[astrangerhere]

Okay, I took extensive notes when I read this, so this might be lengthy.

Religious Themes

I am surprised that no one else has mentioned the apparent anti-semitism in the book. Irene and her friends mock the Claude "the black jew" saying that he is no longer Christian or black because he converted to Judaism. But it was more striking later on when she is speaking of those non-black folks who attend and observe the NWL events saying:

Others to get material to turn into shekels.

This struck me as discordant when taken together with the earlier comments about Claude.

I appreciated this as merely timeless and still terribly applicable today:

"Have you ever stopped to think, Clare," Irene demanded, "how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems."

Other than that, though, I was struck by the lack of any sort of religious practice in the book, as that is something deeply connected with race in the south.

Unreliable Narrator

Looking back on all the things Irene said about Clare, I wonder if from the very beginning we are not dealing with an unreliable narrator. I am not in the camp that thinks Irene pushed Clare (I think her husband did it - more on that later), but she never really had anything good to say about Clare. She was always grasping, greedy, taking what did not belong to her.

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

So was all of this just setting us up for the justification that Irene had to make herself when she was complicit in Clare's death? Do we really know who she was at all?

Whodunnit

As for the murder itself, I believe that John pushed Clare, but that Irene was wholly complicit in it. We were given numerous examples of Iren fearing what John would do to Clare if he discovered her secret. But it wasn't until after she believed that her husband was having an affair with Clare that she no longer saw fit to protect her from that danger. She had ample time to warn Clare that John had found out, but due to her own jealousy and conflicts, she chose not to.

I believe in the end that John pushed Clare, and Irene, knowing that she was just as responsible, has her little break at the end of the book and swears she fell. She isn't protecting John, but it seems to be she is protecting her personal relationships over her race, which seems to be a theme of the entire book. Her internal struggles on this point (I wrote down at least four different page references for this), were some of the most interesting material in the book.

I am sure I have forgotten something, so I might add more later. I am also sure, given that I had a small window of time to scribble this up, that there are mistakes. Humor me.