W(h)ere There's a
Wolf, There's a Way: The Lupine Gothics of Mongrels and Where the
Dead Sit Talking
JOHN GAMBER
"I
started looking wider and I realized that everybody... was drawing American
Indians as some form of wolf. And I thought, what's the attraction there? Why
do people do this? And also I was disgusted by it, not that a wolf isn't a cool
animal, but just in the way it's been memorialized on a thousand truck-stop
blankets." --Stephen Graham Jones
In this excerpt from an interview with Billy J. Stratton,
Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) muses about the conflation of Native America with
wolves across mainstream representations. Here he's speaking specifically about
why he's relieved Art Spiegelman didn't have any Native characters in Maus,
"because I know he'd draw him or her with a wolf head" (Stratton 52). While
such tired cliches of Indigenous people serve as a source of frustration for
Jones, his conversation with Stratton stems from a discussion of his own
werewolf novel, Mongrels (2016). Jones reclaims the wolf in his own work
in ways that trouble facile associations of the lupine with the Native. Nor is
Jones alone in this unsettling reclamation; consider for example the recent
release of A Howl: An Indigenous Anthology of Wolves, Werewolves, and
Rougarou, edited by Elizabeth LaPensée, which
offers stories from the past, present and future. This essay places the lycanthropic
representations in Jones' text in conversation with those (and the more broadly
lupine) in Brandon Hobson's (Cherokee) novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018,
hereafter, WDST).
These texts may seem, on their face,
very different: Hobson's is a realist novel about a Cherokee adolescent in
foster care living with a white family in rural Oklahoma and Jones' is a tale
about a boy from a family of werewolves who mainly live on the run.[1]
Yet, the two texts share a number of similarities. Specifically, both take the
form of Southern Gothic bildungsromans (narrated by
their protagonists); both wield werewolves (in their main texts and epigraphs)
as devices for coming-of-age stories about male adolescents who are
specifically working to construct their notions about masculinity; both
protagonists attempt to configure those masculinities while being raised by
people other than their biological parents; and, due to their familial
situations, both protagonists are often on the move while longing for a kind of
stasis or stability that they deem "normal."[2]
In this article, I contend that both novels wield their lupine imagery (of
werewolves and wolves) within Gothic traditions replete with secrets variously
withheld and revealed as devices to interrogate the tensions and overlaps
between a series of apparent dichotomies, notably: the (masculine) wild and the
(feminine) domestic; solitude and community; and motion and stasis.[3]
Sequoyah, the narrator/protagonist
of WDST, lives with the Truett family (for the bulk of the novel) in Little Crow, "near
Black River, in rural Oklahoma" (11). He is estranged from his
biological mother because "she finally landed herself in the women's prison for
possession of drug paraphernalia and driving while intoxicated. She got three
years since she already had a record" (5).[4]
Sequoyah's mother remains incarcerated throughout the novel. He explains, "My mother and I were alone,
too. My father had left us, packed up his jeep and headed west to find God. I
never knew him" (3).[5] Sequoyah's
mother does appear in the novel in both present scenes and past remembrances,
though their relationship is fraught and increasingly emotionally distant. Two other foster children are also living in
the Truett home, "A seventeen-year-old girl named Rosemary and a boy
who's thirteen... His name is George" (11). We learn that Rosemary is Kiowa and
that she "had attempted suicide, twice," a fact that becomes important as the
novel progresses (105). Sequoyah quickly becomes obsessed with Rosemary, but
while she is initially quite interested in getting to know him, she grows
decreasingly so over the course of the text (to his consternation).
Mongrels' unnamed narrator (who I will
refer to as The Nephew, the last persona he adopts over the course of the
novel) lives with his deceased mother's sister Libby and brother Darren, his
aunt and uncle, both portrayed throughout the majority of the novel as
werewolves, albeit mostly in human, not wolf, form.[6] While Libby does the bulk of the
raising of The Nephew, he idolizes his uncle, explaining, "Every boy who never
had a dad, he comes to worship his uncle" (20), and later, "I wanted to be him
so bad (38). By contrast, The Nephew contends that Libby "wanted me to be the
one who got to have a normal life, in town. / We're werewolves, though" (35).[7]
The Nephew reflects on his years between the ages of eight and sixteen as he
and his aunt and uncle crisscross the southern tier of the United States
between New Mexico and Florida. The Nephew waits (impatiently) to discover
whether he will ever turn into a werewolf (like his aunt, uncle, grandfather,
and, we learn, father), or if he will not (like his mother).[8]
Both texts demonstrate their
attention to were/wolves from their very beginnings, and I offer readings of
their respective epigraphs to frame the contexts into which each situates
itself. The context of these other texts, I argue, mirrors the ways the young
protagonists emplace themselves either in physical space or within their
relationships and/as responsibilities. Mongrels begins with an epigraph
attributed to James Blish: "Eventually I went to
America. There no one believes in werewolves" (np). Jones frames his Southern
werewolf story within this broadly US national context, but it requires a bit
of a tweak of Blish's original, which reads, "And
then I came to this country. Here no one believes in the werewolf" (45). Blish's "There Shall be No Darkness," from which this
epigraph obliquely derives, however, is set, not in the US, but
Scotland—Jones' epigraph, like The Nephew's narrative itself (as we will
see), tells the truth, but tells it slant. Jones recasts the nation that, in
Gothic tradition, denies the ghouls and ghosts that haunt its landscape.
