Before the ‘Crawdads,’ There Were Elephants
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By Michael Malone
Delia Owens, author of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” was on page one of The New York Times in recent days, but the story had nothing to do with her smash novel. Well before the book’s 2018 publication, Delia and her husband at the time, Mark, hustled to save elephants from being illegally killed in Zambia.
Many saw them as heroes for cracking down on poachers who killed elephants and sold their tusks, and killed hippos and rhinos as well. Others saw them as white interlopers with a colonial mindset. As the Times put it, “rich outsiders with an agenda centered on protecting animals from people who ate their meat, who often felt they had a right to the wildlife and whose ancestors had lived with the animals for centuries. The couple’s relative wealth and status enabled them to push their agenda, which the Zambian villagers felt they had little choice but to accept.”
The couple gave the rural Zambians milk, sugar, goats and sheep. They urged them to leave the elephants alone. Still, some saw the Owens as yet another collection of white people coming from far away, and telling Africans how to go about their business.
The couple had initially arrived in Botswana in 1984, and were kicked out by the government a couple years later due to their wildlife activism. They turned up in Zambia in 1986 and departed Africa a decade later, after a film about them, showing a man alleged to be a poacher who was shot dead, was released.
Delia Owens lives in North Carolina, and co-authored, with Mark, three memoirs based on her time in Africa: “Cry of the Kalahari” from 1984, “The Eye of the Elephant” from 1992 and “Secrets of the Savannah” from 2006.
Then she took a shot at a novel. “Where the Crawdads Sing” came out when she was 70.
Her wildlife research in Africa, including studying how female elephants stuck together and took care of their offspring while male elephants were out doing male elephant things, such as mating and meals, was a factor in ‘Crawdads.’
“Delia’s research on the importance of female grouping in social mammals influenced her fictional writing,” her website says. “Where the Crawdads Sing” explores the behavioral impact on a young woman who is forced to live much of her young life without a group.”
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is the uncommon novel that is read by the masses. Reese Witherspoon included it in Reese’s Book Club, and can also be enjoyed by the more discerning, even snobbish reader as well.
Living in coastal North Carolina, Kya is abandoned by a disturbed mother, an abusive father and a group of siblings who simply cannot stick it out in this rough setting any longer.
After her mother departs, Kya lives with her a-hole father until his death. She tries to attend school, but she’s widely mocked as ‘the Marsh Girl.” Despite her lack of education, she knows the marshes and the animals who inhabit them intimately.
Teen Kya ends up in a relationship with Tate, a kind boy who breaks her heart after he takes off for college. He inspires her to author reference books on nature in her region. She later finds herself in a relationship with Chase, the high school quarterback and a guy from a prominent family. Knowing he can never introduce the Marsh Girl to his well-to-do parents, he finds a more suitable partner without telling Kya.
Chase later ends up dead, having plummeted from a fire tower.
Did the Marsh Girl have something to do with it? A trial ensues.
The book got a staggering 4.4 out of 5 on GoodReads from over 2.6 million people who rated it. A review in The Guardian said, “Though set in the 1950s and 60s, ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is, in its treatment of racial and social division and the fragile complexities of nature, obviously relevant to contemporary politics and ecology. But these themes will reach a huge audience through the writer’s old-fashioned talents for compelling character, plotting and landscape description.”
Witherspoon produced the 2022 movie, which had Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya. (Edgar-Jones played Marianne in “Normal People,” a book we wrote about last month.)
Well before the ‘Crawdads’ movie, Delia Owens appeared in a film. The ABC program “Turning Point” had an episode about Delia and Mark Owens in Africa in the mid-1990s. Entitled “Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story,” it saw Meredith Vieira check in with the couple in Zambia.
Delia tells Vieira about the elephant poachers that repeatedly tried to kill them. “Lions don’t frighten me nearly as much as humans,” she said.
The Owens’ time in Africa is a fascinating story. So is Kya’s time in the Carolina marsh.
Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.
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