Feathers

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, pregnancy loss, racism, ableism, and bullying.

Feathers demonstrates how communities are damaged and divided when people base their understandings of one another on their perceived racial differences. Much of the novel’s plot revolves around how the protagonist’s sixth-grade class treats two white-passing boys. Trevor’s family is split by societal divisions based on race because his father is “a white man who live[s] across the highway” in an affluent white neighborhood (5). Trevor takes the pain and shame he feels toward his interracial identity out on his peers, physically attacking his classmates when they speculate about his ethnicity. While Trevor reacts to people’s perceptions by bullying his way to the top of the class’s social pecking order, the Jesus Boy withdraws into himself. The class isolates the new student, and their judgment that “he doesn’t belong” stems from their belief that he is white (11).

This theme culminates in the novel’s climax when the Jesus Boy responds to Trevor’s prolonged bullying about his ethnicity and broaches the taboo subject of the boy’s parentage, saying, “My mama isn’t white and my daddy isn’t white and as far as I know it, you’re the one with the white daddy living across the highway” (88).