The Panem Companion
Page 6
Notably, the two most personal examples we have of this disenfranchised Seam lifestyle are the Everdeen family and the Hawthorne family, both of which are single-parent households headed by single, widowed, self-employed mothers. Because both Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Everdeen died—as far as the books specifically state—due to their work in the mines along with many other miners, it can be inferred that most of the highest tesserae-takers in District 12 are also the children of single mothers. And because they are Seam, we know that they are also darker-skinned. Using District 12 as a model for the workings of every district, this suggests that an overwhelming number of tributes are the children not only of lower-class families but of single-parent households. Because the Games–tesserae socioeconomic system of welfare specifically targets these groups, the Hunger Games would classify as, really, the definition of class warfare.
We see this system truly at work only through the eyes of a character who lives in the sort of family most harmed by it; although it can be argued, rightfully, that Rue led a worse life than Katniss because her livelihood mirrors antebellum slavery, the Everdeens became specific targets of this “pauperism” agenda the moment that Mr. Everdeen died. Even if Mrs. Everdeen had not lapsed into a state of catatonic depression, Katniss would have been required to take out the maximum number of tesserae each year. After all, Mrs. Hawthorne continued working consistently, and Gale had among the highest amounts of tesserae in D12—possibly in Panem.
The socioeconomic welfare system, at least in District 12, inherently favors two-parent households and/or households led by a male wage-earner. Simply by being female, widowed, and having multiple children, Mrs. Everdeen and Mrs. Hawthorne are inescapably tied into requiring state assistance to survive. Katniss herself even recognizes this as she heads out of the Justice Building and onto the train bound for the Capitol, even if she doesn’t explain it in the same terms:
Prim is not to take any tesserae. They can get by, if they’re careful, on selling Prim’s goat milk and cheese and the small apothecary business my mother now runs for the people in the Seam.THG34-35
Only with Katniss gone is the Everdeen family small enough to subsist on a female wage-earner’s salary. When Katniss and Peeta win the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, it is not just Katniss’ stunt with the berries that is a rebellion against the Capitol. It’s that Katniss should never have won at all. She is everything that the entire system, of which the Games are the zenith, literally wants to kill: specialty class, the child of a widowed mother, self-identified as culturally and ethnically “not white,” and from the poorest and most state-dependent district of all.
In present-day America, the breakdown of families receiving Aid for Families with Dependent Children welfare, for the age group that roughly correlates to those eligible for reaping in Panem, is:
The racial densities of welfare receipt are even more skewed in density in Panem, thanks to tesserae being required for all district citizens in the first place, and the tiny size of the Capitol in comparison to the large sprawl of its twelve tesserae-applicable districts (the population of District 13 doesn’t count, of course, because they have seceded from Panem and are not part of the Games–tesserae system).
Suddenly I am thinking of Gale and his forty-two names in that big glass ball and how the odds are not in his favor. Not compared to a lot of the boys.THG20
If the contemporary United States instituted a reaping system with parameters similar to those in Panem, the odds would not be in Gale’s favor in our world, either.
Calculating “The Odds”
In early 2011, Hunger Games fan Shylah Addante of DownWiththeCapitol.net and Mainstay Productions’ Finnick/Annie short films did an in-depth analysis of tesserae distribution:
In a bowl full of “thousands of slips,” Katniss has her name entered twenty times, Gale forty-two.
Let’s do some math.
Katniss says that the population of District 12 is about 8000. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the average family size is 5 (two parents and 3 children, typified by the Mellarks, Hawthornes, and Everdeens when averaged out): 8000/5= 1600
Meaning that there are roughly 1600 families in [District 12]. (This is only an estimate as some families (like Gale’s) have more than three children; some (like Katniss’) have less; and some people have no family unit.)
These 1600 families include 3200 adults (if we assume 2 adults/family) and 4800 children (assuming 3 children/family). Divide 4800 in half, and we have approximately 2400 female and 2400 male children of [District 12].
But not every child is eligible—only those ages 12–18 are entered into the reaping (out of the wider range for childhood which is 0–18). So only seven of the nineteen years of childhood are entered into the reaping. If we assume that the birth rate is constant, and that children are evenly distributed in each year, then there are only about 252 children (126 female and 126 male) born each year in [District 12].
Multiply 252 by 7 (the number of eligible childhood years entered into the reaping) and you get 1764.
Divided by 2, and you get approximately 882 males and 882 females eligible for the reaping each year.
Now to account for the Tesserae.
After consulting with some other Hunger Games fans, I am going with the idea that the Seam makes up 80% of the District 12 population and that the Merchant class makes up 20% [per popular polling consensus of Hunger Games fans]. In the first chapter of the book, two things are apparent: the merchant children do not have to take out Tesserae, and that Seam children are . . . forced into taking the Tesserae. It also seems to be a trend (at least from the example set by Gale and Katniss) that the eldest children take the Tesserae to protect their younger siblings.
