Book Review

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

Heidi W. Durrow

If you are an empathetic person that abhors racism, you would be moved by this novel.

Additionally, you would appreciate this author’s professional skills.

The story begins in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of 1982. The protagonist Rachel Morse and her grandmother, Doris Morse, are walking from a Portland hospital to a nearby bus stop, Sufficiently recovered from a serious head injury, Rachel has been discharged into the woman’s care. Rachel is to begin “a new life,” the old one ending figuratively in Chicago on the pavement of an alleyway courtyard, she and her mother, brother, and baby sister having fallen several apartment stories from the roof of the building.

Her father, Roger Morse. What about him? Absent, her mother and he separated, he a sergeant in the Air Force returned presumably to his base in Europe.

Her mother’s boyfriend, Doug. What about him? Absent, gone a week before the suicide event after a fierce fight with Rachel’s mother, Nella, during which one of Nella’s front teeth was knocked loose. Not to be seen thereafter except once by Nella’s former employer.

Nella Floe was Danish. She met Roger Morse at a dance in Germany. She, White, and he, Black, marry. They stay in Europe, Roger preferring to live permanently outside America’s culture of racism. They produce a sickly child, Charles. Roger is an alcoholic. Their marriage is unstable. Roger feels restricted. “Love is a bitch.” One night, furious that he had made advances toward her sister, Nella leaves Roger alone with Charles. They watch TV. He drinks, smokes, He falls asleep, awakes, finds the building on fire, cannot find the boy.

Nella and Roger reunite, resolve to make a new family. They produce three children: Robbie, Rachel, and, belatedly, baby Ariel. Again their marriage founders.

Rachel meets a white contractor, Doug, at an AA meeting. He provides her initially what she is seriously lacking, fun. She leaves Roger. She and Doug move to Chicago. Four weeks later she, Robbie, and Ariel are dead. Why?

Flawed men? Nella’s naivete about race relations in America? Her crushing realization that she cannot shield her children?

Rachel, the “new girl,” must learn how to be Black, Having lived in a Chicago apartment four weeks and months in a Chicago hospital, living now in Portland, a sixth grader, light skinned with bright blue eyes, she is enrolled in an elementary school populated mostly by black students. They resent her for appearing to be and wanting to be White.

There is a girl who wants to beat me up. She says, “You think you so cute. … I’m fixin to kick your ass.” …

I am light-skinned-ed. That’s what the other kids say. And I talk white. I think new things when they say this. There are a lot of important things I didn’t know about. I think Mor [Nella, her mother] didn’t know either. They tell me it is bad to have ashy knees. They say stay out of the rain so my hair doesn’t go back. … They have a language I don’t know but I understand. I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. …

As Rachel matures physically, she discovers that she attracts white boys, wanting from her sex.

Rachel must adjust to her new life as an American light-skinned black girl. At the same time she must reconcile why her mother Nella committed suicide, why Nella wanted her three children to die with her, and why her father has abandoned her.

Heidi Durrow is a skilled writer.

The way she parses out the details of what I have economically provided above is impressive. She uses third person point of view narration to portray thoughts, feelings, and events experienced by Nella, Loranne (Nella’s employer), Roger, and Brick (a boy Rachel’s age who has witnessed the suicide event). She uses first person narration when she chooses to have Rachel confide her emotions and experiences. The overall result is a chronologically disconnected narrative that stimulates our curiosity and fosters our anticipation.

Excellent characterization is vital. Durrow provides it. We respect and admire Rachel’s Aunt Loretta and her boyfriend Drew. We are amused by the shallowness of Drew’s daughter Lakeisha and put off by but tolerant of the restrictiveness of Grandma Morse’s rules of how to behave and for what Rachel should aspire. We abhor Roger’s and Doug’s flaws of character yet feel some measure of sympathy while witnessing their exhibitions of remorse. Finally, we feel empathy as we learn about Brick’s childhood experiences; and we appreciate greatly his strength of character as he attempts to assist Rachel in the closing chapters of the novel.

Durrow uses simple, thoughtfully selected language that, where necessary, evokes strong emotion. Here is a graphic example.

When he [Brick] finally reached the courtyard, he saw that his bird was not a bird at all. His bird was a boy and a girl and a mother and a child.

