Jacob Have I Loved

“I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn’t matter. He didn’t have any friends but me, so he wasn’t likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed. I thought it was a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes.”

Louise establishes her relationship with her only friend, Call, including her futile efforts to make him laugh—a failure that makes the Captain’s later success more bitter for Louise. Though Louise says that she only “sticks” with Call because neither of them have other friends, and because they work well together while crabbing, her later jealousy over his friendship belies this claim.

“What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.”

Louise feels her birth to have been a double disappointment: She was not born a son, and she was not the center of attention. She traces the roots of her sense of sibling rivalry to the moments of their birth. Based on this idea, Louise feels that Caroline steals everything Louise has, from their parents’ love and attention to Louise’s friends. Louise believes throughout the novel that being born first and female has doomed her to neglect and hardship.

“I felt as if those of us on the stage were floating in another layer of the world, removed from those below. When I squinted my eyes, the people all blurred like a film that has jumped the sprockets and is racing untended through the machine. I think I sang most of the program with my eyes squinted. It was a very comforting feeling thus to remove myself from the world I imagined was laughing at me.”

This passage includes an evocative image of shifting one’s sight to blur out the world, a sensation that many readers can probably replicate or imagine. It also speaks to Louise’s mindset, including fear that everyone in the village, and even the world, is laughing at her, and the general sense of isolation that she experiences throughout the story.

“Caroline’s voice came suddenly like a single beam of light across the darkness.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky

Why Jesus the Savior did come for to die

For poor on’ry people like you and like I

I wonder as I wander–out under the sky.

It was a lonely, lonely sound, but so clear, so beautiful that I tightened my arms against my sides to keep from shaking, perhaps shattering.”

The imagery used to describe Caroline’s singing is beautiful and powerful. Louise experiences Caroline’s voice with a palpable tension that is both painful and exhilarating. This description of a beautiful voice that makes her feel like she is shattering and the first line of the song both repeat at the very end of the novel, bringing Louise’s story full circle.

“The women of my island were not supposed to love the water. Water was the wild, untamed kingdom of our men. And though water was the element in which our tiny island lived and moved and had its being, the women resisted its power over their lives as a wife might pretend to ignore the existence of her husband’s mistress.”

Water is a vital element throughout the novel, symbolizing both the realm of the masculine and Louise’s desire for independence. Louise clearly distinguishes between the way men and women on Rass Island feel about, and speak about, water, placing herself squarely with the men. However, this aspect of her identity is at odds with her simultaneously romantic nature and her need to escape her family’s expectations.

“At any rate, it was Call the Captain liked, not me. If I’d been a more generous person, I’d have been happy that Call had found a man to be close to. He didn’t remember his own father, and if any boy needed a father it was Call. But I was not a generous person. I couldn’t afford to be. Call was my only friend. If I gave him up to the Captain, I’d have no one.”

This is the first of several incidents where Louise fears that someone will take something she desperately needs away from her. She acknowledges her own ungenerous nature in this regard but is so isolated that she must jealously guard her friendships. Her fear that the Captain will steal Call away is later echoed by her fear that Caroline will steal them both.

“It is hard, even now, to describe my relationship to Caroline in those days. We slept in the same room, ate at the same table, sat for nine months out of each year in the same classroom, but none of these had made us close. […] And yet, if we were not close, why did only Caroline have the power, with a single glance, to slice my flesh clear through to the bone?”

Louise highlights one of the most painful aspects of conflict between siblings, which is that few people in one’s life have the same power to wound that a sibling has. Caroline is an inseparable part of Louise’s life, who has known her every moment of their lives, and therefore has an impact that no one else could possibly have.

“She would not fight with me. Perhaps that was the thing that made me hate her most. Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was equivalent to murder.”

Two important facts emerge in this passage. First, Louise’s sibling rivalry with Caroline appears to be one-sided. Though Caroline is capable of deeply hurting Louise, she does not ever appear to be actively trying to compete with her sister. Second, Louise’s feelings of guilt and damnation, which form one of her internal conflicts, are first established here.

