"the shadow of a crow"

Only twenty-three pages, yet rich with incident, objects, and characters (all men, by the way): Balis translating Ancient Greek into "plain writing anyone could read;" the blind man selling peanuts and newspapers; Robert E. Lee and Longstreet overlooking a battlefield and "coining fine phrases like a pair of wags;" Inman's Cherokee friend Swimmer with his Indian stories; and Inman himself, whose "wounds gave him just reason to doubt that he would ever heal up and feel whole and of a piece again."

Whoa, that's a long sentence. Don't want to lose everyone right at the beginning. It's just that Frazier packs a lot into his first chapter, and it's hard to determine where to begin.

The easiest way might be to show where the chapter title comes from.  As the novel begins, Inman is recovering in a Confederate army hospital after having been seriously wounded in battle. He's got a lot of time for "brooding" and flashing back to his past. What prompts his reflections is looking out his hospital window.

One memory is of being in school and sitting in front of a similar window, which happens to have looked out on "a scene of pastures and low green ridges terracing up to the vast hump of Cold Mountain." Bored with his teacher's droning about the "grand wars fought in ancient England," Inman impulsively throws his hat (his own hat, not the teacher's) out the window. Here's the sentence with the title phrase:

It [Inman's hat] landed far out across the playground at the edge of the hayfield and rested there black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground. [my italics]

Late in the chapter, back in the present, Inman buys a new hat and throws his old hat "among the bean rows of somebody's garden" and thinks "They might find use for it as scarecrow attire."

Inman considers Cold Mountain a "healing realm" and "a place where all his scattered forces might gather." At the end of the chapter, he has "set his foot on the sill and stepped out the window." The window image is highly suggestive, but I'll explore that in a later blog.  At this point, the title of the chapter warns us that Inman's journey to Cold Mountain won't be like William Bartam's travels through "streams of fertility and pleasure" (Inman carries part of Bartram's book with him). We know there is a shadow over Inman's journey, the shadow of a crow.

As a parting image, click the video below to see how a hat is used at the beginning of the movie Miller's Crossing.