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14. The 4-B’s
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
Judge Coutts visits Shamengwa often, in part because he hopes to catch Geraldine, but also because he admires Shamengwa’s habits of personal grooming. Coutts believes that Shamengwa’s neatness shows that “although the government had tried in every possible way to destroy our manhood, we are undefeatable.” Despite his damaged arm, Shamengwa still plays his fiddle beautifully—accessing, in Coutts’s words, those “powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life.”
There are two essential ideas to note in this passage. First, just as Mooshum connects respect for his own desires and body to the kind of “political respect” he craves for his tribe, Shamengwa sees his own personal grooming habits as a way of reasserting Ojibwe strength and “manhood” in the face of the U.S. government’s abuse. Second, just as Joseph Coutts find something miraculous in Lafayette Peace’s fiddle playing, his grandson Judge Coutts now sees an almost religious meaning in Shamengwa’s violin music, as if the music can access the “true knowledge” that normally exists only on a spiritual plane.
Themes
Shamengwa normally cares for his violin as if it were human. So it is a shock when Geraldine shows up one day to Shamengwa’s home and sees that her uncle’s violin has been stolen, while Shamengwa (“asleep the whole time”) is tied to his bedposts. Though there is little proof, everyone in Pluto suspects Corwin Peace of this crime. After all, Corwin is known for his dangerous good looks and his money-making schemes (many of which involve selling drugs).
Chronologically, this chapter of Coutts’s narrative seems to take place around the same time as Marn Wolde’s murder—about two decades after John Wildstrand’s affair, which resulted in Corwin’s birth. The trauma of that crime has clearly had long-lasting ripple effects, as can be seen in Billy’s damaging cult and in Corwin’s criminal behavior.
Themes
In the weeks after his fiddle is stolen, Shamengwa lets go of his grooming habits; his beard is unshaven, and his breath is sour. When Coutts visits, Shamengwa sometimes hesitates to greet him, only relenting when Geraldine insists. Eventually, Coutts offers to buy Shamengwa a new fiddle. But Shamengwa refuses—he will not have any violin but the one that was stolen. Shamengwa then tells Coutts the story of his violin.
Given the personal and political meaning Shamengwa gives to his personal grooming routine, the absence of that routine signals just how devastating the theft of the violin is to Shamengwa’s sense of self—which makes sense, especially given the almost religious power of the instrument.
Themes
When Shamengwa was young, his parents lost a baby to diphtheria. Before the boy died, Shamengwa’s house had been lively and filled with the sound of his father’s fiddle. But after the tragedy, the family moved off of their government allotment to an empty area of forest (“where the Dairy Queen now stands”). Shamengwa’s mother went to church constantly, almost never speaking to her children, and his father similarly falls silent, refusing to play any music. A few years later, Mooshum runs away, leaving Shamengwa alone.
As the area around Pluto changes, with chunks of forest turning into chain restaurants, Shamengwa seems to feel little tangible connection to his childhood—with the exception of the fiddle, reminding him of his father’s music. Once again, in reflecting how his mother’s churchgoing replaced his father’s fiddle playing, Shamengwa implicitly creates a connection between music and faith.
Themes
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One day, Shamengwa fakes sick and skips going to church. As soon as he has the house to himself, Shamengwa picks up the fiddle and teaches himself to play. From then on, Shamengwa takes every opportunity he can to play the violin in private. “Freedom,” Shamengwa realizes, “is not only in the running but in the heart, in the mind, in the hands.”
One way that Shamengwa asserts himself as “undefeatable” is through his well-kempt personal appearance. Another way to find this “freedom,” it now becomes clear, is by playing music, as if in this kind of artistic creation, Shamengwa undoes some of the destruction of settler-colonialism.
Themes
Shamengwa’s parents grow more and more distant, sometimes forgetting even to feed him. Around this time, Shamengwa is kicked in the arm by a cow. Desperate not to lose any fiddle-playing time, Shamengwa begins tying up his arm, which means that the bone never fully heals, and the arm remains permanently crooked. “Like most artists,” Shamengwa brags, “[I was] deformed by my art. I was shaped.”
Once again, history tangibly, physically shapes the present, as Shamengwa’s twisted arm is finally explained by his devotion to the fiddle in his youth.
Themes
One day, soon after Shamengwa starts school, his father discovers him playing the violin. Shamengwa thinks his father will scold him, but instead, he encourages Shamengwa to keep playing. The next morning, Shamengwa wakes up to find that his father has run away—and that he has taken the violin with him. Crushed, Shamengwa falls into the same silent habits as his mother. His only reprieve comes when he has a dream in which a voice tells him, “Go to the lake and […] wait there. I will come.”
The break in Shamengwa’s own immediate family (as first Mooshum and then his father run away) perhaps explains why in his old age, Shamengwa is so devoted to his own nieces and grandnieces. Shamengwa’s vision here recalls Marn Wolde’s “pictures,” suggesting that even when the novel’s narratives don’t overlap on the level of plot, they can touch each other in their shared form (namely the inclusion of magical realist elements).
Themes
Shamengwa goes to the lake and waits for three days, but nothing happens. On the fourth day, however, Shamengwa sees a speck on the lake. Shamengwa dives in and swims to the speck, which he realizes is a canoe that has lost its paddler. Lashed to the canoe’s crossbow is a violin, neatly placed in a “black case of womanly shape.” From that moment on, Shamengwa vowed he would never play a fiddle other than the one that appeared to him in the canoe.
The almost otherworldly power of the violin now becomes even more literal, as a new fiddle arrives to Shamengwa as if it were predestined to do so. Interestingly, the violin now also takes on a sexual or carnal connotation, as Shamengwa notes the instrument’s “womanly,” attractive shape. And tellingly, while Shamengwa has not had a love affair as intense as those of his relatives, his personal “deathless romantic encounter” seems to be with this instrument.
