Sky Full of Elephants

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, racism, rape, gender and transgender discrimination, death by suicide, and suicidal ideation.

The narrator explicitly tells the reader that Charlie went to jail because Elizabeth falsely accused him of rape. Yet in the car, Charlie doesn’t discuss the traumatic experience with Sidney, so she doesn’t know. He tells her he’s a professor at Howard, and Sidney believes his new job reflects the lack of standards in the post-event world.

Charlie remembers wanting to eat at a “fancy” restaurant with his mother. Eventually, she took him, and the restaurant revealed that there was a “they” and “us.” The small plates unsettled him, as did the stares from the diners. Afterward, Charlie’s mother told him that Black means being the “villain” in another person’s story.

Charlie also remembers his passionate three-night affair with Elizabeth. On the final night of their relationship, they danced together at a college party before having sex in Thomas’s dorm room. Thomas—Elizabeth’s brother, Agnes’s wife, and Sidney’s uncle—turned on the light. Elizabeth accused Charlie of rape, and Thomas shot and wounded Charlie, who believes Elizabeth “sacrificed” him and turned him into the “villain.”

Charlie and Sidney arrive in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They go to Agnes and Thomas’s house, where a man in a Ku Klux Klan uniform attacks Sidney.