(part 2 of 4) 1999: HOLES by Louis Sachar
“It’s perfectly harmless…when it’s dry.” She finished her left hand. She waved it in the air for a few seconds, then began painting the nails on her right hand. “It’s only toxic when it’s wet.”
Seventy-five books into Newburied, and we have met some truly great protagonists of children’s literature. Johnny Tremain, the hothead silversmith who becomes a revolutionary that wants to fight for something bigger than himself. Kit Tyler, the headstrong Barbadian chafing against Puritan Connecticut. Ivan, the gorilla who lost his sense of righteous fury until he found someone to protect. Miyax/Julie, the girl who has to run away and learn to talk to the wolves to save her own life. Compared to those legends, Stanley Yelnats IV is a good hero, but not the best one in the history of children’s literature. He’s a smart kid and he has a good heart, it turns out he’s pretty resourceful, and he’s adjusted surprisingly well to being wrongfully convicted to a horrifying prison camp for eighteen months. But he’s no Tremain or Tyler. He’s a good hero, but - and I think Sachar would be fine with me saying this - Holes doesn’t necessarily have the greatest hero in children’s literature.
But Holes has the best villain. Holes has the Warden.
The Warden, always capitalized, referred to only as the Warden all the way through the final chapters of the novel, memorably portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in the Holes film adaptation, is such a wonderfully written being of pure cruelty. She is a large part of the reason why Holes belongs in the top tiers of children’s literature; Holes is a novel about divine retribution, and stories like that work best when the forces of evil are pretty unambiguous.
The Warden does have a backstory in Holes though, which the reader mainly receives through dialogue asides and oblique pieces of conversation. The Warden is Louise Walker, whose grandmother, Linda Walker, lived in Camp Green Lake back when it was a lake. The elder Walker, like we have to assume of most people in Texas in that era, was pretty racist, and her husband/boyfriend murders a black man for being in a relationship with local white schoolteacher Kate Barlow. Yeah, we got a lynching in the book that results in the divine punishment of a century-long drought in the town, again I’d say the target audience for this would be fourth or fifth grade.
Kate Barlow, devastated by the murder, becomes a stagecoach robber and spends the rest of her life on the run from the law. When the Walkers catch up with her, they attempt to torture her and find out where she’s hidden all of her loot. But Kate Barlow has nothing left to live for and nothing she wants to offer them:
“‘Go ahead and kill me, Trout,’ said Kate. ‘But I sure hope you like to dig. ‘Cause you’re going to be digging for a long time. It’s a big vast wasteland out there. You, and your children, and their children, can dig for the next hundred years and you’ll never find it.’”
Kate’s final words are “start digging”. And the reader, at this point, might be wondering who, exactly, one hundred years after Kate told the Walkers to start digging, is forcing young men to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet wide every day, until they find something. The Warden is Linda Walker’s granddaughter. She mentions, towards the end of the novel, almost to herself, that “when I was little I’d watch my parents dig holes, every weekend and holiday. When I got bigger, I had to dig, too. Even on Christmas.” But, to be clear, the Warden is in no way sympathetic.
The reader doesn’t meet the Warden until page 67, almost a full third into the novel, and they don’t get this backstory until they’re well past page 100. When Stanley finally meets the Warden in person, he’s even surprised to learn that she’s a woman. But we hear plenty about her, beginning on page one, in Sachar’s description of the wasteland at Camp Green Lake:
“During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the share - if you can find any shade. There’s not much share in a big dry lake. The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the ‘lake’. A hammock is stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that. The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the Warden. The Warden owns the shade.”
Stanley also learns, very early, that the other very intimidating screws at the camp - Mr. Sir, Mr. Pendanski - are, in turn, very intimidated by the Warden. And the less we know about her, the more terrifying she becomes. Even when we do first meet her, she’s rewarding another inmate for doing something right, but she’s still absolutely terrifying:
“‘Your good work will be rewarded.’ She turned to Mr. Pendanski. ‘Drive X-Ray back to the camp. Let him take a double shower, and give him some clean clothes. But first I want you to fill everyone’s canteen.’
‘I just filled them a little while ago,’ said Mr. Pendanski.’
The Warden stared hard at him. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. Her voice was soft.
‘I had just filled them when Rex-’
‘Excuse me,’ the Warden said again. ‘Did I ask you when you last filled them?’
‘No, but it’s just-’
‘Excuse me.’
Mr. Pendanski stopped talking…The Warden turned to Stanley. ‘Cavemen, will you come here please?’
Stanley was surprised she knew his name. He had never seen her. Until she stepped out of the truck, he didn’t even know the Warden was a woman.
He nervously went toward her.
‘Mr. Pendanski and I have been having a discussion. Have you taken a drink since Mr. Pendanski last filled your canteen?’