Themes
Back in the present, Corwin is trying to figure out where to sell Shamengwa’s violin. Rather than feeling guilty, Corwin is proud of himself—after all, there are givers and takers, and Corwin is a taker (“render unto Corwin what is due to him,” he thinks). Corwin’s thoughts race; he feels that words are haunting him, begging to be put into new configurations in his mind.
Like Evelina, Corwin finds both pleasure and pain in sorting his racing thoughts into words. Though Corwin has committed a crime by taking the violin, he feels that he is actually behaving justly by taking his “due” (stealing something he feels is perhaps cosmically owed to him).
Themes
At first, Corwin tries to sell the violin to a few stores at the mall, but none of them will buy it. Then, he decides to play the violin at the food court. At first, when he moves the bow across the strings, it makes only a screeching noise. But then Corwin continues to mime playing the violin, and though there is no music coming from the strings, he hears beautiful melodies in his head. It is while Corwin is pretending to play Shamengwa’s fiddle in the mall that the police arrest him for the theft. Coutts is assigned to hear the case.
Corwin seems to feel an almost metaphysical connection with the violin, taking pleasure in the music he imagines might come from it more than in the money that he ostensibly stole it for. Once again, then, the violin has almost religious properties, a fact reflected in the lilting prose the novel uses to describe Corwin’s strange playing.
Themes
When it comes time to hand down Corwin’s punishment, Coutts thinks of Henri and Lafayette Peace—“as they had saved my grandfather,” the judge wonders, “perhaps I was meant to rescue their descendant.” So instead of sending Corwin to jail, Coutts makes him study the fiddle with Shamengwa every morning. At first, Corwin’s playing is ugly and strange. But over time, he improves, and soon fiddle music can be heard all through Shamengwa’s house.
History is usually a source of pain or vengeance for these characters, as when Billy Peace tries to reclaim the Wolde family’s land. But here, Coutts tries to create a different kind of historical scale-balancing, extending kindness and leniency to Corwin because of what Henri and Lafayette did for Joseph Coutts on the town-site trip. Once again, then, justice is complicated, multigenerational, and not always connected to the letter of the law (even when it is being proscribed by the town judge).
Themes
Just as Corwin is starting to get good, Shamengwa dies. At the funeral, Father Cassidy accidentally eulogizes Seraph Milk (Mooshum) instead of Shamengwa. Mooshum has a great deal of fun with this error (he spends most of the funeral waving at Cassidy), but Clemence gets so frustrated that she walks up to Shamengwa’s coffin and pulls the violin out of it. Clemence hands the violin to Geraldine, and Geraldine asks Corwin to play it. Corwin plays beautifully, if imprecisely, and he leaves everyone in tears. At the end of his playing, he smashes the violin.
The fact that Cassidy eulogizes the wrong Milk brother speaks again to the racism and incompetence embedded in this particular branch of the Catholic church. Despite Cassidy’s faux pas, however, each mourner gives tribute to Shamengwa in their own personal way, whether that is Mooshum’s silliness or Corwin’s imperfect, beautiful playing.
Themes
After the funeral, Judge Coutts notices a slip of paper sticking out of the broken violin and discovers that it is a letter from Henri to his brother Lafayette. In the letter, dated 1888, Henri describes how the Peace brothers inherited the violin: a priest left it to their father, who then passed it on to his sons. Henri’s father specified that if his sons could not decide who got to keep the violin, they should do a canoe race and give the instrument to the winner.
Even before Judge Coutts learned the history of Shamengwa’s prized fiddle, he had sensed that Henri and Lafayette were somehow present in the story of this violin. The fact that this letter is dated in 1888 locates this story temporally in-between Joseph’s town-site trip and the brutal hangings of 1911.
Themes
Secretly, Henri weighs down his brother’s canoe with pitch, while Lafayette pokes holes in the bottom of Henri’s boat. Soon after the brothers set out on the water, a storm rolls in. Henri has to bail out his canoe, but he gets back to shore safely. But the heavy pitch makes Lafayette’s canoe turn over in the wind, and Lafayette drowns. In his grief, Henri sends the violin out onto the lake in an empty canoe, hoping it might find Lafayette that way.
Henri and Lafayette are equal in their attempts to sabotage each other in this race, a testament both to their shared love of the violin and to their shared prankster nature. Poignantly, however, this passage also speaks to the impossibility of an eye-for-an-eye model of justice: though Henri and Lafayette both attempt similar tricks, luck intervenes, meaning that while Lafayette only plays a funny joke, Henry winds up unwittingly committing a murder.
Themes
Coutts wonders aloud to Geraldine that the violin was destined to find a Peace (“the fiddle had searched long for Corwin”). Yet Coutts also marvels that nearly 20 years elapsed between when Henri sent the violin out on the boat and when Shamengwa found it. Geraldine’s response is firm: “we know nothing,” she insists. Coutts resolves that he will not hunger to know more, to understand the “deeper explanation” for this miracle. Besides, he and Geraldine will be married soon.
The strange time lapse between when the violin was set afloat and when it finally reached Shamengwa underlines the idea that a mysterious higher power is at work here, linking the Coutts, Peace, and Milk families through music, mystery, and a winding kind of justice. But if Shamengwa’s violin-playing sometimes gave Coutts access to a feeling of “true knowledge,” in the absence of this music, he must settle for knowing “nothing.” Instead, Coutts finds meaning not in spiritual enlightenment but in everyday intimacy—after years of courtship, he slyly announces at the end of the chapter, he has finally won Geraldine over for good.
Themes
