Slaughterhouse by Greg Sarris
"Slaughterhouse" by Greg Sarris is a coming-of-age story centered on Frankie, a fourteen-year-old boy navigating the complexities of adolescence in a struggling, racially diverse community. Born to a Portuguese father and a Native American mother, Frankie finds himself caught between childhood innocence and the adult world, feeling too old for parental care yet too young for employment. His daily life is marked by interactions with a group of local boys, who engage in conversations filled with youthful curiosity about sex and relationships, particularly regarding a girl named Caroline.
The narrative takes a darker turn as the local slaughterhouse becomes a significant backdrop, symbolizing both mystery and danger. It serves as a site of intrigue for Frankie and his friends, who fantasize about the sinister activities occurring there, including the exploitation of women. As Frankie grapples with his feelings for Caroline, which clash with his burgeoning sexual desires, he faces the daunting task of confronting the realities of their environment. His experiences culminate in a night at the slaughterhouse that ultimately strips away his youthful idealism and exposes him to the stark truths of his surroundings. Through Frankie's journey, Sarris explores themes of identity, sexuality, and the loss of innocence against the backdrop of a troubled community.
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Slaughterhouse by Greg Sarris
First published: 1991
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: The 1980's
Locale: The western United States
Principal Characters:
Frankie , the fourteen-year-old narratorBuster Copaz , the leader of his gangCaroline Copaz , Buster's cousin and Frankie's idealized girlfriendOld Julia , Frankie's friendless aunt
The Story
Frankie, the fourteen-year-old narrator, has a Portuguese father and a Native American mother. They all live amid a chaos of poverty with his father's brother Angelo, various Indian relatives, and several other children. Frankie, who describes himself as too old for his mother to tend and too young to get a job, spends his time hanging out with a racially mixed group of teenagers from the rundown community. They are not vicious boys, only bored adolescents who fill their lives with idle talk about girls and an obsessive interest in the seedy adult world that surrounds them.
Worried about his sexual powers, Frankie fantasizes about Caroline, an American Indian girl who has recently moved into a shabby neighborhood called the Hole. He thinks that she might become his first sexual conquest, but the prospect of negotiating such an encounter scares him. Moreover, his genuinely tender feelings for Caroline clash with his pressing sexual need and cause him great confusion. He desires both a virgin and a sexual dynamo, and he does not know how to resolve this dilemma.
The local slaughterhouse often looms up in the boys' imagination because it has a mysterious aura as a holy site of animal sacrifice and accumulating myth. It is more than that, however. It stands on Santa Rosa Avenue, a neighborhood where people keep chickens and cows in their yards and where small houses lurk behind abandoned refrigerators and other appliances. At night, two nefarious local denizens, Smoke and Indian Princess Sally Did, sell girls in the slaughterhouse. This commercial enterprise constantly occupies the sex-haunted imaginations of the coalition members—Buster Copaz and Mickey Toms (Indians, like Frankie), Victor James (African American), and the "angel-face" Navarro twins, Jesus and Ignacio.
The slaughterhouse has a companion barn, used to store hay for the horses on death row, which becomes an observation post for the curious boys as they snoop on Smoke and Sally Did. One day when the conspirators are in the barn, eagerly examining a girlie magazine they haven stolen from Sally Did's Cadillac, they draw straws to see who will sneak into the slaughterhouse that night to spy on the patrons. Frankie draws the short straw.
Apprehensive about this frightening commitment to his gang, Frankie spends the day seeking distraction. He visits an aunt, Old Julia, who laughs gleefully at his efforts to tidy up her yard. Later he calls on Caroline at her bedraggled home, where he comes under the amused eye of a neighbor, old man Toms. Walking under the cypress trees with Caroline, Frankie tries to convince her of his sincerity, but his sexual overtures prompt her cutting rejection that he is "just like all the rest." Caroline runs home, leaving Frankie angry and confused.
Frankie then goes home to the domestic confusion that reigns among his extended family. His father sits with Uncle Angelo at the kitchen table, where they console themselves with beer, while his mother, her hair festooned with pink plastic curlers, pushes beans around in a pot. Grandma and Old Uncle are by the stove, and noisy children contribute to the general disorder. After his belly is full of beans, Frankie faces up to his appointment at the slaughterhouse as his only chance to salvage a day filled with defeat.
The slaughterhouse is menacing at night, with the screams of dying horses and the smell of their rubbery guts weighing heavily on Frankie's lively imagination. What he observes there, however, is innocuous and banal. Smoke, Sally, and "the girls" promenade around a makeshift arena made up of cardboard boxes stacked on three sides and Sally's gold Cadillac on the fourth. Sally and an orange-haired black girl are leading another girl in a dark shawl in some kind of ceremony accompanied by music from a big transistor radio. The girl wears a tight red dress and wobbles as if she is drunk. Behind her lipstick and "done up" hair, Frankie recognizes Caroline as the apparent initiate.
Frankie gropes his way out of the slaughterhouse to the waiting coalition, where the admiring boys are disappointed by his deflating report of "just some people dancing around." They muster a poker face, though, and head for the park to find "some chicks," staying tough to the end. For Frankie, however, the experience spells the end of whatever scrap of youthful idealism his soul has retained.