Source of book: Borrowed from the library
For reasons that escape me, our library system, which includes most of the San Joaquin Valley and serves something around 7 million people, took several years to purchase this book. And even then, it was the smaller city/town of Merced, not Bakersfield, that did so. Just venting about both the chronic underfunding of Kern County libraries, and the fact that books of significant merit - that often have long wait lists - tend to be overlooked when it comes to purchase lists. Come on! There surely are a lot of us in this area that listen to NPR and check out thoughtful books!
Anyway, Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and wrote this book, her first, about four generations of Cherokee women. It grew out of a short story that appeared in the Paris Review, “Hybrid Vigor,” which was later supplemented with other stories that eventually turned into this book. The story was clearly too big to fit in a small format.
The way the book came to be, though, did lead to one of the book’s flaws: two of the chapters, while they are related to the main narrative, feel out of place and not really relevant to the rest of the book. These are the chapter from the point of view of the father of one of the main character’s husband, and the chapter about the lesbian couple and the young man who assists them. Nothing wrong with the stories, but they seem like digressions that never end up adding to the rest of the narrative.
The other flaw that I found is that the male characters seem flat and static. The two chapters I mentioned above are the only ones told from the point of view of a male character, but they never feel like we get inside the characters’ heads like we do with the female characters in the rest of the book.
That said, my overall impression of the book was positive. The writing is good, and the central story is compelling.
There are four generations of women - the grandmother, who seems to be the most wise and stable of the four, and the one who has adapted best to her abandonment by a flaky man.
Lula, the mother, is also abandoned by her husband, but takes things extremely poorly indeed. After a mental breakdown, she gives up her former dreams and becomes a religious fanatic, deeply involved in the Holiness Church, and forces her daughters to wear long dresses and give up secular music, books, and movies. (This actually felt familiar, for reasons that will be obvious to regular readers of this blog. As did, unfortunately, the way that religious fundamentalism turns people mean and hateful.)
Justine, the youngest of Lula’s daughters, is one of the two main protagonists in the book. At age 14, she starts to push boundaries, and sneaks out late at night with a man in his 20s, who proceeds to rape her. Finding herself pregnant, she and Lula incur the wrath of the Holiness church for a while.
Justine, unfortunately, continues to make poor decisions, marrying two worthless men in succession. The first is outright drunk and abusive, the other a bit nicer, but lazy and self-absorbed. With this second husband, Pitch, Justine is on again, off again, moving back and forth between Texas and Pitch’s family, and Lula’s house.
Justine’s daughter, Reney, is the other main protagonist. She starts off following in her mother’s footsteps, although she does avoid pregnancy (and eventually gets sterilized.) Her first marriage is also abusive, but she is strong enough to leave him eventually, and her second husband is fine, although he seems unsure of what to do with Reney at times.
Most of the book feels like normal literary fiction, with realistic scenarios and events. At the end, though, the world - or at least north Texas - turns into an apocalypse, with wildfires and the seeming end of the world. The writing starts to feel more symbolic and almost approaching magical realism. The end seems a nod in the direction of 100 Years of Solitude.
In my opinion, the strength of the book is in its nuanced portrayal of the cycles of trauma, violence, abandonment, and poverty. Ford also understands the deep connection between childhood trauma and religious addiction, the way that certain people self-medicate their pain with rule-based and self-loathing religious belief.
Lula reminded me so much of my own mother, who channeled her pain from neglectful and emotionally abusive parents (she was the unwanted and unloved child) into a fanatical devotion to making God love her the way her father never did. As in the case of Lula, this meant an increasing embrace of legalism and separation from mainstream culture - and the need to force her children to do the same.
As with any drug, religious addiction requires larger and larger doses as time goes on. More self-flagellation, more restrictive rules, more control of self and others - pleasing God takes ever-increasing sacrifices.
There were quite a number of good lines in the book. I kind of identified with the younger Justine, before she drifted back in the direction of becoming her mother.
