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Chapter 17
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Crow Country, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Prejudice and Discrimination
Heritage and Land
Justice and Restitution
Violence and Integrity
Summary
Analysis
In tears, Sarah Louise angrily makes her way home. She can’t believe that her father, Clarry, wants to hide the crime—to bury Jimmy’s body without telling anyone. Sarah Louise challenged him, asking him about Jimmy’s family. She shouted at him that Jimmy had been murdered, and that Gerald Mortlock should be hanged for it. In response, her father slapped her. He told her that he owes Mortlock money, and if Mortlock gets in trouble, Sarah Louise’s family is finished financially. They have the shop business thanks to Gerald’s money (though Jean doesn’t know this). Sarah Louise arrives home, walking through the kitchen. She tries to reassure her unsettled mother and siblings that all is well.
Sarah Louise/Sadie’s realization that Clarry will not, in fact, act honorably and bring Gerald to justice. In spite of the trust Jimmy has put in Clarry, Clarry will betray him. Her father is motivated by his own self-interest—protecting his financial security by aiding Gerald Mortlock—rather than by doing the right thing. In confronting her father about his immoral choices, Sarah Louise/Sadie shows herself to be both more courageous and more moral than her father is. Still, Clarry’s decision makes it clear just how rare it is for white people to stand up for the rights of Aboriginal people, even when something as serious as murder is involved.
Themes
Sarah Louise goes to the shop, where she finds Gerald Mortlock still slumped over, though he manages to ask her where Clarry is. She tells him that Jimmy is dead, and that her father is burying the body. She finds being in Mortlock’s company unbearable. She is enraged and disgusted by him.
Sadie, as Sarah Louise, is in a difficult position: on the one hand, she doesn’t agree with her father’s action of hiding the violent crime. On the other, she is compelled by her father to help Gerald Mortlock. Her feelings of disgust towards Gerald suggest how terrible she feels about helping him, but she nonetheless sees herself as powerless to change the destructive societal patterns of which she is a part.
Themes
Still, Sarah Louise helps clean up Gerald Mortlock, as Clarry instructed her. Mortlock tells her that the murder was an accident—that Jimmy had been wild, rushing him, shouting about the dam and how it couldn’t be built. Mortlock says he had to defend himself, and that the gun went off accidentally while he was struggling with Jimmy.
In explaining the murder to Sarah Louise, Gerald seems to be trying to justify himself. But his account is questionable: if the murder was indeed an accident, why is he so eager to cover it up, and to have Clarry help him hide all traces of the crime? The dam’s connection to the murder also reinforces how the land and different people’s claims to it can have very powerful consequences for everyone who lives there.
Themes
Finally, after midnight, Clarry returns. He is ashen, and his clothes are dirty. Clarry tells Gerald Mortlock that he buried Jimmy’s body in the Mortlock family graveyard. Sarah Louise wants to weep—she knows that Jimmy “should have been buried near the stones, under the trees, in the heart of the bush,” not with the Mortlocks. She hears a crow shriek. Sadie wakes up, on the ground in the supermarket, with Mrs. Fox, the supermarket cashier, peering down at her.
Clarry’s burial of the body—amongst the Mortlocks, no less—reveals his final betrayal and corruption. By choosing to help cover up the murder, he takes the side of the oppressor—Gerald Mortlock—over the side of the victim, Jimmy Raven. Even though Sadie, in the body of Sarah Louise, is still a child, she seems to be the only one guided by a moral sense and an understanding of the sacred nature of the land.
Themes
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