Two Novels by Brandon Hobson

How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him--now retired--lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven't learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit.

I have reread Brandon Hobson's excellent novel, The Removed, so that I might teach it in the spring. I think--or hope--that it will hit the sweet spot for students: a book that is challenging in ideas, sometimes in prose, but mostly is made up of a kind of plain but sophisticated everyday language. It resonates, too, with topics that are on the mind of students today, like police violence, which it places in the context of the larger history of Indian Removal and dispossession. The story centers on the Echota family, whose son Ray-Ray was shot a decade prior by a cop. They take in a young foster boy, Wyatt, whose eerie similarity to Ray-Ray seems to reverse father Ernest's creeping Alzheimer's. Another son, Edgar, is lost in a fantastical "Darkening Land" of addiction and suicide, and where a sinister friend threatens to turn him into the bounty for an Indian-hunting game. What will students make, I wonder, of the book's mixture of realism and fantasy, and its refusal to cohere into something logical and explainable?

One thing I had a greater appreciation of this time around is the way that Hobson weaves the various timelines and narratives together. There are four third person narrators--mother Maria, sister Sonja, Edgar, and the legendary Cherokee rebel Tsala--and the story of each is punctured with visions and epiphanies in which the others seem to break through. This complicates, for example, the story of Wyatt, whom we are otherwise willing to believe is only strangely similar to the dead Ray-Ray. But when Wyatt's stories prove to have a kind of oracular insight, it becomes clear that we must take seriously the belief that Wyatt is Ray-Ray resurrected. I can already hear the students now--Well, is he?--but the answer, of course, is that he is and he isn't, that Hobson gives us a kind of Schrodinger's cat whose waveform threatens to collapse if you look too closely. This matters because the novel wants to give us models of resurrection and return that are larger than the realm of the materially possible. What "the removed" search for is not a literal return to Cherokee homelands--not in this book anyway--but some other kind of restitution or redemption that is not one-for-one. The last image of the book, with the family gathered for a memorial bonfire, watching a mysterious figure approach, underlines this nicely: is it Edgar? Wyatt? Tsala? Or somehow Ray-Ray himself? Yes, Hobson suggests, yes, yes, and yes.

The instances when Milton would wake in the middle of the night feeling like he was suffering in a bed of putrefaction, his dreams digested and visible as the glow of the school in flames, he could smell the sour gunpowder and dead bodies lying in pools of blood, their foreheads marked with the number of the beast while the rest of the students cried out in a panic, yet all he could hear were the voices of the dead buried in the land all around, rising out of their graves and asking him for an account of his decision to shoot and kill, and for the remainder of the night his sleep was restless and uneasy, full of their shrieking voices and hollow moans, because he worried about bearing the weight of all that guilt. In his notebook for English class, Milton had written down the following quote from Shakespeare: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."

Hobson's new novel, The Devil is a Southpaw, opens with a note that the author has received a manuscript in the mail from a former classmate, or cellmate, having both been institutionalized in a juvenile detention facility long ago. The manuscript, which makes up the bulk of the book itself--very 19th century--is a novel with the same name by Milton Muleborn, and it draws on those experiences at the facility, which it describes as a kind of phantasmagoria of demons, witches, and sinister captors. Much of the novel focuses on Matthew Echota (the same last name as the characters of The Removed), a fellow student-inmate who, we're told, is the most intelligent and talented of them all, a gift for which he is sometimes praised by the prison guards, and sometimes isolated and brutally tortured. We intuit quickly that the author, Milton, is and has always been deeply jealous of Matthew, who it seems not only has a kind of artistic genius that Milton lacks or feels himself to lack, but who also had been dating his ex-girlfriend. Milton's jealousy and enmity toward Matthew is of the kind that only very similar people can share--both are sensitive, artistic, writerly souls trapped inside the harshness of the juvenile detention center--to the extent that part of me wondered if the two wouldn't prove to be the same person in the end.

