Demon Copperhead

“People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.”

Danger makes for a scintillating story or fodder for gossip, but only when it’s happening to someone else. This suggests that people are happier to watch someone else suffer than come together as a community to keep people out of danger. Thus, cycles of trauma, abuse, and poverty repeat endlessly.

“What I said about people, that if they care, they can tell one kind of a thing from another? Big if. Possibly the biggest if on the planet of earth. Why notice zero on snakes, and a thousand percent on certain things about people?”

Demon’s narrative voice demonstrates keen observation and innate intelligence. Here he notes that people are willfully blind to real problems while they construct fanciful ones. This echoes the novel’s message that people often try to cure pain and trauma by cultivating other forms of chaos. The quote also raises the question of whether people care. According to Demon, most people do not care enough to recognize the difference between fictive and real problems, and their inattention contributes to The Failure of Society to Protect Its Children.

“I wasn’t clueless to people’s thinking. But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words. Now I felt that worm digging, spitting poison in my brain, trying to change how I saw Maggot.”

Kingsolver suggests that words can be powerful in malevolent ways. Once a thought is put into words, it can consume a person who never thought it before: People can speak things into existence. This quote also illustrates Demon’s awareness of the wily ways in which people try to destroy communities and relationships; he tries to battle against this external influence.

“But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them. It gets to be known to anybody with ears. Those we had.”

Demon again employs sarcasm to examine his community. People in his community like stories, which they enshrine as legends. In part, these legends help distract people from their own problems. However, the storytelling culture is also a way of spreading humiliating gossip. This quote characterizes the community as small and nosy.

“The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.”

This quote highlights the power of words to humiliate, but also the power of subverting and reappropriating words designed to humiliate. American society has often dismissed white people living in poverty as a blight; their existence challenges white supremacy by demonstrating that white people are not inherently “successful” (in the terms of a society that views poverty as a personal “failure”). This quote celebrates the resilience of these communities, who take the slurs thrust upon them as a badge of pride, robbing them of their intention to dehumanize impoverished white people.

“A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain.”

Demon points out that children’s socioeconomic context informs how (and if) they get in trouble. However, while more privileged children may be exempt from suspicion, “full grocery carts” (material wealth) and “nighty-nights” (apparent family stability) are not necessarily equivalent to safety; wealthier communities also deal with things like drug addiction.

“So fostering was done by companies, and we, as Stoner would say, were Product. Rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts. Live and learn.”

This quote emphasizes the brokenness of the American foster care system. Several companies work in the lucrative business of social work because the government funds them, outsourcing responsibility for unwanted, abandoned, or orphaned children. This system dehumanizes children in foster care like Demon, turning them into “product.” In Lee County, there are more children in the foster care system than there are foster families, ensuring a system in which foster families are never without a paycheck. This allows abuse to fester, as there are so few options for the children in the foster care system.

“Used to be, the stripping house was a place to hear the best stories in the world. Guys saved them up all year. Now it’s mostly just the saddest story ever told: where the world has left us. A farmer has his land, and nothing else. He’s more than married to it, he’s on life support.”

Kingsolver addresses the devaluation of the agricultural economy—an example of The Exploitation of the Rural Working Class. Farmers used to be lauded as the epitome of the American spirit, but by the time of the novel’s setting, corporate farm culture has crushed independent farmers. This breeds resentment and poverty. It’s a system that forces people to remain on land that they can’t make any money from, dooming them to a grueling life of meaningless and impoverished labor.

“ My point though is the totem pole of paychecks, with school as one thing that gets you up there, and another one being where you live, country or city. But the main thing is, whatever you’re doing, who is it making happy?”

Demon must deal with adult problems and responsibilities as a child. One lesson he learns too early is the importance of the hustle in capitalist America. People keep searching for jobs that pay more because employment often means making very little money for work that is overwhelming and stressful. Demon sees life as a stepladder that never ends. School is just one step on that ladder, and it is influenced by where one lives. Demon’s rhetorical question suggests that going through the motions of adult capitalist life is expected but doesn’t bring happiness.

“You tell me why it makes sense for guys wanting money from you to come and take your car, so you can’t earn another dime. That’s the grown-up version I guess of teachers yelling at you for hating school.”

This quote illustrates Kingsolver’s criticism of how American society treats people living in poverty. It is tragically ironic that the bank repossessed Mr. McCobb’s car because he can’t pay his bills, leading him to lose income because he no longer has a car to get to work. This catch-22 highlights how difficult it is for Americans to succeed and how easy it is to fall down the slippery slope of poverty.

“What I said before about having some golden time of life where it’s all good, your people have got your back, and you don’t notice? That’s how the cruel world bites you. I have bad days galore to look back on, the shamings and hard fists, and I’ll tell you what. It’s the golden times that kill me. I had two. And like a son of a bitch, I missed them both.”

Demon narrates in hindsight, reflecting on his past and analyzing his childhood and adolescence. Here, he notes a universal problem: being unable to appreciate happy moments in the moment. Demon’s trauma exacerbates this human tendency; he remembers all his bad days and trauma precisely, but he doesn’t trust periods when his life is good and stable.

“I was born to wish for more than I can have. No little fishing hole for Demon, he wants the whole ocean. And on from there, as regards the man-overboard. I came late to getting my brain around the problem of me, and still yet might not have. The telling of this tale is supposed to make it come clear.”

