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Chapter 27
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
Jane Ellen drives Demon to meet Coach Winfield. But it’s not Coach Winfield who greets Demon. Instead, the “weirdest human” Demon has ever seen shows up. He has stick legs, long arms, red hair, and long fingers. He says Coach Winfield is caught up with Saturday practice. He introduces himself as Ryan Pyles and says people call him U-Haul. Demon doesn’t want to go with the man, but neither he nor Jane Ellen sees any other choice. Demon goes to his new home with U-Haul then. The home turns out to be a mansion overlooking downtown Jonesville. Demon looks around and sees athletic gear strewn all over the place. Without Demon realizing it, a kid sneaks up behind him, wearing a flat detective’s cap, a leather jacket, and Doc Martens.
Demon gets a bad feeling from U-Haul immediately, perhaps foreshadowing that U-Haul will create trouble for him in the future. Note that U-Haul comes to pick up Demon, whom Coach Winfield will be fostering, showing how intimately U-Haul is involved in Coach’s daily life. Finally, the detail of the athletic gear strewn throughout Coach’s house seems to suggest that sports take precedence over everything else in his life.
Themes
It’s Coach Winfield’s kid, Angus, who is the child of the girl Betsy raised who died of breast cancer. Demon assumes Angus is a boy. Coach Winfield comes down the stairs. “You look like a linebacker,” he tells Demon. Demon can hardly contain his excitement. In his excitement, he makes a crass remark about linebackers being popular with cheerleaders. Angus seems mortified by what Demon says. A woman named Mattie Kate puts their dinner on the table. Coach Winfield says she’ll wash the dishes in the morning. Angus shows Demon to his room, which he’ll have all to himself. When Angus comes back wearing pajamas, Demon realizes that she is a girl, not a boy, and thinks back over all of the stupid things he said to her.
After Demon realizes that Angus is a girl, he’s embarrassed by his previous comments about cheerleaders. That embarrassment points to a couple of significant aspects of Demon’s personality. First, Demon seems to code-switch based on whether he is around men or women. For the entire time he’s meeting Angus, he gauges the situation to determine what he should say to make Angus like him, a learned behavior, potentially, from the past times he has been abandoned: fearing that he will be abandoned once more, he does everything he can to ensure that others accept him. Notably, when Demon thinks Angus is a boy, he tries to build comradery with her by sexualizing women—something Angus finds repellant—pointing to ways that Demon may have adopted behaviors of toxic masculinity in order to gain social acceptance.
Themes