Milton's detention center is a strange and frightening place, where a mysterious woman paints skulls at night and a freakish Dr. Strangelove type rules with an iron fist. Its cruelty verges on the fantastical, and the swamp that surrounds it seems to be filled with creatures and spirits. Parts of it, of course, are recognizable, drawn no doubt from the same experiences supporting troubled youth that inform The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking: the rancid food and forced isolation, the stultifying effects of institutionalization of childhood creativity. But in Milton's telling, these aspects become heightened into pure dreamland horror: the novel moves toward a shared escape, in which Matthew and Milton move through a literal underworld where they encounter, among other things, the spirit of Salvador Dali to guide them.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Devil is a Southpaw is the prose. I wonder how people will take Milton's Grand Guignol-isms, his general wordiness and clumsiness. To me, I thought this was all very recognizable. Though Milton is supposed to have written this novel as an adult, I recognized in it something I see often: the language of a talented and creative teenager who has limited control over his style and vocabulary. It's not supposed to be "bad," per se, but the language here is meant, perhaps, to show the fine degree of difference that separates the genius and talent of Matthew--who, as we learn, grows up to be an acclaimed but trouble painter--and the mere creativity of someone like Milton.

I can tell you that reading the prose of teenagers reorders your brain, and after a while you must take a break from it to regain clarity; I felt the same thing while reading The Devil is a Southpaw. It's a bold move, to write a book in prose that is ostensibly flawed in the same ways as its narrator. To me, the voice works as a reflection of Milton. What it means in the end for the novel as a whole is another matter--though Hobson make some gestures at other voices--a second half written by Milton in a more sober, reflective mode, and an interview with the adult Echota--but I walked away thinking that it all remained too claustrophobic in the end. There's really no getting around or outside of it--and maybe that's the point.

Two Books about Cherokee Removal

Our grandfathers followed a stick to northern Georgia. It was an old migration. The Great Spirit led us here. How can the soldiers drive us from our land? Maybe it was because we worshiped the Earth instead of God, Reverend Mackenzie preached. Maybe it was because some of us had black slaves, Reverend Bushyhead said. Maybe it was because of gold and our cornfields, the men said.

Maybe the Great Spirit just calls us to the beyond where he lives. Maybe he's going to show us another world.

But who wants another world?

The Trail of Tears looms large in our memory as one of the country's greatest moral crimes: thousands upon thousands of Native Americans, uprooted from their homes in the Southeast, and forced to march for months to what is now Oklahoma. And yet, I think Diane Glancy's novel Pushing the Bear is the first time I've seen anyone try to show, in art, what the trail was like for those who underwent it, how they suffered to leave their homes behind, how they became sick and weak and died, how they had to hurriedly bury their own before being rushed off to the next unfamiliar place. Glancy's novel, which focuses on a group of Cherokee from North Carolina, takes a multivocal approach, trading first person narratives at a half-page clips. By taking a wide view, Glancy shows a fundamental diversity among the Cherokee, who brought with them their resentments and rivalries with other bands, who brought traditional religions and Christianity, who brought different ideas about how best to respond to the forced removal. It's not not a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but the Cherokee of Pushing the Bear do not manage to come together in inspiring ways. A crisis, Glancy tells us, has a way of prying open all our divisions.

The two central voices of the novel are a married couple, Maritole and Knobowtee. Maritole loses everything and everyone on the trail, beginning with her cabin: she is allowed to return briefly to fetch a few items and finds, chillingly, a white family has already moved in. On the trail, she gives birth to a baby who dies, and then loses her mother and father; her brother fled to the woods and will never be seen again. When she needs Knobowtee the most, he abandons her, failing to provide any comfort or companionship. We learn that Knobowtee, a widower, has married Maritole for her farm, and now that Maritole no longer owns a farm, what is the foundation of their relationship? Maritole becomes close to a white soldier, who shows a puppyish interest in the Cherokee in their ways, but their relationship invites the scorn of the other Cherokee, driving her further to the margin of the march. "I gave him my life in the dark," Maritole says of her first sexual liaison with the soldier, "I let him feel my hurt. My wounds inside. I would always be cut in two. Part of me in North Carolina. Part of me in the new land. I held open my wounds for him to soothe."