Demon references his desire to see the ocean as indicative of his insatiability. Because most of his childhood was about survival, Demon believes that through writing the story of his life, he can clarify his own development. This quote emphasizes the importance of looking back on one’s past, much as Dickens did while writing David Copperfield.

“Yes, life sucks, hungry nights and hurtful people, but compared to buried in a box, floating in a universe of nothing and never? I wouldn’t trade. I watched a pinwheel of green fire swirl up over the treetops throwing white sparks. My dad, mom, and little brother were missing out on a lot of amazing shit.”

Despite how difficult Demon’s life has been, he is grateful to be alive. This quote captures Kingsolver’s message about resiliency and appreciation. At a young age, Demon learned the cost and value of human life. Though his life has been traumatic, he can appreciate the experience of existing in mature ways.

“Dori held my hand the whole time. Her hand felt like a baby bird inside my fist, something I could protect if I tried hard enough. Something turned over, telling me to start my proper manhood there and then. Here’s a knot I can tie, I was thinking. I will never let it unravel.”

In meeting Dori, Demon thought he had a newfound purpose in his life. Dori represents someone to take care of, as well as someone who can return that care. Notably, he believes that having Dori in his life means he’s starting his “proper manhood” even though he’s still a teenager, demonstrating that children who have experienced trauma have to grow up quickly. Demon believes he finally has agency, but this quote also foreshadows their dangerous relationship; Demon indeed tries to make sure it doesn’t unravel, but his will is no match for drug addiction.

“Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”

Kingsolver plays with her meta-fictive approach to this novel, explaining why Dickens’s novel was the appropriate blueprint for her own. Just as Kingsolver aims to do here, Dickens used literature to expose his society to its failures, especially the ways in which it hurt children.

“She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive.”

Kingsolver uses June’s perspective to expose Purdue Pharma for fueling and financially benefiting from the opioid epidemic. Purdue researched the areas most likely to buy its drugs and targeted those communities. This quote helps explain why Lee County, like so many counties in Appalachia, has been ravaged by the epidemic. The rampant drug addiction among Demon and his friends is not their fault but rather a product of systematic corporate predation.

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”

This observation doesn’t excuse racism, but it does provide context for how systemic racism works. When society promises white people superiority and then fails to deliver, some white people respond by projecting their frustrations onto others. In a society built on racism, the easiest people to project frustrations onto are communities of color.

“Dead bodies are nothing new to me, I kept telling myself. This is no hill for a climber. My mom in her white casket. Dori in our bed. I’d sat alone with Dori for over an hour before I let the rest of the world come. But however heartbroken I’d been that day, I knew Dori was where she needed to be. Hammer was not. This was a body robbed of all its righteous goods.”

Demon, despite his traumas, is not desensitized to pain. Death haunts him because so many of his most cherished loved ones have died. This is important because Hammer’s death stands out among all the deaths Demon has seen. Because of Hammer’s goodness and potential, Demon sees his death as a different kind of waste of human life than the deaths of the other people he has known. This emphasizes a turning point in Demon’s character development and the development of the plot.

“I sat letting her words happen, smelling her fruit, and it hit me between the eyes: It was always June. This thing I’d had for the Knoxville women, aka dome house women. All along June, never Emmy, not past the puppy love. This was the full-throttle type love that I never got figured out properly, due to being raised in shotgun fashion. What my twisted little raggedy heart had always, always wanted. A mother, simple as that.”

Women play an important role in this novel. They are victims, heroes, mothers, daughters, friends, girlfriend, grandmothers, and caretakers. They are, most of all, Demon’s symbol of love and goodness. He craves female companionship, hoping for a girl like Dori he can protect and love. He now realizes that this desire is actually his orphaned heart longing for a mother. The absence of a motherly figure to provide unconditional love and structured support is a loss Demon has long tried to repress.

“I tried to think of one place on the planet of earth where I would feel happy to be. Came up bust. Then tried to settle on someplace I could stand to be. Nothing again. No house or vehicle or yard or pasture came to mind. No place. A guy could take this to mean he ought to be dead.”

No matter how much Demon loves his home, it is not a place that provides him with any happiness. Though there are people he loves in Lee County, like Angus, the surrounding environment is uniformly oppressive. This reveals the depth of Demon’s misery, which he doesn’t fully realize until this moment. The recognition helps him make the life-changing decision to leave Lee County for rehab—a major moment in his character development.

“Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was a bear. If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.”

Kingsolver uses imagery and tension to highlight the major turning point in Demon’s life and character development. In seeing danger where there is none, Demon’s relationship with his beloved Lee County fundamentally changes. He starts to understand with vivid detail that he is in danger in Lee County. This is the final realization he needs to have to seek help from June.

“You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?”

This quote emphasizes that although an entire society can bring about a person’s downfall, it is up to the individual to turn their life around. Demon must choose to do the work of sobriety every day. Each day presents a new opportunity for growth or for regression. As noted here, it takes courage to seek sobriety and stay sober. This quote emphasizes Demon’s character growth and highlights the theme of Rebuilding Oneself and the Importance of Autonomy.

“I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail.”

Demon has repeatedly reflected on moments in which his life seemed to derail, trying to understand how things turned so bad. This is the first time in which he applies that same thought process to something good. Kingsolver uses the metaphor of the tree to emphasize that although recovery can be a long and arduous task, it is also beautiful.