Justine had fought her at every turn. It might as well have been written. Justine wasn’t her sisters, wasn’t wired to go along with things for the sake of comfort. In that way, she was as religious as Lula.
Yeah, that was - and is -me. I never could just go along for the sake of comfort. But Reney is like me too - and like her mother in many ways. Pitch and his family are white - and more than a bit Texas Redneck white - but they do take in Reney, even though they say appallingly racist stuff about Native Americans in casual conversation.
Nina had captured every John Wayne movie ever made and labeled each one in her perfect cursive. Reney did her best to watch them all that summer. She cheered for the Indians, though she knew John Wayne would always end up the hero.
Hey, should I mention here that Jesus and John Wayne is a good book? Anyway, the years where things were happy between Justine and Pitch and Nina was still alive were those that Reney considered her best.
This was something like the family Reney always wanted, the one living out these evenings when the beer brought happy and nobody was talking about finding work or trying to coerce anybody to be something they weren’t.
Yeah, that would be nice too - I wish I could go back to when my family was that way, before Gothard. But also, these days were rare for Reney.
But when the happy spilled over and the voices grew sharp, Reney would tuck her tied patch quilt under her arm and write Justine and Pitch a note that she was going to watch movies with Nina.
The problem with Pitch is the problem with so many men: he wanted to raise horses rather than get a job, even though the horses were a money pit and only brought financial pain.
Justine’s first husband was an abusive piece of shit, but she married him in part to get away from Lula. And Reney does the same with her first.
Her mom…forbade Reney to see him, swore she’d kill him. If it wasn’t the heartfelt letters that brought them back together, her mom’s mandate must have.
This is the conundrum of parents. The catch-22 when it comes to the love lives of one’s children. You of course hope for good choices, but interfering can also have the opposite result from that intended. I’m not referring to anything in particular with my kids, but just to parental anxiety more generally.
While I felt the chapter on the lesbian couple, Stevie and Marni, didn’t fit the rest of the book, it was interesting as a stand-alone vignette. In fact, I was disappointed that they only got a passing reference for the rest of the book. It would have been interesting if they had been interwoven with the full story. The scene where Mose meets them is pretty funny.
Mose studied his thumb. “You said y’all are partners?”
Stevie looked up from her boots and shook her head, giving Marni an I-told-you-so look.
“Yes, honey,” Marni began. “We’re partners.” She sighed and began again. “In the sense that we can’t get legally married because the state of Texas is just short of the Dark Ages when it comes to these things? Stevie is my wife. I’m hers. I thought that was clear yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” Mose said. “I didn’t know ladies could marry like that.”
“Ladies can’t marry like that,” Stevie said, “Not here.”
“I’m real sorry,” Mose said, stepping toward the door.
“Sorry for what?” Marni said.
“I don’t know,” Mose said. “I didn’t know. I never…”
“Met lesbians before?”
“I guess not.”
I also want to mention the scene where Justine is going through Lula’s stuff, and finds an old picture of Reney. As my kids transition to adulthood, I am feeling a lot of these feels:
Her Reney, who after high school had become such a hard woman, so cautious with money and closed off. Sometimes it seemed this kid she’d more or less grown up with, the girl she loved and fought with and rocked in the night - her daughter, her very soul - was a whole different person.
Again, not the specifics, but normal separation. Kids that you used to be close to are out living their own lives, making their own friends, and doing the normal separation from parents. It’s bittersweet, because this is life and you want them to fly, but you still miss the little kids that were.
The context of this, though, is that Lula, now in her 80s, has had a stroke which is the beginning of the end for her. I have to back up though. Lula has epilepsy, and refuses medication, even though she has injured herself multiple times, crashed vehicles, and generally experienced negative consequences. Like other Holiness believers, she refuses modern medicine. Justine realizes it stems from the trauma of being left by her husband.
There were the nervous breakdowns. Forty years of loneliness and untreated seizures. The miracle of antiepileptic drugs she wouldn’t take because Moses didn’t think to bring them up in Deuteronomy. And now this stroke. If she could talk, I know she’d say, “Count it all joy.”
