Previous
Chapter 32
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Kind, Kindness, and Discrimination
The Power of Books
Hardship and Humanity
Change and Modernization
Autonomy and Interdependence
Summary
Analysis
Cussy Mary rides straight to her outpost, vomiting twice on the way. Her hard feelings dissolve as she escapes into reading the books that await her there for her Friday route.
Cussy Mary hides away from everyone in her shame, but she finds that books have an almost magical ability to sooth pain and transport a person beyond their own troubles and limited existence.
Themes
On Friday, the day after the celebration, Cussy Mary and Junia take a heavy load through dark passes and steady rain to bring books to Oren Taft. Their meeting place is his grandparents’ old home, which is slowly rotting away and covered with wild roses and wisteria. His community of 11 families is unreachable except on foot. The “holler dwellers” who live there are the poorest of the poor.
Cussy Mary’s meeting with Oren Taft reminds readers of the importance of the Pack Horse Library project; without Cussy, Oren and his community would not only lack books but most contact with the outside world. Coming on the heels of her disastrous experience in town, it suggests that those who denigrate her don’t understand her true worth.
Themes
Catching sight of Cussy Mary’s face, Oren asks if she’s quite well. Cussy says she’s just tired, although the drug keeps making her sick and she and Pa are fighting over her taking it. Oren gives Cussy a bag of fat ramps from his wife, and a recipe for ramp biscuits with hog jowl to add to her scrapbook. Cussy is reluctant to take the ramps, since food is so precious in the mountains. But Oren insists.
Like everyone else, Oren misreads Cussy Mary’s pallor as illness. And his reaction—concern rather than disgust—shows that he values her as a human being. Despite being the poorest of the poor, Oren and his community still show their humanity by acts of generosity, like sharing wild onions with Cussy Mary and offering a recipe for her to add to the scrapbook she circulates among her patrons.
Themes
As they exchange the books, and Cussy Mary thinks about how important Oren’s willingness to carry books to his community is. She encourages him to apply for Queenie’s old job. Oren is pleased and honored. He bids Cussy good health and goodbye, telling her he misses his “bonny Picasso”—her blue skin reminds him of the beautiful blue sky and a painting he saw in one of the library magazines, Picasso’s Woman with a Helmet of Hair. Then, like a librarian-Santa Claus, he heaves the books onto his back and sets out for home.
When Oren associates Cussy with the Picasso painting, he points towards her inherent worth as a human being and reinforces the comments that Queenie and others have made about Cussy’s beauty and worth. Notably, despite his poverty and isolation, Oren is worldly and sophisticated enough (thanks to the Pack Horse project) to know who Picasso is and to see that a person’s value isn’t limited by the color of their skin.
Themes
Get the entire The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek LitChart as a printable PDF.