Moreover, like "There Shall Be No
Darkness," Mongrels also deals with
the science behind werewolves—it theorizes both their history and
evolution as a mode of fleshing out issues of belonging in both community and
in place. In Blish's text, lycanthropy is regarded as
a disease and a mutation (specifically of the pineal gland), and, as such, a
possible evolutionary step toward something new. Jarmoskowski,
the werewolf in the story, opines just prior to his demise, "Someday the pineal will come into better use and all men will be
able to modify their forms without this terrible madness as a penalty. For us,
the lycanthropes, the failures, nothing is left" (44). Werewolves then
represent a potential hope for a kind of transforming humanity which comes with
a maddened bloodlust, which represents too great a curse.[9]
That curse, likewise, takes the form of isolation—and it is this
isolation that leads Jarmoskowski to "come to this
country." He laments, "It is not good for a man to wander from country to
country, knowing that he is a monster to his fellow-men... I went through Europe,
playing the piano and giving pleasure, meeting people, making friends—and
always, sooner or later, there were whisperings, and strange looks and dawning
horror" (45). Much like the protagonists of Mongrels and WDST, Jarmoskowski is always on the move, longing for but never
finding, never even really hopeful for, a sense of community or belonging. To
that end, Joshua T. Anderson notes that in Mongrels, "traveling from
'state to state' across geographical borders is a necessity, and... transforming
from 'state to state' across the lines of species (human and wolf) and
monstrosity (human and werewolf) is a condition of lycanthrope life" (127).
Similarly, Jarmoskowski continues, "Sometimes, I
could spend several months without incident in some one place and my life would
take on a veneer of normality. I could attend to my music and have people about
me that I liked and be—human" (45). In each of these novels, as in Blish's story, this unfulfilled longing to remain in one
place and/or find belonging with/in community is likened to human normalcy,
while those who cannot attain that stasis, for whatever reason, become excluded
from humanness (and aligned with the lupine).
Of course, such a phrase as
"human normalcy" requires its own canon of stories by which to contextualize it
(as its meaning will vary wildly across different histories, locations, trajectories,
and intersections). As Daniel Heath Justice explains in his chapter "How Do We
Learn To Be Human?" from Why Do Indigenous Literatures Matter "Although
we are born into human bodies, it's our teaching—and our
stories—that make us human" (33). Both Mongrels and WDST
are stories about the importance of stories, particularly stories about home
and community, in shaping the kinds of humans we become.[10]
Justice continues, "the role of experience, of teaching, and of story [is] to
help us find ways of meaningful being in whatever worlds we inhabit, whatever
contexts we've inherited" (34).[11] Such, then,
I argue, are Mongrels and WDST: stories about characters becoming
human and navigating the spaces between humanness and inhumanness that wield
lupine images as symbols of both the dangers and possibilities of those
seemingly disparate states. These are not, however, how-to guides; they are
stories about pitfalls and dangers, messy tales about the incompleteness and
the contingent nature of that becoming and of very human fallibilities.[12]
Hobson's novel likewise begins
with a pair of epigraphs replete with (were)wolf references or allusions. The
first reads, "'A starving man will eat with the wolf.' –Native American
proverb." Those of us who work in Native American Studies are apt to read the
provenance Hobson provides for this aphorism with some distrust, of course; the
phrase "Native American proverb" is dicey. We regularly encounter memes, for
example, like this, vaguely interspecies inspirational quotes associated with
particular creatures—wolves, eagles, and buffalo—that seemingly
can't be traced to any particular Native nation or community. It's hard not to
read some tongue-in-cheek play from Hobson here. The Jones passage I use as the
epigraph to this essay wields this pairing, as Jones continues, "It gets so
annoying to see. I get so tired of that stuff—and I say that, but if you keep getting tired of every little thing like
that you're going to spend your life fatigued, so you finally just allow
yourself to be amused by it" (Stratton 52). Hobson's epigraph conjures this
wolf/Native American pairing, and we can picture it emblazoned across the
"truck stop blankets" Jones mentions above. Yet, this rendition relies on a
peculiar manifestation that maligns the wolf, suggesting that eating with them
could only come about because of starvation (we might contrast such a negative
reading of this canid with Jones' "not that a wolf isn't a cool animal"). This
alleged proverb certainly parallels settler constructions of wolves as dangers
to be eliminated across North America.[13]
And, as such, the wolf qua Indian qua wolf motif further reminds
us of settler elimination of Indigenous peoples.[14]
In contrast to these defaming and violent views toward wolves, though, Hobson
elsewhere asserts, "Though hunting was a profession, a Cherokee would not kill
a wolf, as wolves were messengers to the spirit world ("How Tsala"
22).[15]
All of this to say: we might read an irony in Hobson's epigraph and attribution,
but each also signals a bit toward understanding the text's protagonist and his
tendencies to lupine ideation, as I will demonstrate below.