The mother, the girl, the child. They looked like they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray sticky porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The girl was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow. And yet there was an old mattress, doughy from rain, just ten feet across from the bird-boy’s right arm, which was folded like a wing beneath him.

Pain moved the boy’s body. His bones jutted from his wrists. His eyes were wide open. He can see me, Jaime [Brick] thought.

The boy seemed to have landed feet first on the sodden cement courtyard filled with garbage bags bursting with scent and refuse. The bones from the bottom of the boy’s leg poked through his jeans at his thigh. He lay on the ground on his back as if he had fallen from a large, comfortable nest.

Heidi Durrow’s award-winning novel released my emotions. I was reminded again of what excellent fiction tells us: that human beings are flawed, that their actions impact others, that confessed guilt is not enough to excuse egregious irresponsibility, and that strength of character (our own and that of good people who seek to help us) is essential if we are to justify gratefully our parents’ gifts of life.

Book Review

A Country of Strangers

Susan Richards Shreve

 



Bottom line.  “A Country of Strangers” is an intriguing novel, made so by the writer’s imagination and skillful narration.

 

The characters make the novel.  In varying degrees every character is flawed.  Before I discuss them, I need to establish the novel’s setting.

 

Moses Bellows and his wife Miracle and Moses’s brother Guy and his wife Aida are tenants living on a former slave plantation in Virginia twenty miles south of Washington, D. C.  The time span of the novel, not counting back stories, is August 1942 to July 1943.  John Spencer, the last surviving heir of the family that had owned the property dating back before the Civil War, had disappeared mysteriously January 12, 1935.  Moses Bellows, first, and then his wife, brother, and sister-in-law had henceforth lived in the plantation house as if they were the owners.  Local whites were furious.  In 1939 they formed a committee to find a way to have Spencer declared legally deceased so that the property could be sold and the Bellows evicted.  In January 1942 Spencer was declared dead and the house and property were put up for sale.  A mid-westerner named Charley Fletcher purchased it.

 

Moses Bellows.  Aida, Moses’s sister-in-law, describes Moses early on as a man who “could make a grizzly have a heart attack on the spot if he’d a mind to.”  Physically imposing, prideful, angry with his station in life, Moses, presumably, had been the last man to see John Spencer alive.  Spencer had been having sex with Miracle, who suspects that Moses murdered him.  Answering her accusations, Moses says that they had not yet found Spencer’s body.  Until they do, Spencer is not dead.  Therefore, “if he isn’t dead, I didn’t kill him.”

 

Miracle Bellows.  Dutiful, loving, given the name “Miracle” by Moses to replace her real name – “Mary” – because it was a white person’s name, Miracle had been quite young when she and Moses had met.  We are told that she had given Moses a picture of Jesus “to keep him pure when she was lamb-innocent and twelve years old and he was twenty, raging with sex and fury at being too long boxed in on one farm in a small town without a future.   Furious that their life together had been reduced to eating dinner together “face to face, across the table, but without a word – Miracle looking out the window with her dark sorrowful eyes as if the rest of her life had been snatched away by the absence of John Spencer,” Moses, “with an anger finally too large for the clapboard house, moved into Spencer’s house.”  Contributing additionally to her melancholy is that she and Moses have not been able to conceive a child.

 

Guy Bellows.  The author describes him early in the novel as somebody who “did not wish to behave grown-up except when he was drinking.”  Inebriated, he became unpredictable, dangerous.  A slow but dependable construction worker, “a simple man, easily led, essentially sweet and without complication,” Guy “wasn’t even bothered by the inner plight of being born colored in northern Virginia as Moses was.  He had only one Golden Rule … He would not tolerate ridicule.  That was that.  Not for himself or of his wife or Moses or Miracle.”  If anyone made fun of any of them, Guy had declared, he would kill him.  He had his shotgun handy for that purpose.

 

Aida Bellows.  Flighty, prone to drinking, hot-blooded, “full of sweetness and temper and trouble at the same time,” Aida “had married Guy Bellows when she was eighteen, and from the start she took charge of him, which was not difficult, because Guy Bellows had locked in step at eleven years old.”