It's Maritole who coins the title phrase: in periods of madness and distress, she feels as if she is pushing away a giant bear that nibbles at her. The bear is a symbol of the march itself, a beast that would devour her whole if she let it, and which requires constant effort and attention to push away, though of course, it always comes back. Over the course of the march, Maritole and the marchers begin to approach a zen-like resignation, not of defeat, but of openness to the possibility that their lives can be rebuilt anew. "Maybe that was the Great Spirit's lesson," one Cherokee writes, "I could receive and lose in the same breath. The burden the white man carried was that he didn't know the lesson yet." This, to me, may be the central truth of Pushing the Bear: that those who are unable to believe that history might work on them, rather than others, are in a dangerous place.

We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

Diane Glancy's Cherokee find themselves, at the end of the novel, facing a new life at Fort Gibson in modern-day Oklahoma. The characters in Brandon Hobson's The Removed may be their descendants, Cherokee living in an Eastern Oklahoma town called "Quah" (a lightly fictionalized version, one might guess, of the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah). As its name suggests, Hobson's novel asks the question: is Indian removal a historical process that is completed and over? Or does it live on, in some form or another, to today?

The Removed centers on the Echota family, whose name evokes the Treaty of New Echota, made between the United States and the Cherokee prior to the Trail of Tears. Sixteen years prior to The Removed, the eldest Echota brother, Ray-Ray, was shot and killed by a white police officer. In the present, we see through alternating first-person narratives--a method that recalls Pushing the Bear, though without Glancy's brisk switching--how the murder continues to effect each member of the family today. Mother Maria has agreed to serve as an emergency foster parent for a young Cherokee boy whose wisdom and sense of humor remind her of Ray-Ray. The boy, Wyatt, makes an even stronger impression on her husband Ernest, who becomes convinced that Wyatt really is Ray-Ray reincarnated, and it's hard to say he's wrong. The arrival of Wyatt reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's in Ernest, who suddenly finds himself reconciled to his memories and whole for the first time in years. Daughter Sonja spends her time seducing a single father named Vin, a pursuit of singular and baffling obsessiveness that makes little sense--until it's revealed that Vin is the son of the cop who killed Ray-Ray.

The most interesting section, though, belongs to son Edgar, whose disillusionment and despair have led him into a life of addiction. Edgar imagines--or perhaps is--followed around by an aggressive "red fowl" whom he nursed as a chick and who has turned against him. A symbol of drug addiction, maybe? Edgar decides at the last minute to return home for a yearly bonfire in Ray-Ray's memory, but he finds himself waylaid with his friend Jackson in an eerie town known only as the "Darkening Land." Is this a real place, or a limbo-like place where, it's suggested, suicides live? Edgar's friend Jackson says he's making a video game about Jim Thorpe, and keeps wanting to capture Edgar's "Indian" likeness as a reference. This, we learn later, is a lie; Jackson has designed a video game that allows players to hunt Indians, and the line between the holograms who are the targets and real Indians like Edgar is frighteningly blurry. It's a bit of a groaner when we learn that Jackson's last name is Andrews--Jackson Andrews, get it?--but I think that, through the skillful creepiness of the setting, Hobson earns it.

How many ways can one be removed? Ray-Ray's death gives us one way. Addiction, provoked by poverty, might be another. There is a suggestion, too, that the foster system encourages a kind of removal; Hobson brought his longtime professional experience with the Oklahoma foster system to bear in his (excellent) novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, and does so again here. All of this suggests that Indian Removal is a process that plays out again and again, when Native Americans are ground out of the systems that identify them as dependents or threats. And yet, the novel gives us visions of reconciliation and restoration, too, in the arrival of Wyatt, the living memory, and in the way that Sonja is forced to abandon her quixotic and half-baked plan of revenge. The final voice threaded with Maria's, Edgar's, and Sonja's is that of Tsala, a 19th century Cherokee folk hero who fought against removal and saved the Eastern Band of Cherokee (and who appears briefly in Pushing the Bear as "Tsali"). Tsali, like Ray-Ray, was a martyr, but his spirit could not be conquered.

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

No matter what, I could not bring myself to think of Rosemary any less. Little by little, the days were like thieves, stealing parts of me, including any courage I had to confront my feelings toward people: my growing interest in Rosemary, my hatred for Nora Drake, my friendship with George. At night I began to think more and more about my mother, as her court hearing grew closer. I worried about her release. I worried about her remaining locked up. And I worried the days were taking my feelings, how the more I thought about everyone, the more dead I felt inside.