“When the last cat was placed, we went back to Auntie Braxton’s. The Captain had put chairs on top of tables and was beginning to mop the floor with hot water and disinfectant. Call told him the whole story of Caroline’s feat, house by house, cat by cat. They laughed and imitated the befuddled women at the door. Caroline threw in imitations of happy, drunken cats while the Captain and Call hooted with delight, and I felt as I always did when someone told the story of my birth.”

The way the Captain and Call ignore Louise’s contribution to saving the cats’ lives and happily praise Caroline’s suggestion echoes the story of Louise’s and Caroline’s births. Just as Louise was ignored as an infant in favor of tiny, sickly Caroline, so too is she ignored here. Even this relatively small incident becomes another instance of the inescapable pattern of her entire life.

“I had never seen a mountain, except in a geography text. I was fourteen, and I had never even seen a real mountain. I was going to, though. I was not going to end up like my Grandma, fearful and shriveled.”

Louise compares herself to her grandmother and decides that she will not end up the same way. This is the first time Louise dreams of seeing mountains, an ambition that appears again later. In the end, she succeeds in fulfilling this dream and in that way finds her independence and her own family.

“Then, suddenly, something happened. I can’t explain it. I had not put my arms around another person since I was tiny. It may have been the unaccustomed closeness, I don’t know. I had only meant to comfort him, but as I smelled his sweat and felt the spring of his beard against my cheek, an alarm began to clang inside my body. I went hot all over, and I could hear my heart banging to be let out of my chest.”

In one of the most powerful passages of the novel, Louise has a sudden romantic and sexual awakening as she hugs the Captain. Though she knows that the feelings are inappropriate, they still represent an important step toward adulthood. They also trigger an obsession and guilt that haunts Louise in the second half of the novel.

“[M]y own hands caught my eye. The nails were broken and none too clean, the cuticles ragged. There was a crack of red at the edge of my index finger where a hangnail had been chewed away. […] A man with strong clean hands would never look at me in love. No man would. At the moment, it seemed worse than being forsaken by God.”

After noticing how clean and strong the Captain’s hands are, Louise then fixates on her own hands. She compares them to the Pond’s lotion ad and concludes that because her hands are not beautiful therefore no man will ever love her. This sets in motion her obsession with hands and her conviction that hands symbolize a person’s destiny in life.

“My mental project that fall was a study of all the hands of the classroom. It was my current theory that hands were the most revealing part of the human body–far more significant than eyes. For example, if all you were shown of Caroline’s body were her hands, you would know at once that she was an artistic person. […] In contrast I observed that Call’s hands were wide with short fingers, the nails bitten well below the quick. They were red and rough to show he worked hard, but not muscled enough to give them any dignity. Reluctantly, I concluded that they were the hands of a good-hearted but second-rate person.”

This passage expands on Louise’s obsession with hands and explains her theory of why hands are the most important signifier of a person’s character and fate. She compares Caroline’s, Call’s, and her own hands, and believes she knows what each person’s fate will be. However, her assumptions prove wrong later, when Call not only gains dignity and attractiveness but also marries Caroline.

“I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After all, I hadn’t thrown the lotion bottle at anyone, just the wall. There was no need to warn or disturb my parents. I could probably live out my life on the island in my own quiet, crazy way, much as Auntie Braxton always had.”

Tormented by her feelings for the Captain, and her belief in her own undesirability, Louise chooses to believe that she is, in her words, becoming “crazy.” The feeling helps her frame her sense of isolation—not just from her family, but from her community more broadly—while it also excuses her from having to take responsibility for her actions, since madness is an outside force that she just has to live with the best she can.

“The words roared in my ears like a storm wind. I put the kettle on and laid out cups and spoons. Everything seemed so heavy I could hardly pick them up. I struggled to pry the lid from the can of tea leaves, aware that my grandmother had come in and was standing close behind me. I stiffened at the sound of her hoarse whisper.

‘Romans nine thirteen,’ she said. ‘As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.’”

Having just heard the Captain’s plans for sending Caroline to school, Louise retreats into the kitchen to process her tumultuous feelings. Her grandmother follows her, cruelly deploying a Bible verse that makes Louise feel worse. Here, the title of the novel becomes clear. This Bible passage ties directly to the theme of sibling rivalry.

