"A myth," says Ezol, touching the water glass absentmindedly, then pushing it away. "How plausible is it that white people, who live by the clock and sword, would invent a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise?"
The 1907 Miko Kings out of the town of Ada are the greatest Indian baseball team that ever lived. They are anchored by Blip Bleen, the Indian Territory's most powerful hitter, and Hope Little Leader, their tenacious and brilliant pitcher. Their ultimate test: a nine-game series against the Seventh Cavalrymen out of Fort Sill, the very same U.S. Army outpost that keeps the warrior Geronimo imprisoned or own show, and whose supporters have not forgotten Custer's Last Stand. The symbolism isn't lost on anybody, but for many the game is reenacting these in even more literal ways, like the gamblers who stand to take over the Miko Kings if they lose the ninth game. The game comes at the pinnacle of the allotment era of U.S.-Native relations, when everything that the Indians own has begun to pass into white hands.
I loved LeAnne Howe's play Savage Conversations, which imagines a relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and a the spirit of a "Savage Indian" killed by her husband, the president, in Minnesota. There are many echoes of the play in Miko Kings, especially in the way history becomes instantiated in a spirit or apparition: the story of the Miko Kings is collected by a Choctaw journalist who is visited by the ghost of Ezol Day, the brilliant young postal clerk and lover of Blip Bleen, who was a witness to the climactic series nearly a hundred years prior. Ezol insists to the journalist that baseball is an Indian game, and that its strangeness--"a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise"--has its echoes in the same Choctaw language and philosophy that allow her to time travel to the future and converse with her descendant. A large section of the novel's middle is designed to represent Ezol's first-hand diaries and correspondence, down to the childish script, along with cuttings from newspapers and photographs.
Miko Kings echoes Savage Conversations, too, in its interest in bodily mutilation, as in the sections where we see an aged Hope Little Leader, languishing in an old folks' home in the 1960s and missing his hands. The story of how Hope lost his hands, we suspect, will turn out to be the same story as the final game against the Seventh Cavalrymen. And though the novel has an essential optimism, I think, centered on the metaphorical possibility of returning through time, the loss of Hope's hands seems to suggest an irrevocable loss that mirrors the loss of land, the loss of place, the loss of community. Losing these things, Howe suggests, we lose a part of ourselves.
There are a few too many ideas in Miko Kings, I think, in too little space. I was never quite able to mentally incorporate the story of Justine, Hope's beloved, who becomes a Black nationalist militant in New Orleans. And the skipping between narrative points of view--from Hope to Ezol to the Kings' owner to a journalist interviewing Justine--took some of the power away from the frame narrative, which comes out of the narrator's research into the Kings and her own past. But Miko Kings is bold and inventive, and it seems silly to complain that it is too full of riches. I hate conceding that there's anything cosmic or profound about baseball people, because baseball people are annoying about that sort of thing. But Miko Kings persuaded me.
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