Greek mythology and birds

There's a lot of bird imagery in the novel, there's even one on the front cover. There is also a lot of allusions to Greek Mythology in this book and if you read any of my previous blog posts you will probably know where I'm going with this. There is one thing I noticed in this novel that happens a few times, birds being present when ghosts are mentioned or when people are very ill. Kayla and Jojo both see birds. Jojo sees them with ghosts, while a very sick Kayla just sees birds. In Greek mythology there is the idea of the psychopomp which are guides for souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife. Of course people in different cultures applied this idea to animals. Of the 8 main animals that were considered psychopomps, 5 of them were birds. I like that Jesmyn Ward alludes to to Greek Mythology and even in her novel and, although I don't know if this is intentional, uses something unknown from the mythos. This could be a stretch but I thought it was interesting.