 

Prudential Dargon.  Thirteen-year-old Prudential, staying with her mother’s sister Miracle and Moses, is pregnant.  She refuses to identify the impregnator, but narrative hints impugn her father.  Miracle and Moses plan to take the child as their own after Prudential gives birth.  Ulysses Dargon, Prudential’s father, “was a large angry man … so strong he had a reputation in southern South Carolina for it.  But what struck everyone in Okrakan about Ulysses was the clear fact that he would do anything.  He had no rules, and when he drank, which was plenty, he beat his wife.”  Fiercely independent, Prudential plans to live in New York City after her child’s birth to pursue a career on the radio.

 

Charley Fletcher.  A middle class white man whose mother had insisted that he had a great gift to provide the world, a successful Minneapolis journalist, he had been called to Washington, D. C. after the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold an important position in the newly created newspaper censorship department.  Several years earlier he had married a Danish actress, Lara Bergmann, after meeting her at the Olympic Games in Berlin.  Seeking a quiet life, a refuge away from the capitol where Lara and her daughter Kate, born out of wedlock, would feel secure, Charley purchased John Spencer’s property.  Charley reveals himself to be an insecure liberal.  Daunted that he has been turned down for service in the army (he has flat feet), he considers himself inferior to his competitive Minneapolis newspaper colleague, photographer Tom Elliott, who has been accepted into the Air Force.  Shamed that he had been declared 4-F, suspecting that Lara and Tom were lovers, Charley had become, too often, impotent.  Desiring a singular achievement, Charley wants his family and the Bellows to become friends, socialize, see each other as equals.  Moses rebuffs him.  Moses’s mother had often admonished Moses about heeding “boundaries,” rules, “how it was important to know the rules and play by them.”  Moses did not want to be Charley Fletcher’s or any white man’s friend.  Fletcher was violating black and white boundaries.

 

Lara Fletcher.  Unhappy about being isolated on the newly purchased property, desirous of the social life to which she was accustomed, Lara, initially, is resentful of her changed existence.  Early in their marriage Lara and Charley had been ardent lovers.  She “did not know when the mischief and romance between them had faded, when the love-making had changed.  First there were long lapses as if their marriage had become familiar and ordinary and then the kind of awkwardness of characters in a comedy of manners and then after Sam [their infant son] was on the way, the romance was gone altogether.”  One hour each weekday while left alone in her private room she daydreamed about Tom Elliott.  In her dreams she had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1940, kept in solitary confinement “because she was beautiful and therefore dangerous.”  Before she had been imprisoned, she had met Tom Elliott, a young American photographer.  They had fallen in love.  The war over, released, returned to Denmark, she is visited by Elliott, malnourished, ill, in need of care.  She touches a scar across his left cheek.  It disappears.  He declares that she is magical.  “He took the book from her stomach, put it on the floor, and dropped the sides of her robe.”

 

Kate Fletcher.  Upon arrival at the Spencer property, Kate wants to become acquainted with Prudential.  Repeatedly scorned, Kate matches Prudential’s combativeness.  An incident at the Quaker private school that Kate attends seals Kate and Prudential’s eventual friendship.  Pole Trickett, a male classmate, had pulled Kate behind a bush on the school grounds.  Covering her mouth with a hand, he had exposed himself.  She had bit him.  A day later the principal, responding to Pole’s mother’s complaint, had called her into his office to answer for her behavior.  Kate had stated that Pole “took his sticking-out penis from his pants and tried to put my face on it.”  The principal, offended by her use of the word “penis,” had washed her mouth out with soap.  Encountering Prudential on the way home, Kate declares that she is quitting the school.  She states the reason.  “I had no idea that kind of misfortune could happen to a white girl, “Prudential comments.  Kate responds: “Then you don’t know much.  Misfortunes happen to everyone.  Even in America.”

 

Even though they are fully developed, interesting to analyze characters, I dud not empathize all that much with Susan Shreve’s characters.  The exception was Prudential.  Victimized more than the others by circumstances beyond her ability to affect, she is not afraid to strike back against injustice.  While a crowd of whites waits outside the plantation house to witness the Bellowses vacate John Spencer’s house prior to the Fletcher family’s arrival, Prudential leaves through the front door, advances out toward the crowd to the sign near the road that reads “Elm Grove, 1803,” brings it back into the house, paints on the back of the sign “Skunk Farm, 1942,” takes it back close to the road and repositions it, her relabeling faced toward the road.  Several months later, having sought him out on the private school’s grounds, she throws Clorox in Pole Trickett’s face.