Hobson follows this broadly
attributed proverb with something far more particular; the second epigraph to WDST reads, "'Poor strangers, they have
so much to be afraid of.' –Shirley Jackson" (np). In this instance, as
with Jones's epigraph, we encounter a passage by a specific author, though
without the text from which that passage comes. Hobson lifts this quote from
Jackson's gothic novel, We Have Always
Lived in the Castle, which his text in some ways mirrors.[16]
Jackson's novel famously and richly begins, "My name is Mary Katherine
Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have
often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf,
because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have
had to be content with what I had" (1).[17]
The protagonist/narrator of Jackson's novel, called Merricat
by most of its characters, laments having not been born a werewolf, displaying
a longing that both Sequoyah and The Nephew mirror (and contrasting Jarmoskowski's portrayal of lycanthropy as a curse).[18]
The Blackwood family in Jackson's
novel is collectively reclusive, and the townspeople mock and jeer Merricat when she takes her biweekly trips from their
isolated house to town to buy groceries and to get books from the library (Merricat is particular to "fairy tales and books of
history" (2). She explains, "The people of the village have always hated us"
(4). In order to drive out a newly arrived relative who is attempting to attain
the family's wealth, Merricat sets fire to the house.
The fire department puts out the fire, but the townspeople proceed to loot and
smash the remains of the house. Thereafter, Constance and Merricat
remain in the relatively undamaged ground floor of the house, visited only by
occasional townspeople who, out of guilt or fear (the young women are imagined
to be witches), leave food for them. In the final vignette of the novel, a
young boy, spurred by his friends, makes his way to the porch and calls out,
"shakily," a taunt the townspeople had earlier directed at Merricat
(146).[19]
That night the sisters find "on the doorsill a basket of fresh eggs and a note
reading, 'He didn't mean it, please.'" In response, Merricat,
in the third to last line of the novel, states, "Poor strangers... They have so
much to be afraid of" (146). Similarities abound between Hobson's novel and
Jackson's: in both we encounter odd and maudlin young people, similarly odd
adult caretakers, a town full of creepy people, a family living in relative
isolation out in the woods, family stories of dubious veracity, and deaths that
may or may not have been accidents.
Adding layers of referentiality to
Hobson's epigraph, Merricat explains that she likes
three things in particular: "my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and
Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom" (1). Richard Plantagenet might
refer to any of a number of people, but likely gestures to the great-grandson
of King Edward III of England. As Jamil
Mustafa contends, "The inclusion of Richard III among Merricat's
favorites is... illuminating... because Richard was supposedly guilty of the same
crime that Merricat commits, the murder of blood
relations—in particular, of male heirs" (135). While Constance is
found to have killed the family, she is not convicted of any crime. The reader
later learns that it was in fact Merricat who killed
the family, and quite intentionally—like Hobson's novel (as we will see),
Jackson's opens with a death foretold, and possibly, with the
protagonist/narrator, a murderer.[20]
WDST includes its own specifically
werewolf narrative of sorts, constructed, like that of Mongrels, as a
fiction within the larger fiction of the novel. Sequoyah explains to George, "I
once got a boy to believe I was a werewolf" (205). He explains that the other
boy was in a shelter with him and had asked him about the burn scars on his
face: "I told him I was attacked by a wolf in the woods in the middle of the
night" (205). The reader is well aware that Sequoyah received these burn marks
from his mother; he explains very early in the novel, "I was burned by hot grease
once when I was eleven. My mother was drunk, but it was an accident... Hot grease
stung my cheek and neck... The scars are small but noticeable enough" (4). We read
multiple layers of storytelling in this passage. Within this work of fiction,
Sequoyah, named for the creator of the Cherokee syllabary, crafts another
fiction. Nonetheless, we see a kind of wish fulfillment in this werewolf tale.
