Oldies and goodies

Barbara Kingsolver is the well-deserved recipient of many literary prizes. Her more recent novels have been impressive stand-alones, but I’m among the many readers who also love and re-read her original trilogy set in Arizona.

The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven are about Taylor Greer, born in Kentucky and desperate to leave the small town where she has grown up. Taylor is a firecracker of a character: never one to be pushed around, never at a loss for words, tough and caring and brave and flawed. In a small Oklahoma town, short of money, she stops in a bar.

“You got anything to eat that costs less than a dollar?” I asked the old guy behind the counter.

“Ketchup” the gray-haired cowboy [one of the only three other customers] said. He slid the ketchup bottle down the counter so hard it rammed my cup and spilled out probably five cents worth of coffee.

‘You think being busted is a joke?” I asked him. I slid the bottle back and hit his beer mug dead center.

This fierceness is probably why an Indian woman, one of the other customers, gives Taylor an infant, the child of her dead sister.

“Take this baby,” she said.

A baby? As Taylor says

“If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky”

The infant is silent, big-eyed, watchful, wet and cold, and Taylor calls her Turtle because she clings on like a snapping turtle. She has bruises, healed fractures, and she has been sexually abused.

Taylor’s beat-up car comes to a standstill in Tucson, and that’s where they stay, slowly finding a community of support. There is Lou Ann, whose husband walked out leaving her with an infant — she rents a room to Taylor and Turtle, and babysits both kids. There’s Mattie, the owner of a auto parts store, who hires Taylor and lets her bring Turtle in to work when childcare falls through.

And there are people much worse off than Taylor and Turtle. Estevan and Esperanza are refugees from Guatemala, where their child was kidnapped. Like Turtle, they are traumatized by what has happened to them, but Kingsolver makes them so much more than just their past; they are fully realized characters.

Kingsolver has obvious and deep empathy for the underdog, but she also raises all the common questions. The cantankerous Mrs Parsons says, about immigrants and refugees:

“Before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America.

But even readers who feel like Mrs Parsons will also feel for Estevan and Esperanza (I think!), because Kingsolver’s characters have such depth.

The Bean Trees ends on Kingsolver’s characteristic positive-but-realistic note, but Pigs in Heaven picks up on some complex themes. Taylor is the white adoptive mother of a Cherokee child and the world sees them as an oddity.

“Your daughter doesn’t look a thing like you”.

[Taylor]’s used to this. Strangers stare at the two of them with that inquiring-minds-want-to-know look. […] “She’s adopted,” Taylor says flatly.

Except, Turtle is not exactly legally adopted. A brush with fame puts them on Oprah, and a Cherokee lawyer investigates the adoption. Given the brutal history of the Native American genocide by white settlers, the enduring sorrow of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and the many Native American children lost to one government policy or another, there is a legal and moral imperative for the Cherokee to maintain tribal traditions with their children. Yet, Turtle was abused and voluntarily given to Taylor, and the two have a deep and abiding bond. Should Turtle be returned to her relatives in the tribe?

Kingsolver complicates the story by giving Taylor a Cherokee great-grandmother, but there are other factors to consider. The Cherokee lawyer, Annawake Fourkiller, says:

“Really, a baby elephant should be raised by elephants.”

“She isn’t an elephant. She’s a little girl.”

“If she’s raised in a totally white culture, there’s going to come a time when she’ll feel like one. [..]”

[Alice, Taylor’s mother] “If I’m Cherokee, and Taylor is, a little bit, and we never knew it but lived to tell the tale, then why can’t she?”

Annawake lays her dark wrist over Alice’s. “Skin color. Isn’t life simple? You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn’t. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee.”

The custody issues are at the heart of this book, but it has so much more: the struggle to stay afloat on minimum-wage jobs (tuna and peanut butter have to be the main proteins), the patchwork of bad childcare options, how we deal with the mentally offbeat (“you could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they are not self-sufficient”), the importance of a family and community.

[Taylor] Everything I’ve been doing, for this whole crazy summer, was just so I could keep Turtle. I thought that was the only thing that mattered, keeping the two of us together. But now I feel like that might not be true. I love her all right, but just her and me isn’t enough. We’re not a whole family.”

The Bean Trees feels like an organic book that follows the characters through a journey, but Pigs in Heaven has a lot of background information about the Cherokees that occasionally makes Annawake Fourkiller sound like Wikipedia. But I found this easy to forgive, as this is not common knowledge, even, sad to say, in America.

The three books are considered a trilogy, but in fact only two of them follow the same characters, while the third, Animal Dreams, is very loosely related. It’s set in and around Tucson as well, but the only character it has in common with the other two is Collie Bluestone, a minor character who appears briefly in all the books. (I wonder if Kingsolver had thought of writing a book about him — I’d have bought that! But I’m glad that she diversified from Tucson-centric novels — we’re all the better off for her wonderful Appalachian novels and The Poisonwood Bible).

Animal Dreams is set among a small community of Spanish-origin, interbred people near Tucson. Codi Noline is the daughter of the town doctor, Doc Homer; a neighbour has told Codi that her dad’s Alzheimer’s has progressed, and Codi has returned to see what she can do. She has a high-school crush still in town, Loyd Peregrina (of Apache, Navajo and Pueblo descent), and plenty of people who remember her as a child. While she rediscovers her hometown people and investigates her ancestral past, she reads the letters written by her sister Hallie, who is helping the farmers of Nicaragua while they are being attacked and murdered by the US-funded contras.

The concept of generational and buried trauma runs through her books. Only after years of safety does Turtle allow herself to remember the ‘bad man’ who abused her. Annawake is articulate and emotional about Cherokee history. Codi has nightmares where she is blind, and memories of watching her mother’s death — events that she is told she could not possibly remember, but that she does.

All three books lovingly describe a small-town environment where everyone is connected by blood or marriage to everyone else, where the elderly are respected for their memories, but also where the young can be restless and desperate for space and freedom. In Kingsolver’s telling, they generally return to their roots.

(I was amazed and delighted to see how many editions of these books exist! So nice to think of new generations of readers discovering them)