Pet

“Bitter knew her name was heavy, but she hadn’t minded, because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam—that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest […] But Jam trusted her mother for those brutal truths, and that’s why home was the first place she brought the books with the angels in them.”

Bitter is her mother’s daughter, named for the circumstances of her birth. The truth is bittersweet, and so is the tone of Emezi’s novel. Bitter’s daughter being named Jam speaks to this coupling of unpleasantness with pleasure.

“Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. ‘Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.’”

Bitter’s quote sets up the entire premise of Emezi’s novel. In the text, it is almost impossible for people to tell monsters and non-monsters apart. Later, Jam will learn that the only way to determine who is a monster is to see what she does not want to see. Jam learns to spot the signs of monstrous actions and eventually finds the culprit responsible for them.

“Bitter tilted her head, and something sad entered her eyes. ‘It not easy to get rid of monsters,’ she said. ‘The angels, they had to do things underhand, dark things.’”

Emezi does not simplify the morality of angels and monsters into categories of good and bad. Bitter’s statement to Jam clarifies how the angels had to do morally complex things to better the world. Emezi questions accepted definitions of good, making clear that it does not and should not be equated with complete innocence.

“Jam sighed and freed her hands from her mother’s so she could say the words, lifted from an old Gwendolyn Brooks poem, words the angels had used when they gave Lucille back to itself. A revolution cry. We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

This excerpt from Gwendolyn Brooks’s ode to Paul Robeson is the thesis of the novel. It is a rallying call that connects all the people of Lucille together. The quote emphasizes how everyone is connected to each other, and the responsibility that every single person has to others in their community.

“Yes, child. Angels aren’t pretty pictures in old holy books, just like monsters aren’t ugly pictures. It’s all just people, doing hard things or doing bad things. But is all just people, our people.”

Bitter’s statement to Jam foreshadows Pet’s true identity. It also echoes the different lessons that Jam will learn by the end of the novel. The simplification of good and bad things into angels and monsters is misleading at best and leads to the creation of a false moral binary.

“When Jam was a toddler, she’d refused to speak, which was why they’d taught her to sign instead. She used her hands and body and face for her words but saved her voice for the most important one—screamed out during her first and only temper tantrum, when she was three, when someone had complimented her for the thousandth time by calling her ‘such a handsome little boy’ and Jam had flung herself on the floor under her parents’ shocked gazes, screaming her first word with explosive sureness. ‘Girl! Girl! Girl!’”

Jam’s gender identity is a vital part of her character and Emezi does not stray from depicting the pain the protagonist feels at being misgendered as a little girl. Jam has an intimate understanding of things not being as they appear, which leads to her connection with Pet later in the novel. Bitter and Aloe’s unshakable support of their daughter speaks to the need for greater acceptance and understanding of transgender children.

“You know you’re still a girl whether you get surgery or not, right? No one gets to tell you anything different.”

Bitter and Aloe are extremely supportive of Jam and are quick to reassure her that she is a girl with or without the surgery. Emezi makes clear here that gender and sex are entirely different things, and physical transitioning is not a prerequisite to respecting a person’s gender identity.

“She got on her knees and shuffled back to the painting, peering at it without the vertigo of standing upright, cradling her hand to her chest. There were drops of her blood on the figure’s chest where she’d fallen—though it was hard to tell them apart from the bloody streaks Bitter had already painted—and looking closer, she saw those glints of metal she’d noticed before. Jam tilted her head, and the light danced off them, bright and steel. Her mouth fell open as she recognized what they were: razor blades. Oh shit, she thought. Bitter’s gone mad.”

Bitter’s painting is an assemblage of different materials, made of paint, photographs, and metal razor blades. Jam, as the new generation, adds to Bitter’s work when she accidentally cuts herself and bleeds onto the canvas. Through a combination of Bitter and Jam’s blood, sweat, and tears, Pet gains entrance into the world. Emezi uses this accidental collaboration to symbolize intergenerational cooperation as a catalyst for change.

