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6. Bitter Tea
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 reveals that the first time he ever saw Geraldine Milk, he was determined to marry her. Coutts knows that Geraldine has struggled with love after her first serious boyfriend was killed in a car wreck. Coutts also knows that Geraldine is aware of his own troubled romantic history; because she is a tribal enrollment specialist, she has “everyone’s secrets alphabetically filed.” Despite their shared cultural backgrounds, however, Geraldine is initially reserved. It takes months for her to agree to go on a first date with Coutts—and Coutts knows he cannot press her, as the Milk sisters are famous for their tempers.
Both Geraldine and Coutts work in tribal administration, helping to liaise between indigenous practices and United States law; Geraldine manages tribal enrollment (meaning she works for the BIA), while Coutts is the town’s only judge. This shared work likely helps to bring the couple together, but it also showcases just how intertwined every element of life in Pluto is. Even Coutts and Geraldine’s seemingly dispassionate jobs are infused with the town’s desires and heartbreaks and “secrets.”
Themes
A few weeks after their first dinner date, Coutts asks Geraldine to go fishing. As they sit in the boat, Coutts tells Geraldine about when Henri and Lafayette Peace—Cuthbert’s older brothers—saved Coutts’s grandfather’s life. Then the pair discusses the past and future: Pluto is struggling right now, but they feel little sympathy, given all the White citizens of Pluto have done to Indians on the reservation.
If shared history is sometimes a source of pain and division for the characters, here, Coutts shows the reverse, demonstrating that past acts of generosity can help forge moments of community and grace in the present. In this conversation, Coutts and Geraldine also make an important distinction between the mostly White, settler-colonial community of Pluto, and the Indian reservation land that surrounds it (where both Coutts and Geraldine reside).
Themes
Coutts tells Geraldine that years after the hanging, the vigilantes admitted they were wrong to kill Holy Track, Cuthbert, and Asiginak. Later, Eugene Wildstrand would blame this act of violence on “the heat of things.” Geraldine replies by wondering “what doesn’t happen in the heat of things?” Geraldine gets a bite on her fishing line and reels in a turtle.
In its early chapters, The Plague of Doves vacillated between Evelina’s intense, momentary passions and the large-scale arcs of history. But here, Geraldine knits the two together, arguing that history is determined by impulsive decisions—and that what seems like a sweeping historical arc is in fact just a series of choices made in “the heat of things.”
Themes
When they get the turtle into boat, Geraldine realizes (from the initials carved into the shell) that this is the same turtle she and her boyfriend caught when they were young. On the way home, Coutts worries that his romance with Geraldine is doomed before it has even begun. As he makes himself dinner, he thinks of his grandfather, who survived against all odds as part of the first (failed) town-site expedition in Pluto. A turtle saved his grandfather’s life back then, and the thought comforts Coutts.
Even in small ways, like this turtle Geraldine catches and then recatches, history surfaces to this present (in this case, literally). Coutts’s patient mindset—which readers will soon learn is a family trademark—reflects his interest in the famous Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who urged moderation and self-discipline above all.
Themes
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