 

The author’s writing is solid, in places lyrical.  The characters are authentic, imaginatively conceived.  Susan Richards Shreve is indeed a professional writer.  As I continued to read, however, I became increasingly impatient.  Where is this story going? I wondered.  It depicts the gulf of understanding between blacks and whites, yes, but any novel that involves the races particularly at that time depicts that.  What else?  What large purpose?  The author chooses a climax.  Consequences follow.  The end.  All of it, I felt, a bit contrived.     



Book Review

"The Town"

by Conrad Richter

 

What distinguishes a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from well-written novels that do not win prestigious awards?  I would assert a deeper exploration into the psyche and behavior of the human species.  I would also suggest an undertaking of far greater depth and scope than the attention-gaining, quick-moving, character-conflict- resolution-end of story kind of novel.   I believe “The Town” meets these conditions.

 

I appreciated these three themes. 

 

The accomplishments that one generation achieves and the people who achieve them are too frequently discounted by people of succeeding generations tempted to believe, because their lives have been made easier, that they are more enlightened, superior.

 

Every child born of the same parents is different from his/her siblings, but all, usually, adopt the broad values inculcated during their upbringing. But there can be outliers that parents may never direct.

 

Great harm can be done to innocent children by cruel attitudes and acts of adults who adhere to rigid moral codes.

 

Intertwined in the revelation of these themes are two important characters: Chancey Wheeler, the youngest of Sayward and Portius Wheeler’s ten surviving children, and Rosa Tench, Portius’s illegitimate daughter.

 

Chancey Wheeler is the outlier of the Wheeler children.  Unlike his siblings, he is born with a delicate constitution.  He is sickly, physically weak, and seemingly handicapped by a weak heart.  During his first several years of life he is frequently carried to places in and close to the family house rather than be expected to walk.  Deprived of normal activity, he spends most of his time inert.  Much of that time he fantasizes. 

 

He resents his siblings’ robustness.  In his late teens he acknowledges the reasons for his dislike of them.  They were so sufficient to themselves, he thought.  That was it.  Nothing stopped them.  Any one of his people could go it alone, ask for no quarter, do without your help.  … If only there had been another in the family puny, lazy and cowardly like he!  Just the thought of having such a brother or sister, perhaps one even worse than he was, lifted him up, made him feel better.  But his mother wouldn’t admit he was puny or cowardly or anything else that wasn’t good.  He was strong as anybody else, she claimed.  … But nobody could make that much out of him, Chancey told himself, for none understood him save Rosa. 

 

He believes his mother resents him.  He convinces himself that Sayward and Portius are not his parents and he longs for the day when his real parents will take him away.  He tells fantastic stories – for instance, he rode in to town once on the back of a red cow – and insists that they are true.  As he matures, he resists doing menial work. In his middle teens he meets Rosa Tench and finds her to be an unthreatening, accepting soul.  Eventually, he leaves the home and start a career as a newspaper editor.  He is harshly critical of Sayward’s generation and of his oldest brother, Resolve, who has become governor of the state.  He steadfastly believes that his mother is cruel to him by insisting that he not be soft and lazy.  Eventually, Sayward blames herself for his shortcomings.  Where she made the mistake was letting a little sickness coddle him.  Had she brought him up rough and tumble like his brothers and sisters, he’d know how to call back worse names than he got, and then the others would be glad to leave him alone. 

 

He rejects everything Sayward values -- especially the virtue of hard work -- which he believes are old-fashioned, out-of-date.  In his late teens he and Sayward have this conversation.

 

This spring he tried every excuse to get out of working in the lot and garden.  When she held him to it, he cried out it was a disgrace.  She was thunderstruck though she tried not to show it.

 

“Why is honest work a disgrace?” she wanted to know.

 

“It’s all right for those who have to,” he told her.  “But you’re the richest woman in Americus and I’m your son and yet we have to go out and work like hired men in the field.”

