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Chapter 22
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Elatsoe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Friendship
Justice
Cultural Identity and Coming of Age
Colonialism and Monsters
Death, Grief, and Healing
Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
Ellie tells Vivian, Lenore, and Gregory what she’s pieced together. Dr. Allerton drove a new Mercedes to the wake because he totaled his old car at the crash site that she, Jay, and Aunt Bell found. Unwilling to tell Vivian about visiting the clinic and finding the beer cans, Ellie says that she also suspects he was drunk. Trevor saw the wreckage on his way home from work, and he pulled over to help. And then, Dr. Allerton transferred his injuries to Trevor’s body, returned Trevor to his car, and hoped he’d die. Trevor wasn’t Dr. Allerton’s first victim: all of Willowbee’s doctors, since its founding, have been swapping injuries and illnesses. She offers Roosevelt’s thank-you note, and the contemporaneous article about the mauled farmer, as proof. The article, though, mentions the farmer was found in a cranberry bog, of which there are none in Texas.
Finally, Ellie lays out all the evidence she has, which paints a damning picture of Dr. Allerton’s (and all of Willowbee’s doctors’) miraculous healing abilities. This adds more weight to dream Trevor likening Willowbee to a leech: it seems likely that, like Trevor, the people who take on injuries or illnesses don’t consent to this. And in turn, this makes it more likely that those victims were and are from vulnerable populations. The farmer, for instance, was almost certainly poor. Still, nothing yet explains why the farmer was found in a cranberry bog—cranberry bogs exist in the northern U.S. and Canada, not in hot and dry Texas.
Themes
Lenore wonders if Roosevelt, whom she thought was “decent,” knew how the cure worked. Vivian points out that Roosevelt was awful to Native Americans, but he probably didn’t know how the cure worked—if he did, he would’ve demanded a Native person get his injuries. Lenore asks what will now prove that Dr. Allerton killed Trevor, but Ellie says that Dr. Allerton must want to find Trevor’s body because there will be some identifying thing on it—like the tattoo Dr. Allerton got for charity. Vivian pulls out her phone to schedule an exhumation, but Lenore admits that she believes someone followed her to the grave. Vivian tells Lenore and Ellie that they need to have faith in family, rather than in justice, since “[i]t’s all we’ve ever had.” Then, she calls Ellie to talk about Six-Great.
Roosevelt is known for his land conservation policies (he doubled the number of national parks), but one of the ways he did this was by taking land from Native Americans. And in addition to expressing an interest in eugenics, he regularly spoke disparagingly about Black and Native people. His legacy, in other words, is complicated, but when it comes to his treatment of Native Americans, he wasn’t “decent.” Vivian then suggests that family is more reliable than justice, given their family’s working-class and nonwhite status: nonwhite people who aren’t wealthy have never been able to expect truly impartial justice due to the U.S.’s history of racism and bias.
Themes