“The chalkfur Bitter had painted was rustling now, and Jam held back a cry as she saw the small blob of blood vanish into the painting with a quick sucking sound. She stumbled backward, her eyes wide, as the figure started coming out of the canvas.”

The speculative novel seemingly set in the utopian future takes on an edge of fantasy at this moment in the text. Pet’s entrance into the text marks the initiation of conflict in the narrative, the beginning of Jam’s loss of innocence. Pet’s arrival is portrayed as a physical disruption in Jam’s world and in Lucille.

“The same Bitter who wouldn’t let Jam get a pet had gone and called up a monster.”

Jam takes Pet’s appearance for granted and believes it to be a monster. Despite the lessons she learned from her mother in the previous chapters, Jam is still stuck in the trap of believing that things are entirely as they appear. She is more ready to accept contradiction in Bitter than recognize Pet’s true nature. She has not yet learned to see the truth, a lesson that she will learn by the end of the novel.

“Well, little girl, it replied, I suppose you can call me Pet.”

This key moment represents a distinct change in the tone of the novel. Pet has come to wreak vengeance on Lucille. Belying its violent vendetta, Pet, in name and in practice, bonds with Jam and becomes her companion.

‘“Your world is unpleasant, your truths are unpleasant, the hunt is unpleasant.’ Pet looked at her with its goldblank face, and thin tendrils drifted out of its mouth. ‘But unpleasant things must be done for unpleasant purposes out of unpleasant necessity.”’

This moment in the text encapsulates the theme of moral ambiguity that appears throughout the novel. Neither angels nor monsters are purely good or bad, just as people are neither purely good nor bad and must be judged by their actions. Emezi’s emphasis on the need for “unpleasantness” speaks to the difficult things that angels must do to better the world.

“All this was her fault, all of it, and she had broken their world, allowed something else into it, allowed not just Pet but conflict between two parents who usually did nothing more than lovingly bicker, and now nothing felt safe and nothing felt okay and it was all her fault. […] She dropped her hands to her sides and opened her eyes to a world that wasn’t real anymore. Her parents were puppets, animated before her, and Pet was turning its head slowly, as if it could smell how quickly she was floating away. Jam watched as it stepped in and pulled her with a feathered arm, placing her body against its streaked fur.” 

Jam’s anxiety manifests most clearly in this moment of the novel. She is wracked with guilt for bringing Pet to life, and she begins to blame herself for her parents’ arguing. Jam disassociates in response to her fear and anxiety. Pet’s protectiveness over Jam is foreshadowed here, as it is the only one who takes notice of the little girl’s anxiety.

‘“You two are scaring her,’ Pet said, its voice level. ‘Are you not ashamed, are you not full of shame, see how shameful you shamelessly shout about me being here, not once thinking if your child was safe, without noticing her, you shame things, where are your eyes, they are not clouded by shame, but maybe they should be.”’

Pet’s sense of justice and righteousness is made especially clear upon its confrontation of Bitter and Aloe. While it is hell-bent on hunting down the monster, it is also extremely protective of Jam, a child, and thus one of the most vulnerable members of society. Pet believes that Bitter and Aloe should be ashamed of themselves for not putting Jam’s welfare above their own.

‘“I said no. This is a new Lucille. We’re safe. There are no more monsters.’ Pet’s mouth stretched in amusement, and a sheet of smoke dripped out. ‘You keep lying that lie, liar.’”

Pet is not at all swayed by Aloe’s insistence that there are no longer monsters in Lucille. It goes beyond calling Aloe disillusioned, it calls Aloe a liar. Aloe’s refusal to believe that monsters could still exist encapsulates the willful ignorance that Emezi critiques throughout the novel.

“Pet crouched down and slid its spine from side to side, as if stretching. ‘It is not a what. It is a who. The why is monstrous. The when is here.’”

Pet’s statement is an indictment of Lucille and the angels who have become complacent and failed to take care of the most vulnerable citizens. Pet repeatedly insists throughout the text that its arrival is not a mistake. In this moment, Pet’s goal, its reason for existing becomes especially clear.