So if there are 126 females in a given year, 100 of them will be Seam children and 26 will be merchant children. If the average family size includes three children, then we can assume that one third of the children will be the eldest and take extra Tesserae (+5 slips). Each age year breaks down as follows:
12–13 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +1 Age Entry): 26
Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae; +1 Age Entry): 204
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +1 Age Entry): 66
Entries
Total (12–13) Entries: 296
13–14 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +2 Age Entry): 52 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x2; +2 Age Entry): 408
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +2 Age Entry): 132
Entries
Total (13–14) Entries: 592
14–15 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +3 Age Entry): 78 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x3; +3 Age Entry): 612
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +3 Age Entry): 198
Entries
Total (14–15) Entries: 888
15–16 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +4 Age Entry): 104 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x4; +4 Age Entry): 816
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +4 Age Entry): 264
Entries
Total (15–16) Entries: 1184
16–17 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +5 Age Entry): 130 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x5; +5 Age Entry): 1020
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +5 Age Entry): 330
Entries
Total (16–17) Entries: 1480
17–18 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +6 Age Entry): 156 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x6; +6 Age Entry): 1224
Entrie
s
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +6 Age Entry): 396
Entries
Total (17–18) Entries: 1776
18–19 Year Olds
26 Merchant Children (No Tesserae; +7 Age Entry): 182 Entries
34 Seam Children—Oldest Sibling (+5 Tesserae x7; +7 Age Entry): 1428
Entries
66 Seam Children—Younger Sibling (No Tesserae; +7 Age Entry): 462
Entries
Total (18–19) Entries: 2072
Grand Total of Entries: 8288
Total of Female Entries: 4144
Total of Male Entries: 4144
Katniss’ Odds (+3 Tesserae x5; +5 Age Entry) 20/4144 or .48%
Gale’s Odds (+5 Tesserae x7; +7): 42/4144 or 1.01%
Peeta’s Odds (No Tesserae; +5 Age Entry): 5/4144 or .12%
Prim’s Odds (No Tesserae; +1 Age Entry): 1/4144 or .02%
Although a more cynical view may look at the math and say that the odds of both Prim and Peeta being reaped for the Seventy-fourth Games are so astronomically low as to render the plot of the series unrealistic, a true Hunger Games fan might suggest that, despite the math, the odds were simply not in their favor.
5
The Curious Case of Primrose “Everdeen”
On the first day of kindergarten for Katniss and Peeta, when Prim was between six months and one year old, Mr. Mellark told his five-year-old son that he had been in love with Mrs. Everdeen, but that she “ran away with a coal miner” and he “had to” marry Mrs. Mellark.
Why was this still so salient and so fresh in his mind that he shared it with his five-year-old child?
It’s easy to extrapolate that the reason for his confession was in the schoolyard that morning, being kissed good-bye by the girl in a red plaid dress. However, it’s not the only reason fans have considered.
The question of Prim’s parentage is a significant point of analytical fandom debate. Is blonde-haired, blue-eyed Prim really the “passes”-for-merchant biracial daughter of dark-haired Mr. Everdeen? Or should Prim really be Primrose Mellark? There are staunch supporters on both sides of the issue.
Katniss does not at any point overtly suppose that someone else could be Prim’s father, aside from noting the differences between her and Prim’s coloring, much less that Prim’s father is Mr. Mellark. But Katniss, as a first-person narrator, is unreliable; our understanding of Panem is limited by what Katniss herself knows and feels.
Katniss is the consummate “Daddy’s girl” and loved her father deeply, which colors much of her narrative regarding her family. And Mr. Everdeen died when Katniss was young enough that Katniss does not seem to have a sense of her parents’ relationship independent of their relationship to her. Her mother “must have” loved Mr. Everdeen very much, Katniss notes at one point, but she has never spoken to her mother about their marriage. Katniss’ own feelings about her father inform her opinions about her mother’s feelings.
However, despite Katniss’ control of the narrative, there are details about her world that can be seen through her unconscious, or incidental, narrative: the details she sees and conveys to readers but does not question or otherwise remark upon. On those, readers are left to draw their own conclusions . . . and we do!
After Katniss volunteers in Prim’s place, Mr. Mellark visits her as she waits to leave for the Capitol. He seems moved to the point of silence, and presents Katniss with a gift, cookies:
Someone else enters the room, and when I look up, I’m surprised to see it’s the baker, Peeta Mellark’s father. I can’t believe he’s come to visit me. After all, I’ll be trying to kill his son soon. But we do know each other a little bit, and he knows Prim even better. When she sells her goat cheeses at the Hob, she puts two of them aside for him and he gives her a generous amount of bread in return. We always wait to trade with him when his witch of a wife isn’t around because he’s so much nicer. I feel certain he would never have hit his son the way she did over the burned bread. But why has he come to see me?
The baker sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the plush chairs. He’s a big, broad-shouldered man with burn scars from years at the ovens. He must have just said goodbye to his son.
He pulls a white paper package from his jacket pocket and holds it out to me. I open it and find cookies. These are a luxury we can never afford.
Why?
Perhaps just out of affection for Katniss’ mother or appreciation for Katniss’ sacrifice. But perhaps because, unwittingly, Katniss has just spared him from having to watch two of his children die in the arena.
“Thank you,” I say. The baker’s not a very talkative man in the best of times, and today he has no words at all . . .