Stanley didn’t want to cause any trouble for Mr. Pendanski. ‘I still got plenty left,’ he said.
‘Excuse me.’
He stopped. ‘Yeah, I drank some.’...
‘Then fill it,’ she said [to Mr. Pendanski]. ‘And the next time I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it without questioning my authority.’”
The reader’s - and Stanley’s - stomach clenches with each soft ‘excuse me’, each instance of this politeness and seeming kindness clearly masking some sort of viciousness underneath. Sachar is kind enough to confirm your feelings of dread a quick eleven pages later when the Warden, frustrated with the slowed pace of digging, stabs a child with a pitchfork.
And, of course, that’s not the most physical pain the Warden inflicts on another character in Holes. It turns out that the Warden has a very memorable way of torturing people when she gets angry:
“‘In that room, Caveman [Stanley], there’s a small flowered case. Will you get it for me, please?’...
It was a makeup case. Stanley’s mother had one similar to it. He saw several bottles of nail polish, polish remover, and other jars and powders.
The Warden held up a small jar of dark-red nail polish. ‘You see this, Caveman?’
He nodded.
‘This is my special nail polish. Do you see the dark rich color? You can’t buy that in a store. I have to make it myself.’
Stanley had no idea why she was showing it to him. He wondered why the Warden would ever have the need to wear nail polish or makeup.
‘Do you want to know my secret ingredient?’
He raised and lowered one shoulder.
The Warden opened the bottle. ‘Rattlesnake venom’. With a small paintbrush she began applying it to the nails on her left hand.”
The Warden goes on to scratch Mr. Sir across the face with her venom-nails, sending him into unimaginable pain, and calculating - correctly - that Mr. Sir would then take it out on Stanley for the next week by torturing him and depriving him of water. When Zero runs away from the camp, she demands that Zero be brought immediately to her once he’s recovered, softly mentioning that “it’s almost time for me to paint my nails again”. Yes, she’s planning to send a child - a child who has been unhoused for most of his life and is a ward of the state - into this same horrifying pain. This is a very evil person, this is a character inflicting pain and suffering on others - on vulnerable people - in a way that we generally don’t see characters do in children’s literary fiction. And, astoundingly, none of these passages really reflect the depths of the Warden’s cruelty and greed. For that, we have to think about why and how Camp Green Lake exists in the first place.
It’s been a century since Katharine Barlow died. The money that the Walkers were trying to squeeze out of Barlow wasn’t theirs, was never theirs, was just a pile of money that they knew was out there somewhere, and they wanted to get their hands on it. When it became clear that the money was buried somewhere out in the middle of the vast desert - as it turns out, in a suitcase with the name ‘STANLEY YELNATS’ sewn on it in large black letters - that would have been a very good time for the Walker clan to cut bait, give up on unearthing the loot, and just go try and make money some other way. But they didn’t! They dug, every day, for years. They made their children dig on Christmas. The children grew up, and had children of their own, and made those children dig as well. New holes, every day, backbreaking labor for money that never belonged to them.
And then one of the Walkers - maybe it was Louise/The Warden, but if it wasn’t, Louise was certainly okay with the idea - figured out the way forward. It wasn’t to give up on digging for buried treasure. No, it was, somehow, to lie to the state of Texas about your plans for an exciting new rehabilitation camp for at-risk youths, and then outsource that backbreaking greed-fueled work to the cheapest labor force on the planet: child prisoners. None of this is stated outright in the text of the novel, but it’s very obviously what had to happen in order for the Holes plot to exist in the first place, and it is so unbelievably evil. It is so unbelievably evil to siphon public funds into your pocket to set up a horrifying children’s prison so you can use the inmates as free labor to dig for ill-gotten buried treasure that you’ve been trying to find for a century. The Warden stabs a kid with a pitchfork in this book, and that is a relatively forgettable scene when placed up against the absurd torture of rattlesnake nail polish or the entire baroque scheme that led to Camp Green Lake existing in the first place.
And what leads someone to do all of these evil things? Stupid, obvious greed. The Warden thought there was money in the desert and it was worth doing it for the money. By the end of the novel, we learn that the total value of the buried money was about two million dollars. It’s a lot of money, certainly more money than I have. And yet, I don’t personally see that as enough money to justify not just forcing children to dig it up for me but founding a work camp to give me a steady supply of child diggers. Holes has the best villain in children’s literature because of the terror that the Warden inspires, yes, but also because of the preposterous lengths she will go to hurt others for the most base of reasons. That’s what greed does to people: it consumes them, it hollows them out, it leads them to see others - children - as inanimate tools for satisfying that greed. That greed, and the dehumanization that it drives, is the true horror in Holes.
I sure hope none of that is present in our actual real-life prison system.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the second of four installments on Louis Sachar's 1999 medalist, Holes.