 

It came to her mind to say, I thought you said you weren’t my son, but never would she cast that up to him.

 

“Work’s the best thing we can do, Chancey,” she said.

 

Caught up with fanciful notions of an enlightened society – justification to excuse his aversion to work -- he responds this way.

 

… progress will do away with all toil and labor in time.  … There’ll be no rich people and no poor people, just brothers and sisters.  And everybody will have security and happiness.”

 

Sayward answers.

 

“Making a body happy by taking away what made him unhappy will never keep him happy long.  The more you give him, the more he’ll want and the weaker he’ll get for not having to scratch for hisself.”

 

Chancey is an unsympathetic character throughout the novel.

 

Rosa Tench is the consequence of Portius’s marital infidelity with the town’s school mistress, Miss Bartram, who marries a local laborer, Jake Tench, prior to Rosa’s birth.  These events occur in Conrad Richter novel, “The Fields.”  Neither Rosa nor Chancey know of their blood relationship.  Mrs. Tench, following Rosa’s birth, becomes an isolate, never leaves her house, is slovenly, lives only to identify with characters in novels.  Rosa is an entirely different child than are her brothers, who are ordinary and rather crude.

 

We meet Rosa initially in a fascinating scene fairly early in the novel.

 

Portius, suffering a high fever, is being nursed back to health.  Rosa’s father, in a drunken state, wanting to prick Portius’s conscience, sends Rosa to the Wheeler house with a batch of flowers.  Sayward answers a gentle knock on the front door.

 

Her slender legs looked like they never belonged in that coarse gray calico dress she had on, and her white face had the singular shape of one of her blossoms.  Washed and rightly dressed and combed, she would be oddly beautiful, Sayward thought. Now the little girl just stood there, not saying a word.

 

Sayward gets Rosa to identify herself.

 

The sound of the name gave Sayward a turn.  For a minute she just stood looking.  So this was the child conceived in sin by the pretty school mistress who, they said, looked like a hag now, and would not set foot out of her house since the babe was born, nor would she wash or comb!  Why, the girl was no bigger than Chancey, though she must be a year or two older.  And now Sayward knew, with the feel of knife in her side, who the girl looked like.

 

Did the girl know it, too?  Her face quivered.

 

“I brought some flowers for Mr. Wheeler,” she said, very low, holding out her handful.

 

“I’m sure he’ll be much obliged to you,” Sayward told her, sober as could be, taking them from her, steeling herself, hardening her hand toward the soft clinging feel of those fingers,  Now how much did the child know, she wondered.  “Did you bring those your own self or did somebody tell you to?” she asked.

 

“My father told me.”  The girl’s eyes were like the most ethereal of wide slaty gray liquid curtains that threatened to be torn down.

 

Sayward recognizes Jake Tench’s intent.

 

… just the trick Jake would play on some highly respectable bigwig …, send a bastard child to him with flowers when he was sick, but Jake would have to be might tipsy to play it on his own foster child and Portius.  Why, he had threatened death on any who told Rosa that she was not his own, or so she heard.

 

Sayward has to leave to tend Portius.  She instructs Rosa to sit just inside the front door to wait.  When Sayward returns, Rosa is gone.  Her daughters Huldah and Libby were at the door.

 

“Where is she?” she asked them.

 

“Do you know who that was?” Huldah leered at her.

 

“Of course I know.  What did you do to her?’

 

“We didn’t do anything,” Libby said.  “We just looked at her, that’s all.”  But her face said, “We sent her home a flying.”

 

“I can imagine how you looked at her,” Sayward said sternly.

 

This scene foreshadows Sayward’s difficulty accepting Rosa’s existence and the Wheeler children’s and Porticus’s rejection of Rosa throughout the novel.  It also foreshadows Rosa’s victimization by her mother, Jake Tench, and others in the community.

 

By accident Chancey and Rosa meet in town.  They discover that each feels estranged from their families.  Rosa takes Chancey for walks in the woods to enjoy the beautiful isolation of nature that she craves.  Chancey sees in her a sanctuary from his feelings of inadequacy and the resentment he feels toward his mother and siblings.  They grow older, continue to meet; their meetings become know to their families; they are forbidden by them to meet.  Portius has the sheriff warn Rosa and Chancey of the consequences of their continued meetings. After a subsequent meeting, Rosa’s mother says awful things to her.

