love itself passing
To whatever it was before it began. A.H.
