When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky

Hank Crawford is a mixed-race Black man who works as a groom at Glendale Park. Crawford works closely with Two Feathers on her horse-diving routine and later dedicates himself to courting Bonita Boydstun, a wealthy Black woman from an elite Nashville family. Verble describes him as quiet and thoughtful, with skin “lighter than a brown paper bag” (22). As one of only two Black characters in the novel, Crawford holds a difficult position as a mixed-race man in a world governed by a strict racial hierarchy. Crawford is descended from a white enslaver who had a number of mixed-race children with one of the enslaved women held on his property. According to Crawford, his grandfather “kept on loving his kids and sent all of them, white and colored, to school” and broke tradition by willing property and money to his Black descendants (80). As a result, Crawford enjoys a degree of prestige denied to many other Black descendants of enslaved people. Despite this privilege, however, Crawford and his family also face racist violence in Nashville. Crawford’s cousin, Jimmy, is “beat up, robbed, and left to die in a ditch” by white vigilantes upset by his family’s prominence in the city, underscoring Racial and Ethnic Tension in 1920s America.

Little Elk, a young Cherokee man killed during the Cherokee-American wars of the early 1800s, reappears as a ghost after the collapse of the Glendale sinkhole. When he first appears to Clive, he is “nude to the waist and clothed in a wide sash and loincloth” with leather boots “from his feet up to over his knees” (128). Like many Cherokee men of his time, Little Elk is “tattooed, and his head [shaved] except for a knot on the top” (129). Verble emphasizes his protectiveness over other Indigenous people as his defining characteristic. In his afterlife, Little Elk is “transported back to his death tree” for reasons he doesn’t initially understand (152). After watching white settlers loot Indigenous graves, Little Elk “decide[s] he’[s] been sent back to stop the desecration of the graves”, feeling great pleasure in being able to help (159). Later, when he learns that Jack is stalking Two Feathers and harming animals, he decides that he’s been called back to the human world “to kill the murderous night-going witch [and] to save the woman and animals” (312). Little Elk’s devotion to protecting Indigenous people from white violence distinguishes him from the rest of the characters in the novel.

Jack Older is a white Glendale employee and recent college graduate whose obsession with Indigenous people motivates him to take the Cherokee name Strong-Red-Wolf and to stalk Two Feathers. Verble describes Jack as “tall and redheaded” with large glasses (135). He is responsible for the murders of Dinah, the hippopotamus, and Tom Noddy, the brown bear. As the novel’s primary antagonist, Older is characterized by his racist beliefs, his compulsive violence, and his obsession with Indigenous people and culture. Jack’s racist beliefs stem from the anthropology classes he takes at the University of Tennessee, “which divided races into various classifications that were subdivided and debated” (135). Chief among these beliefs is the idea that “the races were three, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, and that they formed an evolutionary hierarchy with Caucasoid on top, Mongoloid in the middle, and Negroid on the bottom” (135). Jack’s obsession with race reflects the importance of these hierarchies in early 20th-century America. Jack had “been fascinated with Indians ever since he could remember” and eventually “became more convinced that he was an Indian” (45). As a result of this “notion, fantasy, delusion,” Jack begins to write Two letters under the name Strong-Red-Wolf (45).

Clive Lovett is an English Great War veteran who works as the head zookeeper and animal tender at Glendale Park. Verble describes him as “the most eligible bachelor” (126) at Glendale Park and well-beloved by both his fellow employees and visitors: “[M]others trusted their children with him, men took his advice, and women of all ages batted their eyes at him and blushed” (72). Clive is also well-loved by the animals held at the zoo, and “could, by his touch, calm any frightened creature” (60). Clive’s ability to see the ghosts of Glendale, a result of the trauma he holds from his experience in the war, highlights the novel’s thematic interest in The Lasting Effects of Grief and Trauma. As an Englishman living in America, Clive could have “shrugged off his patriotic duty [and] missed his conscription,” but he returned to England and joined the army, where “twice he went missing in action [and] twice he was wounded” (61). Clive is haunted by these experiences, which sometimes cause his “genial gregarious personality” to disappear into a deep depression. After the sinkhole collapses beneath Glendale, Clive is haunted by a series of ghosts, including his dead cousin Millwood and Little Elk, a Cherokee boy who died during the Cherokee-American war.

Helen Hampton is the reserved house mother responsible for chaperoning Chambliss Hall, the dormitory where Glendale’s female employees are housed. Verble describes her as old-fashioned and matronly, and she considers herself to be “literally a daughter of the Confederacy” (10). Throughout the narrative, Helen’s entrenched racism and implicit bias shift as she grows closer to Two Feathers and Clive. Initially, Two Feathers’s presence in the dormitory makes Helen “uncomfortable” because “she didn’t know if Two should be treated like a white or a Negro” (10). For Helen, knowing Two’s race “[is] important” because “standards [need] to be maintained” (10). Helen’s preoccupation with race—and especially with hierarchies of race—reflects her social conditioning that white people like herself are superior to other groups. After Two’s injury, Helen’s attitude toward Two shifts, as she begins to feel “tender toward the girl” (263). Helen is “surprised” by her “maternal, almost loving” feelings toward Two, and attributes them to her vulnerability after the accident (263). By the end of the novel, Helen’s views have shifted entirely, and she is one of the only white people to defend Two against the accusations that she murdered Jack. These changes in Helen’s attitude reflect changing views toward race in the United States in the 20th century.

James Shackleford is the manager of Glendale Park and the head of a wealthy industrialist family. Verble describes him as “one of the wealthiest men not just in Tennessee, but in the entire nation,” and the novel notes that he “enjoyed, and suffered from, all that went with having real money” (27). Shackleford is characterized by the traumatic memories of his childhood during the Civil War when his childhood home was “trampled, looted, and burned by both Confederate and Federal soldiers,” causing him a great deal of trauma (30). In order to escape the violence of the war, Shackleford and his mother had “ridden […] past countless stinking bodies, braced against the ever-present possibility of robbery, the depravations of desperate people, the brutality of morally righteous victors” (61). As a result, “well over a half century later, he still woke up at night running through the woods, pursued by invisible bushwhackers, deserters, and Yankees” (62). Like many characters in the novel, Shackleford’s past trauma has a strong influence on his daily life in the present.