 

“Don’t all right me, Miss Rosa!  If you don’t want to tell your own mother, I can’t make you.  But don’t tell her either, when the law brings your sin out in court.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Never did I dream I would have a daughter such as you!”

 

Their meetings are not sexual, as the public and family members suspect.  Each provides the other emotional release.  Unlike Chancey, Rosa is a sympathetic, almost beloved character.  We respond to her anguish when she looks through the windows of the Wheeler mansion and marvels at the advantages the Wheeler children have compared to what she must endure.

 

Wasn’t it the saddest thing in this world that you always had to be yourself, that you couldn’t be somebody else, that never, never, never could you be the person you most wanted to be?

 

I was furious at the outcome of her conflict.

 

I valued also other aspects of this novel.  For instance, the story, covering many years, mirrors real life.  Tragedies occur, challenges must be met, characters age, children are born, “progress” happens.  At the end of the novel the town is nothing like what the land had been when Sayward, a child, was brought into the deep forest by her father and mother at the beginning of the novel “The Trees.”  All three of Conrad Richter’s three novels about the Lucketts and Wheelers have an authentic feel about them that causes their readers to believe such a place existed.



Book Review

One-Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Jim Fergus

 



All historical fiction writers depend on their readers’ willingness to suspend disbelief.  Most readers will tolerate one or two difficult-to-accept situations or coincidental happenings if the writing is good, the characters are well-crafted, and the story engages their emotions.  They will accept a lot if the story provides accurate information about the people and culture of the narrated time period.  With “One Thousand Women” I was not able to be that charitable.

 

The writing is competent. The characters are imaginatively conceived.  The author integrates informational content about Cheyenne culture in his narration.  I have several quibbles about the narration, but my major objection is that the story too frequently strains believability.

 

Mr. Fergus took a huge risk in determining the concept of this novel.  In his “Author’s Note” he states: in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors.  Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother’s tribe, this seemed to the Cheyenne to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man’s world—a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them.  … the Cheyennes’ request was not well received, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come.  In this novel they do. 

 

The author has the Cheyenne chief’s request occur in 1874.  Chief Little Wolf offers one thousand horses for the one thousand white women “to teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone.”  President Grant and his advisors see possible practical benefit in accepting Little Wolfe’s offer.  Here might be a peaceful solution to “the still explosive situation on the Great Plains.  … Besides placating the savages with this generous gift of brides, the administration believed that the ‘Noble American woman,’ working in concert with the church, might also exert a positive influence upon the Cheyennes—to educate and elevate them from barbarism to civilized life.”  The consequent “Brides for Indians” program  would “supplement an anticipated shortage of volunteers by recruiting women out of jails, penitentiaries, debtors’ prisons, and mental institutions—offering full pardons or unconditional release, as the case might be, to those who agreed to sign on for the program.”  May Dodd, the novel’s protagonist, committed to a mental institution by her rich parents for living with a man of low economic and social station and for having given birth to two children, accepts the government’s offer.  Her journals of her experiences are the novel’s content.

 

I could not suspend my disbelief that such an attempt to assimilate such disparate cultures could actually happen.  I did let pass (but not by much) my skepticism that incarcerated women might be willing to become Indian wives in exchange for their release and that wealthy parents might be so cruel as to commit their wayward daughters to mental institutions to gain control of their infant grandchildren.

 

I plunged into the story hoping that the forthcoming story and the author’s narrative skill would overcome my imitial reservations. They did not.

 

The novel is 434 pages, too long I thought.  It is told in segments.  The wives do not meet their husbands until more than 100 pages are read.  We must read first May Dodd’s angst about being incarcerated in the mental institution, her separation from her children, her indecision about how complicit her lover was in the relinquishment of her babies, her acquaintanceship with the other future Indian wives, and her budding love affair with Captain Bourke, assigned to command the detachment of soldiers assigned to deliver the women to Chief Little Wolf.  I believe all of this could have been accomplished in half the space. 

 

Certain passages appealed to me.  I liked this subjective narration about May’s frustration of not knowing what her lover’s role was in her parents' custody-taking of his and her children.

