Stick Out Your Elbows, and Hold Yourself Up

          From the very beginning of the novel, Orleanna Price invites the reader to consider the guilt or innocence of herself and various members of her family, not only as far as their involvement in Ruth May's death, but also their effect on the continent of Africa. Kingsolver explores how they all feel this guilt as a result of their fault of complacency.
          Orleanna was not the one who beat the Bible into their children, diminished the value of the women, and forcibly put the family into a dangerous, though avoidable, situation. Yet, she agonizes over her own part in these events. Each Price daughter shoulders the terrible burden of being involved in Ruth May's death, though it was not any of them who arranged for the snake to be in their chicken house that night.  The majority were utterly blind to the atrocities committed, while the powerful few white people subjugated the African continent, and yet the Price family, for their whiteness, carry this immense guilt for these actions.
         As Rachel repeats to herself, it wasn't her personally who ordered or carried out assassinations, schemes, and battles- why should she feel guilty?
         Kingsolver analyzes how guilt not only affects the wrongdoers but those who knew them, loved them, or did not protest them: those who were complicit. Those who stuck out their elbows and held themselves up, swept away by the crowd, in order to survive. Just because they did not do anything to intentionally aid the wrongdoing does not mean that they did nothing.
        Every action has an effect, no matter how insignificant it may seem. Recall the scene of a mother and her four daughters trekking through the jungle: she brushes aside a spider web. She slashes through a branch in her way. Now, that spider will have to weave a new web, and that branch will never grow and contribute to the jungle skyline, forever altering it. The youngest daughter squashes a bug under her toe, and the presence of humans scares away an okapi from the river. Now, that bug has died before its time, all its work unfinished, and the okapi will go thirsty for a while. None of this would have happened if they had not come walking that day, and all of that did happen because they had. Every sound they uttered and every footprint they left had an effect the jungle forever.
        Similarly, none of them can be entirely removed from the events which gave them so much guilt, no matter how much Rachel may want to disagree. They might not have done anything good, or they might not have done anything bad, but they all did something. They all had some effect. They went along with the masses, stuck out their elbows and held themselves up, and they were complicit.