I am glad that, although my parents certainly have swallowed a LOT of the “alternative medicine” crap, at least my mom takes her anti-seizure meds, after a frightening experiment of going off them when I was a teen. And also that we got our vaccines as kids, even though they and my sister have now gone full-on anti-vax as part of the detachment from reality the American Right has embraced in the Trump Era.
There is another line in this section that stunned me. Justine is talking with a doctor about the therapy needed by her mother after the stroke.
He says, “A stroke of this magnitude often makes a person combative who never was before.”
“It must be a miracle,” I say. “Because Mama has come through this as mean as ever.”
You know, it has been hard for me to admit this, even to myself, but my mother is mean. And really always has been, although it was better regulated when she was younger. It really came out in her treatment of my wife, but as time has gone on, she has mostly gotten bolder in saying mean things and in refusing to disguise her contempt for people different from her. Unfortunately, I see a lot of her in Lula.
I am reminded as well of the difference between being nice and being kind. They are not the same. Religious fundamentalism - which isn’t about doctrine but about culture, politics, and power - can often be “nice.” But it is never kind. My mom often comes off as “nice,” but if you choose to do things differently from how she thinks you should, the “nice” goes away really fast, replaced by meanness.
And, looking back, fundamentalism made all of my family - including myself - think and say some really mean, cruel things about a lot of people, even - believe it or not - cancer victims. I am ashamed of what I have thought and said, but it was so easy when I was still trying to believe fundamentalist teachings, to not even notice one’s own cruelty.
Kindness requires empathy, the ability to understand and fully accept people who are different from you. This is death to fundamentalist legalism, of course - which is why fundamentalist religion has to work so hard to create a pathological lack of empathy in its followers.
Justine flashes back to a bad memory, when she had a fight with Lula over religion, and finally got frustrated enough to say “I don’t need your prayers.” And also this:
“We’re all going to die, Mama. But I want to live. Some ain’t in for an illusion.”
And at that, Lula goes apeshit and starts beating her until she is unconscious. I’m big enough to avoid physical punishment now, but if my mother ever does the passive-aggressive “I’m praying for you” thing again, I am definitely telling her I don’t need or want her prayers. I don’t need anyone trying to convince their imaginary sky daddy that I - or my wife and kids - should be forced to be like my mother. Nope. Nope. Nope.
[Note: my religious beliefs are complicated these days, but I am fully sure that if God exists, he isn’t the racist and misogynist psychopath that white Evangelicalism says he is…]
And also this:
Like a big old baby, I hurt for the little girl I was and wonder who she could have been without the Bible, without sickness, without so much by-God loss. But without the things that make us who we are, we’re nothing.
I too wonder what I would have been, without Gothard and Dobson and their toxic interpretations of the Bible. But I am who I am in part because of my pain. Charles Dickens wrote a book about that, by the way, and there was a Star Trek movie with a similar conclusion by Captain Kirk.
Perhaps one could say this is the theme of the book. Pain makes us who we are, for good and ill.
I guess I will end with an observation during the final pages. With the apocalypse has come religious nut-jobs, with their assault weapons signs and hate. They have attempted to rename the town of Bonita, because it is in Spanish.
On the last stretch into Bonita a hand-painted sign warns: WELCOME TO PRETTY. SLOW DOWN - ROUGH GOING. Mother warned us that a small group of white locals have taken it upon themselves to expunge foreign words from the English language, hoping, I guess, that the coming God is a white supremacist too and that he appreciates their attention to detail.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I think MAGA “christianity” is all about. They really do believe God is as much of a white supremacist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic dick as they are, and will appreciate their attention to detail.
I haven’t even gotten into the constant low-level racism that Ford describes as part of the Native American experience - she shows rather than tells, but it is definitely there in a non-preachy way.
It’s a good book, and a pretty quick read. If you are looking to add Native American authors to your reading list, put this one on.
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