We sit in silence until a Peacemaker summons him. He rises and coughs to clear his throat. “I’ll keep an eye on the little girl. Make sure she’s eating.”THG37-38
Some of the most compelling pieces of evidence for Prim’s potential Mellark lineage come from the subtle ways that the Mellarks have become integral to the Everdeens’ family life and the similarities between Prim and the Mellark men (but not Mrs. Mellark, with her unspeakable cruelty; it could even be inferred that both Prim and Peeta got their gentle natures from Mr. Mellark for precisely this reason: both Mrs. Everdeen and Mrs. Mellark are written very negatively, as emotionally distant and, in Mrs. Mellark’s case, physically abusive).
On the morning that opens The Hunger Games, Katniss and Gale, of course, go to the woods to hunt for their daily provisions to trade. However, before they get to work, they enjoy a meal provided for them by two like-minded people: Prim, with her cheese, and Mr. Mellark, with his bread.
On the table, under a wooden bowl . . . sits a perfect little goat cheese wrapped in basil leaves. Prim’s gift to me on reaping day.THG4
It’s real bakery bread, not the flat, dense loaves we make from our grain rations. I take it in my hands, pull out the arrow, and hold the puncture in the crust to my nose, inhaling the fragrance that makes my mouth flood with saliva. Fine bread like this is for special occasions . . . “[Mr. Mellark traded it for] just a squirrel. Think the old man was feeling sentimental this morning,” says Gale. “Even wished me luck.”THG7
Given that Peeta, the youngest Mellark son, is almost old enough to age out of the reaping and his two older brothers have already completed the process, why would Mr. Mellark be “feeling sentimental” on the morning of the seventy-fourth reaping ceremony?
Could it be because of whose first reaping it happens to be—Prim Everdeen?
The squirrel could also represent a clue about Prim’s parentage. Because squirrels are so identified through the Hunger Games’ narrative with Katniss and the Seam, the fact that Mrs. Mellark hates them but Mr. Mellark enjoys them and “will trade for them if his witch of a wife isn’t around”THG52 could suggest, metaphorically, a dalliance between Mr. Mellark and Mrs. Everdeen (resulting in Prim) as much as it does Mrs. Mellark’s deeply ingrained hatred for all things Seam.
Although Katniss revered her father, her understood and understated respect for Mr. Mellark—via her appreciation and awareness of his breads—is evident in the text. And Katniss’ description of the meal planned for the evening after the seventy-fourth reaping ceremony serves to tie together the Everdeens—foraged food, strawberries, stew—and the Mellarks—bakery bread: “We decide to save the strawberries and bakery bread for the evening meal, to make it special we say.”THG16
Further evidence for Prim being Mr. Mellark’s daughter comes from oversimplified fictional-world genetics. And I want to put a caveat here: this is grossly oversimplified pseudoscience. I’m employing it not to erase the immense complexity and nuance that goes into genetics but because the majority of the storytelling in the Hunger Games is accomplished through foreshadowing, foils, parallelism, extended metaphor, and symbolism, rather than scientific or nuanced economic reality. (Think of the simplistic “Sinking California” theory most likely used in determining the geography of Panem and the not
-so-rigorously-scientific details like near-magical healing ointments and muttations.) Given that, an oversimplification of genetics does not seem out of the question.
We know from Katniss that she and Prim do not share the same coloring. Katniss looks like Mr. Everdeen and the other residents of the Seam. Prim looks like Mrs. Everdeen and other members of the merchant class; Katniss describes her as looking “out of place” in the Seam with her blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes.
If intermarriage between the Seam and the merchants is as rare as the evidence of Panem’s racial segregation would suggest, then one can assume that both Mrs. Everdeen and Mr. Mellark’s genes are homozygous recessive (blonde/pale/blue), stretching back between (roughly) ten and thirty-six generations, and that Mr. Everdeen’s genes are homozygous dominant (black/dark/[gray]). Here are simple Punnett squares for the children of Mr. and Mrs. Everdeen:
The odds of Mr. Everdeen and Mrs. Everdeen giving birth to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned child are almost 0 percent.
In contrast, the odds of Mr. Mellark and Mrs. Everdeen giving birth to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned child are nearly 100 percent.
That’s why my mother and Prim, with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place. They are. My mother’s parents were part of the small merchant class.THG8
Peeta Mellark . . . I watch him as he makes his way toward the stage . . . Ashy blond hair that falls in waves over his fore-head . . . Blue eyes.THG25-26
The odds (no pun intended) are pretty overwhelming that Prim is half-Mellark—or at least not half-Everdeen.
Because real-world genetics is more complicated, although it’s not likely for a many-generation dark-haired, dark-skinned father and a many-generation light-haired, light-skinned mother to give birth to a light-haired, light-skinned child, it’s still possible. We don’t know for sure that Mr. Everdeen doesn’t have any recessive genes for blond hair and light skin, and in fact, in our world, such strictly homogenous genes are deeply implausible. Although there are other species that have homozygous genes—Siamese cats, true-bred Dalmatians, many varietals of flowers—human beings’ genetics are not so pure without horribly extensive inbreeding.