“Pet’s head angled down to face her. A monster, it replied, and Jam’s stomach plummeted. They looked at each other, a silent understanding thrumming between them. It was an answer she’d been expecting, without knowing she’d been expecting it. Of course there were still monsters, Jam thought. Could you really make something stop existing just by shoving it away somewhere else?”

Jam already knows what her parents refuse to see. Despite how certain Aloe is that there are no more monsters in Lucille, Jam has an inkling that the refusal to speak about them or deal with them does not actually fix the problem. Emezi alludes to the prison industrial complex in this quote; they encourage the reader to consider if simply sending monsters away helps society at all.

“Pet shrugged, its metal shoulders glinting as the feathers slid over each other. I am not allowed to move so freely in this your world, it said with a trace of bitterness that pooled, oily, in the air between them. That is why you are important: there must be a hunter like me; there must be a hunter who is human, who can go where I cannot go, see what I cannot see.”

Pet cannot hunt the monster alone. Though Pet is a supernatural creature capable of hurting and hunting down the monster, it needs Jam’s help to find it. Pet thus represents the catalyst for change, an inspiration to push Jam to see the wrongs in the world and fix them.

“There had been so much counseling, so many treatment programs, so much rehabilitation to be done. So many amends to be made, the makings of how different justice could look. It was no small thing to try to restructure a society, to find the pus boiling away under the scabs, to peel back the hardened flesh to let it out.”

Emezi speaks to the endless number of monsters in the world and the variety of different ways that evil can manifest. The exhaustion that fills Bitter here echoes the angels’ own weariness at the endless work of “addressing the wounds” (69). This tiredness and unwillingness to speak about the past directly leads to the complacency of Lucille at the beginning of the novel.

“These people were family, had been family. And now Pet was telling her that one of them was a monster? Standing in the glow of that kitchen, Jam couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it. Pet had to be wrong, she decided. Yeah, there was no other option. She would tell it so when she got home. […] How could some creature from a painting know these people, her people, better than she did?”

Ignorance is bliss: The axiom perfectly encapsulates Jam’s perspective in this moment. It would be easier for Jam to ignore Pet, to deny and refuse to see the ugly truth hiding beneath the surface. Jam tries to convince herself that everything is fine, because intervening would directly change the foundations of her world.

“The truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen, it whispered in her mind. A thing that is happening happens whether you look at it or not. And yes, maybe it is easier not to look. Maybe it is easier to say because you do not see it, it is not happening.”

Jam does not want to admit that monsters might still exist in Lucille. Refusing to see the truth does not right the wrongs that have occurred, nor does it return the world to the way Jam used to view it. Emezi speaks through Pet in this moment and directly to the reader. Though it might be easier to ignore the injustices and evils in the world, ignorance only further perpetuates those wrongs.

Pet tries to convince Jam that anyone can be a monster. This realization breaks Jam’s view of the world. She does not want to believe that someone in Redemption’s family could be responsible for hurting Moss. Pet tells her that it is their duty to uncover the doer of these monstrous deeds, regardless of how dear the person might be to her and Redemption.

Pet tries to convince Jam that anyone can be a monster. This realization breaks Jam’s view of the world. She does not want to believe that someone in Redemption’s family could be responsible for hurting Moss. Pet tells her that it is their duty to uncover the doer of these monstrous deeds, regardless of how dear the person might be to her and Redemption.

“And now it was opening its wings, and there was a great light starting to seep out from under the shield of gold feathers, and Jam knew as surely as if Pet had told her itself that it was going to show its true face to Hibiscus. She didn’t know what that would look like, what it would mean, or what it would do to Hibiscus, but somehow she knew that it was a terrible thing that was about to happen.”

In contrast to Pet’s monstrous appearance, Pet is revealed to be an angel. Pet is the apocalyptic, righteous, and terrifying angel of old religious texts that Jam reads about at the beginning of the novel. Though Pet is an undeniably important character throughout the work, it also represents how appearances can lead to misconceptions.