88 pages • 2 hours read
And The Earth Did Not Devour Him
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Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Hand in His Pocket”
The boy stays with Don Laíto and Doña Bone for three weeks until school ends, when his parents will pick him up. They have paid Don Laíto and Doña Bone for the boy’s room and board. Everyone likes the couple, “[e]ven the Anglos” (89). The boy says they steal and are bootleggers but are still “good people” (90). They attempt to sell to the Mexicans what they steal then give away what they cannot sell.
At first, they are nice to the boy, and he likes staying with them, but by the end of his stay, he is afraid of them. They feed him rotten food that makes him sick, and he sleeps in a dark, musty room stuffed with boxes, clothing, and almanacs. Doña Bone likes to scare him by jumping at him unexpectedly. Don Laíto rubs his hands under his arms then kneads dough for sweet bread. They make the boy work in their yard and try to get him to steal, though he refuses.
During the boy’s first week with the couple, a “wetback” begins paying Doña Bone to visit her when Don Laíto is away (91). The boy is not allowed in the house while the man is there. The boy overhears Doña Bone tell Don Laíto that the man “has money” and add, “it would be so easy” because the man does not have “anyone to worry about him” (92). The next day, they instruct the boy to dig a hole for a cellar. After three days, they tell him they have changed their minds. When he goes to bed, he finds the man’s body in his bed covered in blood. The boy is terrified, but Don Laíto and Doña Bone laugh and make him help them bury the body in the hole he dug. They threaten to tell the police the boy killed him. When his parents come to pick him up, they say he looks skinny and frightened. After a few months, Don Laíto and Doña Bone visit the boy and give him a ring the murdered man wore. The boy is afraid to get rid of it but puts his hand in his picket whenever he sees strangers.
Vignette 5 Summary
A first personfirst-person boy narrator goes to a barber’s for a haircut. No one will cut his hair, and he is told to leave. He goes across the street to a movie theater and waits for the show to start, but the barber comes out and asks him to leave. The narrator resolves to find his father and tell him what has happened.
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Silvery Night”
A boy wakes up one night to summon the devil at midnight. The devil has fascinated the boy for his whole life. He recalls seeing shepherds’ plays. Don Rayos, who plays the role of the devil wearing “his black metal mask, with his red horns and black cape,” tells the boy that “many who have summoned” the devil and later regret it and go insane (96). The boy waits for his siblings and parents to fall asleep and takes a clock with him so he will know when it is exactly midnight.
He is afraid but does not believe the devil can hurt him because he is not dead. The boy notes that if the devil does not appear, it means there is no God, and if there is no devil, “maybe there’s no punishment” either (97). The boy uses different names to summon the devil, but no one comes. He swears and feels disillusioned but also brave. He concludes “[t]here is nothing” and goes home to bed where he reflects on the evening’s events (98). He gets chills and a stomachache and believes what drives people mad when they summon the devil is not that he appears but that he does not.
Vignette 6 Summary
A Protestant minister visits a farm and says he will send the workers someone to teach them carpentry so they do not have to work in the fields anymore. The men are excited. Two weeks later, a man shows up with a trailer and brings the minister’s wife as his interpreter. The two spend all their time in the trailer and never teach the men any skills. A week later, the man and the minister’s wife leave. The men later learn the two ran off together.
Chapter 7 Summary: “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him”
The boy says he first felt “hate and anger” when he saw his mother crying over the death of his uncle and aunt (100). Their surviving siblings split the couple’s children up among them. The narrator feels angry because he feels powerless “to do anything against anyone” (100). He becomes angry again after his father gets sunstroke. The narrator’s mother scolds him for not coming home. The boy explains they put his father under a tree to rest.
His father suffers from severe cramping for three days. The boy can hear his father moaning in pain and praying for “God’s mercy,” which makes the boy angrier (101). He asks why sickness and work are burying them alive and asks him mother what she hopes to gain from praying and lighting candles, saying, “God doesn’t care about us” (101). His parents are good and do not deserve their suffering. His mother begs him to stop, saying, “It’s as if already the blood of Satan runs through your veins” (102). The boy asks why they work “like animals, with no hope for anything,” adding that only “death brings rest” (102).
The children go to work in the fields while their mother stays home to care for their father. The children feel weak and dizzy from the heat. The boy tells the others to work slowly, stop for rest, drink plenty of water, and not to worry if “the boss gets mad. Just don’t get sick” (103). They work through the heat, occasionally blacking out. The youngest begins vomiting and passes out. The boy carries him home. He again asks why they have to work so hard and suffer so deeply. He weeps with rage and fear then curses God. He fears the earth will devour him, but it remains solid under his feet. That night, he feels “at peace as never before” and “detached from everything” (105). He no longer worries about his father and brother. The next day, both are better. Keeping the previous day’s curses to himself, the boy feels “capable of doing and undoing anything he pleased” (105). He kicks the earth and tells it, “you can’t swallow me up yet” (105).
Vignette 7 Summary
A stroke paralyzes “the grandfather” from the waist down (106). His 20twenty-year-old grandson visits and tells him he wants the next 10 ten years to pass quickly so he can find out what happens in his life. The grandfather calls him stupid and cuts off the conversation. When he turns 30thirty, the grandson realizes why his grandfather had this reaction.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
Chapters five 5 through seven 7 present the boy’s experiences in the Mexican migrant community and further develop the motif of the boy’s religious skepticism. In Cchapter five5, the boy stays with a couple, Don Laíto and Doña Bone, for three weeks as he completes his school year. The characterization of Don Laíto and Doña Bona shows that the narrator does not romanticize the people in his community. They are, like all people, complex, with both good and bad motives and qualities. Don Laíto and Doña Bone exploit their own people. They accept money for the boy’s room and board yet attempt to use him to steal for them. They also terrorize him into helping them cover up the murder of a “wetback,” an ethicethnic slur for Mexicans, typically illegal aliens, living in the United States. The fifth vignette shares a racist incident the boy experiences when he attempts to get his haircut and is refused.
Chapter six 6 describes the boy’s attempt to summon the devil and his disillusionment when the summoning fails. The boy recalls a man, Don Rayos, who dressed as the devil in Mexican shepherds’ plays, morality plays that revolve around the shepherds’ journey to see the Christ child. Shepherds’ plays derived from medieval Spain. Spanish missionaries brought them to the new world, and they became a Mexican tradition. Don Rayos tells the boy that summoning the devil drives people mad. The boy concludes this may be because they lose their faith when they realize there is likely neither devil nor punishment nor God. The vignette that concludes the chapter features a minister’s wife running off with a man the minister sent to help the migrants. The man and the minister’s wife do not fulfill the promise but instead look after their own desires.
The narrator’s view of religious faith as pointless is further explored in Cchapter seven7. The deaths of an aunt and uncle, as well as the illnesses of his father and brother, cause the boy to feel rage and helplessness at the futility of his people’s endless work. He chides his mother for praying when it makes no difference. Still the workers work themselves to illness and death. Cursing God brings no negative consequences, which instill in the boy feelings of power and agency.
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