THG Reread: Rooba, Bookending Katniss’s “Happy Memory”
Disclaimer: I’ve never taken part in any official THG reread/discussion and I essentially read the book in isolation, so anything I say in these posts may well have been discussed and dismissed years ago.
The butcher, a short, chunky woman named Rooba, came to the back door when we knocked. You don’t haggle with Rooba.
~ Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Ch 20
So…I love Rooba. Wildly. (I have a stupid grin on my face just writing those words.) She might actually be my favorite side character in the entire series, and I have ridiculously extensive headcanons about her string of husbands and lovers and her delightfully mismatched children (Jude!!!). No one will ever convince me that she wasn’t crazy about Katniss’s father (not in a lovelorn sense, because this is Rooba we’re talking about - more like “Damn, what a man!” and periodically nagging him to marry her or at least spend some time in her bed ;D) or that she isn’t Mrs. Mellark’s older sister and therefore, Peeta’s aunt.
Does that latter notion seem far-fetched? Consider this passage:
“She’s excellent,” says Peeta. “My father buys her squirrels. He always comments on how the arrows never pierce the body. She hits every one in the eye. It’s the same with the rabbits she sells the butcher.”
Yes, I understand that District Twelve is probably the equivalent of a gossipy small town with a lot of worst-kept secrets (Katniss’s hunting being chief among them), but this tidbit about the rabbits is very specific and therefore, intriguing. Rooba and Mr. Mellark almost certainly converse as butcher and baker (and can we talk about their delightfully inverted gender roles?), but in light of Katniss’s later remark -
The idea that I might ever have been discussed, around the dinner table, at the bakery fire, just in passing in Peeta’s house gives me a start.
- I like to think that this confirmation of Katniss’s sharpshooting was imparted directly to Peeta from his aunt. :)
Giddy fangirl speculations aside, even in canon, Rooba is intensely likable.
You don’t haggle with Rooba. She gives you one price, which you can take or leave, but it’s a fair price. We took her offer on the deer and she threw in a couple of venison steaks we could pick up after the butchering. Even with the money divided in two, neither Gale nor I had held so much at one time in our lives.
She’s a frank, straight-up businesswoman - no haggling, no squirrels, and fair prices all around - and she makes one decision (minor, for her intents and purposes) that vastly improves the well-being of the Everdeen family.
Owning a nanny goat can change your life in District 12.
[My family] can get by, if they’re careful, in selling Prim’s goat milk and cheese and the small apothecary business my mother now runs for the people in the Seam.
Pockets heavy with her share of profits from the deer, Katniss spots a wounded goat and resolves to get her for Prim, although Rooba’s already on her way to collect said goat for butchering. And then this delightful sequence ensues:
“Lucky thing you showed up,” said the Goat Man when she arrived. “Girl’s got her eye on your goat.”
“Not if she’s spoken for,” I said carelessly.
Rooba looked me up and down and then frowned at the goat. “She’s not. Look at that shoulder. Bet you half the carcass will be too rotten for even sausage.”
“What?” said the Goat Man. “We had a deal.”
“We had a deal on an animal with a few teeth marks. Not that thing. Sell her to the girl if she’s stupid enough to take her,” said Rooba. As she marched off, I caught her wink.
Rooba came down expressly to buy that nanny goat for meat (no doubt at a fine bargain), but upon learning that Katniss was interested, she took one look at the girl and promptly pulled out of the transaction, and we all know it wasn’t because she believed the goat was “too rotten for even sausage.” Katniss remarks on the “fondness” people feel toward her sister (“People deal with me, but they are genuinely fond of Prim”), but I think this scene makes it clear that certain personages are pretty darn fond of Katniss herself. Whether Rooba liked Katniss’s spunk, admired her resourcefulness, was endeared toward Katniss because of her father and/or simply decided that the goat would be more use to the Everdeens than to her, she - rather merrily, to my perception - made a decision that vastly improved the family’s standard of living.
Rooba effectively bookends this “happy story” that Katniss recounts for Peeta in the cave - first buying the deer, then relinquishing the goat - and I think that’s easily overlooked. And she’s especially unique in being, if memory serves, the only merchant that Katniss identifies by first name. Katniss identifies very few adults from Twelve by first name and to my knowledge, they’re (almost!) all strong independent female entrepreneurs (Greasy Sae, Ripper, Hazelle, and of course Rooba) that she seems to truly respect, which places the butcher in fine company indeed. ♡
Nice meditation on Rooba