“There was, then, no use struggling or even trying. It was God himself who hated me. And without cause. ‘Therefore,’ verse eighteen had gone on to rub it in, ‘hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.’ God had chosen to hate me. And if my heart was hard, that was his doing as well.”

Following Grandma’s taunt about Jacob and Esau, Louise cannot remember if it was the father or mother who said they loved Jacob and hated Esau. Then she checks the Bible passage and discovers it was God who spoke the line. Louise concludes that God has chosen to hate her for no reason, just as he chose to hate Esau. Louise sees her own fate in that of Esau.

“When the war in Europe ended eight days later, it was overshadowed by the news from Baltimore that Caroline had been accepted by the Juilliard School of Music in New York on a full scholarship. I looked upon this announcement with enormous relief as the end of any sacrifice I would ever be asked to make for Caroline.”

WWII exists in the background throughout the novel without having much impact on the plot or the characters’ lives except when Call leaves to join the Navy. The fact that Caroline’s happy news is more important and impactful than the end of the war once again shows how much the Bradshaw family revolves around Caroline’s success.

“I wonder if I shall ever feel as old again as I did that Christmas. My grandmother with her charm, gaudy and perishable as a dime-store jewelry–whoever had a more exasperating child to contend with? The Captain responded with the dignity of a young teen who is being pestered by a child whose parents he is determined to impress. While I was the aged parent, weary of the tiresome antics of the one and the studied patience of the other.”

This passage has a certain humor, as Louise takes on the parental role for the two oldest people in her life. Grandma and the Captain both behave like children, one petulant and the other diffident, highlighting Louise’s continuous role as a de facto caretaker. Though it has already been clear that Louise has grown out of her crush on the Captain, this scene solidifies the fact.

“Sara Louise. You were never meant to be a woman on this island. A man, perhaps. Never a woman.”

The Captain says this to Louise when she admits she had hoped life on the island might be better once Call returned. This is an important moment when Louise must confront her own conflicted feelings about Rass Island. It also recalls the idea that the water is meant for men only and she will always be excluded.

“‘Your sister knew what she wanted, so when the chance came, she could take it.’ I opened my mouth, but he waved me quiet. ‘You, Sara Louise. Don’t tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don’t need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you’re after, my dear.’”

Still speaking, the Captain asks what Louise wants in life. He is the first person who has ever asked her this, and she has no answer. However, before she can complain that all her chances were given away to Caroline, the Captain insists that she is strong enough to do it herself. Her real problem was that she never actually knew what she wanted.

“‘Let me go. Let me leave!’

‘Of course you may leave. You never said before you wanted to leave.’

And, oh, my blessed, she was right. All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.”

Louise fights with her mother for the first time, afraid that she will be stuck on the island like her mother, and angry over the preference that Caroline received. Then, just as the Captain did, her mother asks what she wants and points out that Louise never explicitly said before that she wanted to leave. Louise realizes that the only thing holding her back was her own fear.

“I wanted so to believe her. ‘Will you really?’ I asked. ‘As much as you miss Caroline?’

‘More,’ she said, reaching up and ever so lightly smoothing my hair with her fingertips. I did not press her to explain. I was too grateful for that one word that allowed me at least to leave the island and begin to build myself as a soul, separate from the long, long shadow of my twin.”

This moment marks a vital turning point in Louise’s sense of identity. She has spent her whole life competing with her sister and feeling inadequate and neglected. Now that her mother confesses that she will miss Louise even more than she misses Caroline, Louise dares not examine the admission too closely for fear it will fall apart. The idea alone is enough to give Louise the courage to step out from beneath her sister’s shadow, but it also forces her to reevaluate everything she previously thought about her life.

“‘I kept wondering ever since you came. Why would a woman like you, who could have anything she wanted, come to a place like this? Now I understand.’ He left off stroking his daughter’s hair and leaned forward, his big hands open as though he needed their help to explain his meaning. […] ‘God in heaven’s been raising you for this valley from the day you were born.’”

Now living and working as a nurse-midwife in an Appalachian village, Louise speaks with Joseph, the man she will eventually marry. His words to her closely echo Louise’s words to her mother during their fight, making it clear that Louise has followed a similar path to her mother’s despite herself. At first, she is angry at the thought, but then she realizes it is true.