Sequoyah is fifteen years old, Cherokee, caught up in the faceless indifference of the foster system. His mother is in prison, perhaps up for parole soon, but in the meantime he's been placed with the Troutts, a well-meaning couple who live out in the sticks of rural Oklahoma. Life with the Troutts, at least, is better than life in juvenile detention, or some of the other foster homes that Sequoyah has been in and out of. He finds a friend in George, another foster kid who prefers to write messages than to speak, and who clearly has some kind of autism. But it's the Troutts' third foster kid, an older girl named Rosemary, who really captivates Sequoyah. Like him, she's Cherokee, she's disaffected, she's not like other kids. "I feel a weird connection to you," she tells him. "I mean like you're a lost soul from a thousand years ago who's here to deliver something to me."

Maybe that sounds heartwarming, or worse, banal, but it's not. What Rosemary and Sequoyah really have in common is that they've both been deeply damaged by troubling childhoods, and they are both strange, dark, and prone to antisocial behavior and violent thoughts. We come to understand that people are actually afraid of Sequoyah; when George wakes up bleeding from his mouth during a bad sleepwalking spell, he assumes that it's Sequoyah that has hit him in his sleep. When Rosemary's girlfriend (perhaps in both senses) Nora tells her that the way Sequoyah looks at Rosemary is creepy, are we sure that she's wrong? Sequoyah's affection for Rosemary is both a desire to be with her and a desire to be her; he sneaks into her room when she's not around and wears her clothes. Rosemary, for her part, steals money and things and disappears for days; she gives and then cruelly retracts her affection for Sequoyah and talks openly of suicide.

What I liked best about Where the Dead Sit Talking, I think, is that Hobson manages to make Sequoyah and Rosemary poignantly empathetic, rather than repulsive or frightening. We see quite easily how they've been shaped by their difficult circumstances; Sequoyah literally bears scars on his face from an episode of his mother's negligence. As teenagers, they feel real; in the afterword, Hobson talks about how the book was inspired by children he knew working in Oklahoma's foster system. In fact, one of my biggest reactions to Where the Dead Sit Talking was jealousy: I've been working on my own book about disaffected teens, and I wish I had Hobson's talent for detail. Time and time again Hobson has Sequoyah, Rosemary, George, or even some rando at their shared school, do or say something that I bookmarked to steal--or, I should say, for inspiration.

Where the Dead Sit Talking is a grim book. It's narrated by a slightly older Sequoyah, looking back at this transformative experience in his life. We know from the beginning that things haven't gotten better for him; the book's first line is "I have been unhappy for many years now." Sometimes he'll interrupt the narrative to let us know how a particular character dies: "on October 12, 1999 of mysterious causes," or, "who later died on January 19, 2003 of strangulation." These asides are never justified or explained; we're not meant to think something as gruesome and manipulative as that Sequoyah has become a serial killer or anything. But he is someone who grew up surrounded by loss and death, who sees death. On a narrative level, Where the Dead Sits Talking avoids overarching narratives in favor of something more vignette-like. When climactic things happen--the one moment of grand violence in the novel is the one moment that feels a little off--they both grow out of and interrupt the persistent ebb and flow of hope and despair that characterize the life of a foster child like Sequoyah.

This is the fourth year in a row that I have dedicated January to reading books by Native American authors, and Where the Dead Sits Talking is one of the most rewarding discoveries from the experience. Sequoyah's Cherokee identity isn't exactly central to the narrative, but neither is it incidental. Looking back, I was struck by his desire to be like his "great-grandfather," who saw spirits in every thing. It's not such a big leap from there to a teenager who yearns for the mystical experience of a soulmate like Rosemary: "My great-grandfather claimed to have met a beautiful spirit woman... Her eyes were fire. She held my great-grandfather's gaze, kissed his hands, and fell into a long, deep sleep with him." Perhaps we are invited to see a connection between the kinds of displacement that the Cherokee suffered and the displacement that kids in the foster system suffer. Maybe not. But at the very least, Hobson reminds us that displacement--alienation, isolation, and loss--have many forms, and each is more enduring than we might hope to believe.