Bird on a Wire: A Review of Jane Schwartz's Caught

The pigeon game is usually learned through an informal apprenticeship system. Most boys start when they are between six and eleven years of age. . . . Very few women have ever been involved. . . .

These observations, made by Jane Schwartz in her paper on pigeon-flying published in Folklife Annual (1988), are the basis of Caught (NY: Ballantine, 1985), her novel about a ten-year-old girl who becomes an avid "chaser," or apprentice pigeon-flyer. While the narrative is full of keenly observed details about the folklore of this vanishing New York pastime, Caught is also a perceptive treatment of the gender issues which complicate relationships in general and growing up in particular.

Caught—a title which yields a number of different meanings in the novel—centers around Louie, a bright and determined child. As the book opens, Louie is already involved in the sport, helping her brother Frankie and his pal Michael get revenge on an unsporting player. While the deed nearly costs Louie her life, it also gains her the attention of Casey, a 38-year-old pigeon-flyer, who soon recruits her as his chaser. Louie's apprenticeship is a hands-on training in urban folklore, which exposes her to turf wars between the flyers, the ethnic tensions between them, and the many perils which stalk working-class life. Pigeon-flying grips Louie's imagination more than any other pastime—including school—and Schwartz's narrative is punctuated with lyrical vignettes of swirling, cooing, whirling birds.

Schwartz is straightforward in her treatment of sex and gender. Sex is instinctual, haunting, and compelling. Louie experiences this for herself when she discovers Casey asleep on the roof: "I had never watched anyone asleep before. There was an intimacy about it that was new and vaguely exciting to me." Schwartz is much to be admired for her courage and her decorum in permitting Louie her feelings for Casey; and Casey's awareness of her could well be used as a text in any discussion of sexuality and its abuses. For all the tacit acknowledgment of erotic possibilities, the lines between adult and child are rigorously drawn, both by Casey and by the author. Casey is also Louie's mentor in other life matters: he talks to her about death, friendship, and loneliness, and his closeness and generosity validate Louie's attachment. Casey provides Louie with the respect neither of her parents give her enough of (more about them later). And he goes further than anyone else in steering her through the predictable challenges and the emotional turmoil of adolescence.

Gender, in contrast to sex, is a cultural product. Like the ethnic hostilities which fester among the flyers, gender issues pit Louie against her family, and some of the flyers against each other. Louie, inevitably, is the focus of these conflicts. As a girl trying to enter into an all-male pursuit, she is perceived as an annoyance and a distraction, not because of her age or her small size, but because she is female: "I told you not to let the girl in here," complains one of the flyers, an old antagonist of Casey. "She's only makin' trouble." And the trouble she makes is also gender-based: she imposes a gag on the men, who feel that in mixed company they shouldn't curse or drink because "it ain't ladylike." "Fuck ladylike" is Louie's prescient response. "I just want to know why [a male] gets to do everything and I can't."

Louie's question is given ample support. The males in this novel "get to do" a whole range of things, some of them unsavory, illegal, and immoral. It is also the men who let Louie know what it means to be a girl, and their message is far from encouraging. A girl is to be confined to a string of prohibitions and limitations. Not only can a girl not curse but she has curfews, can't go where she pleases, must help her mother with chores. Girls, too, "always like school," and girls "can talk." Small wonder that Louie wants...