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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Demon Copperhead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Exploitation
Class, Social Hierarchy, and Stereotypes
Pain and Addiction
Toxic Masculinity
Community and Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Damon Fields, the book’s narrator, describes the day he was born. That day, Nance Peggot barges into Damon’s mom’s house and finds her in the middle of labor, passed out with drugs scattered on the bathroom floor. Damon punches and kicks, “still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.” Nance comes out of the house and yells to her husband, Mr. Peggot, who is waiting outside, to call 911. When Nance describes the event later on, she says that Damon punched out of the sack like “a little blue prizefighter.”
The book's opening passage introduces the climate of addiction that Demon is born into. Addiction is the first thing he knows, as he is born to a mother who has passed out from drug use. The novel establishes Mom’s pattern of drug use and addiction not just to highlight her own struggles, but also to provide context that will help explain how and why Demon later becomes addicted to drugs himself. That Mrs. Peggot, Demon’s neighbor, steps in to help Demon when he is most in need, introduces the novel’s other central theme of community.
Themes
Damon grows up in a single-wide set between the Ruelynn coal camp and a settlement called “Right Poor” in the heart of Lee County in southwest Virginia. He spends hours playing in the creek, looking under rocks, and “being mighty” with his neighbor, a boy named Maggot. “Maggot” is short for Matt Peggot, and he’s the grandson of Nance. The place where they live is famous for its copperheads, but Damon never sees one. He adds, though, that one of his mother’s “bad choices,” a phrase she learned to use in rehab, was a guy named Copperhead. Copperhead had “the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon.” As Damon grows up, he becomes the spitting image of that man.
This passage introduces some of the ideas and stereotypes that people who aren’t from Appalachia—and, in this case, even people from outside of the specific area of town where Demon lives—have about the region and its people. Specifically, people have an idea that Demon's home is infested with copperheads, dangerous snakes. In truth, though, there are virtually none of those snakes in the region. Those misconceptions about the region become a running theme throughout the novel, especially as outsiders use stereotypes about the region to justify disregarding its people and ignoring their struggles.
Themes
Damon’s mom has a different story about Damon’s birth than Nance Peggot’s. But, Damon says, anyone who had met both his mom and Nance would know who was more trustworthy. Either way, according to Damon’s mom, the day Damon was born, her “baby daddy’s mother” showed up out of the blue with a plan to take her grandchild away from the “den of vice” and raise “her up decent.” The fear that she might lose custody of Damon scared his mom into going to rehab. Damon doubts his mom’s story and also doesn’t understand why she was so insistent that the woman came to take away a girl. Damon wonders if that was what his Mom wanted all along—someone delicate who would make her clean up her act. Damon thinks that he’s fragile, too.
Demon intimates that his mom may feel some shame regarding the circumstances of his birth, namely that she was unconscious after taking drugs when Demon was born, and that is why she may have made up a story to obscure the actual events of that day, as told by Mrs. Peggot. Demon also wonders about how gender plays into his mom’s story, suggesting that if he had been born as a girl, his gender would have provided an impetus for his mother to go to rehab because she would have needed to protect her child. But Demon questions those tropes and assumptions of gender when he says that he, too, was fragile and needed protection, hinting at the way that Demon will ultimately have to question and dismantle the harmful gender stereotypes he's exposed to growing up.
Themes
