When the Emperor Was Divine

“Without the bird in the cage the house felt empty. She sat down on the floor and put the bottle to her lips. She looked at the place on the wall where The Gleaners had hung. The white rectangle was glowing in the moonlight. She stood up and traced around its edges with her finger and began to laugh—quietly at first, but soon her shoulders were heaving and she was gasping for breath. She put down the bottle and waited for the laughter to stop but it would not, it kept on coming until finally the tears were running down her cheeks. She picked up the bottle again and drank.” 

The woman expresses her helplessness in the face of the events. After mercy-killing the family’s dog and releasing the pet bird, she has reached a moment when there is nothing that she can do besides laugh. This image is compounded when, as the laughter intensifies, the experience of laughing itself becomes helpless.

“In a few hours he and the girl and their mother would wake up and go to the Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way. Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go to wherever it was they had to go.”

The family members, upon evacuating, has their identity reduced to a number pinned on their collars. This is one of the many ways in which they are forced to give up their old identities. It is also a parallel to the Nazi practice of tattooing prisoners in concentration camps with numbers for identification.

“All summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls of the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands. […] One night when the flies were very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to be a jockey.”

The conditions in their first detention center were difficult and undignified, in a way that hypocritically echoes the Nazi concentration camps that the Americans are fighting against in the European theater of the war. This passage also reveals that the boy responds to any situation of adversity by conjuring up hopeful fantasies. He even converts the experience of living in a horse stall to the ambition to become a jockey.