 

God only knows what has become of you, Harry.  Did they kill you or did they pay you?  Did you die or did  you sell us to the highest bidder?  Should I hate you or should I mourn you?  I can hardly bear to think of you, Harry, without knowing … now I can only dream of someday returning to Chicago, after my mission here is fulfilled, of coming home to be again with my children, of finding you and seeking the truth in your eyes.

 

I accepted the author’s need to spice up (add additional conflict to) the first 110 pages by creating a love affair between May and the principled Captain Bourke.  Some of the narration, however, seemed florid, too sensuous.

 

Page 85 – I still stared at the horizon, but I could feel the Captain’s dark eyes on my face, the heat of his arm against mine.  My breath came in shallow draughts as if I could not take sufficient air into my lungs.  “It is late, Captain,” I managed to say.  “Perhaps we should take our stroll another time.”  Where our arms had touched and now parted it was like tearing my own flesh from the bone.

 

Page 110 – When John Bourke kissed me, I tasted the faint sweetness of whiskey on his lips, and felt his deep moral reluctance giving itself up to my more powerful need for him. I felt us both being swept away together, and I held tight, held on for dear life, as if only the contact of our bodies could fix me in this time and place, as if only when his flesh and mine became seamless, seared together as one, would I be truly anchored to this world, the only world I know.  “Will you show me now, John,” I whispered into his mouth, “dear John, will you show me now,” I implored, “how a civilized man makes love?”

 

This one-time consummated love affair produces, improbably, May’s entirely white “Cheyenne” child.  The author thereby places in the reader’s mind – in a counterfeit way, I believe -- additional concern about probable disastrous outcomes.

 

I did like how the white women and May were assimilated rather easily into Little Wolf’s tribe.  Most of the natives were accepting and the white women were surprisingly adaptive.  All the white women were expected to learn their gender-determined domestic tasks and to work as hard as the native women.  Rather quickly, the white women developed an appreciation of the Cheyenne people.  May makes this comment on the day of her marriage.

 

… there is a universality to poverty that transcends culture; just as in our own society, there are among the savages both rich and poor—those who are successful hunters and providers who live in well-appointed lodges with many hides and robes and have a good string of horses, and those who have little and depend on the largesse of their neighbors.  And never have I seen a more generous, selfless people than these.  I believe that those unfortunates who came to our lodge that night … were the families of men who had been killed in battle, or possibly the families of some of those poor wretches whom we had encountered at the forts—the drunk and beggars who had deserted their wives and children.

 

During the large middle section of the novel, the author must sustain the reader’s interest.  He does this by inventing incidents – some credible, some, in my opinion, not so credible -- that characterize what we consider flaws of Native American culture. The Native American villain of the novel -- half-breed Jim Seminole -- buys whiskey from a trading post and, with destructive intent, distributes it to the men of the tribe.  Violent, destructive actions result.  Sometime afterward, the warrior element of the tribe raids a Crow village and brings back many horses.  Later, retaliating, Crow warriors abduct many of the white women, who are subsequently rescued by their husbands.  Lives are lost including a white women.  Much later, a band of Cheyenne warriors attack a Crow village and return with ten cut-off hands of Crow babies, done ostensibly to celebrate the birth of May’s baby and to ensure that the Cheyenne tribe would dominate the Crow in the future.

 

Given what actual history tells us of the conflict between Native American tribes and the U.S. Government and Army in the 1870s, we know before we start reading that the white women’s habitation with the Cheyenne tribe would be brief in duration.  The author uses the improbable relationship of May and Captain Bourke to inform us of that fact.  Concerned about May’s peril, Bourke, who is a harsh critic of Indian ways, warns May through a trusted messenger that the government has rescinded the Brides for Indians program and that independent tribes like Little Wolf’s must locate on designated reservations or be militarily destroyed.  Consequently, May must determine what to advise her honorable husband: remain strong and independent and fight injustice or be realistic, accept reservation habitation, and save many lives.  The issue of believability again intrudes.

 

“One Thousand White Woman” has its good sections.  I applaud the author for his research and his ambitious undertaking.  Too many perceived implausibilities and event contrivances, however, limited my enjoyment of the novel.