Rather than explaining the true source of his scars, he decides for a less domestic, and a much more wild,
injury.[21]
Instead of being scarred by his mother in a kitchen, he opts to claim a wolf
attack. Outwardly, Sequoyah parallels The Nephew's rejection of the feminized
domestic space as the foregrounding element of his autobiography. Yet,
Sequoyah, as I discuss further below, will ultimately embrace both his own
feminine elements and an idealized, if individualized, notion of domesticity.
The trick here is that Sequoyah
gets this other boy to believe him. He creates a story about himself to make
himself seem dangerous, to protect himself from a variety of encroachments:
intimate, physical, violent. As Jones notes, "Truth is in the rhetoric of me
convincing you and you saying, 'I believe that. I feel that to be true'"
("Observations" 24). But, this entire novel is really working to do similar
work. It's a story about a character telling a story about himself that doesn't
quite add up and seeing who is going to buy it. Throughout the text, the reader
occupies a position similar to that of both the other boy and of George in this
vignette. Sequoyah is telling a story about having told someone a story that
was meant to create distance and fear, and that in this case is also meant to
generate intimacy and respect, if not trust.
Furthermore, Sequoyah sexualizes
his werewolf self-fashioning. He asserts, "I told him sometimes I wake up in
the mornings naked with scratches and blood and mud all over my body. I told
him other wolves gave me a hard-on" (205). Sequoya's wielding of sexual arousal
as part of his mythos blends a rough-and-tumble machismo with a bestial
sexuality that means to create distance between himself and this other boy. He
crafts himself as feral, unbound by the rules of society that disallow these
manifestations of wildness. He proceeds to tell the story of telling this same
boy a story of stealing a pickup truck and driving to Galveston, Texas, where
he was found and arrested, "I told him they threw me down and handcuffed me
just off the freeway. I told him a coyote came out of the brush and started to
attack the trooper, ripped into him. Bit his leg so that blood sprayed
everywhere. The coyote smelled my blood, knew I was part wolf. The coyote
ripped out the trooper's organs and we started eating it. The kid believed
every word" (205). Sequoyah's story turns on the wild coyote recognizing his
wildness and power, where the emblem of authority—masculine but civilized law
enforcement—fails to do so, a failure that ends in his death.[22]
Given this tendency toward telling tall tales, Sequoyah's role as a reliable
narrator is in doubt throughout the novel.[23]
Indeed,
this story and the epigraphs of the text are not the sole references to wolves
in the novel. When we first meet George, we learn that "He was reading fairy
tales mostly... stories of wolves and children, and also science fiction stories"
(26). Sequoyah tells us that he had "won honorable mention in a contest at
school one year when I'd drawn a cartoon wolf with bandages on his nose and a
patch over one eye. The inscription underneath it read: 'Do What's Right! Don't
Fight!'" (167).[24] Rosemary
explains that as a child, "The stories I liked to read all dealt with children
escaping wolves" (190). As Sequoyah goes on
a bicycle ride that he remembers as one of his "most invigorating experiences"
while living with the Troutts he recalls, "I imagined
wolf tracks under my tires" (193-94). While he waits in a hospital room for a
diagnosis after having vomiting spells and headaches, he imagines, "They would
tell me I was part animal, part human, some other entity" (263). And, finally,
of a meal he consumes after being released from the hospital, he explains, "I devoured everything, wolfing it
down with my hands, eating like an animal. I was so sated in that moment, so
freshly and newly awake, I didn't even notice until I got home that all the
rooster sauce and ketchup on my shirt looked like blood" (266). These passages
might seem to lack a single coherent thread, but the sheer repetition of wolf
imagery in the text coupled with its epigraphs begs analysis. Beginning with
the first epigraph's starving man, we note the ways Sequoyah likens the wolf to
voracious and self-concerned feeding. Included in the second epigraph lies his
longing toward lycanthropy (which he shares with Merricat).
Finally, he imagines wolf tracks as part of a liberty he feels on his bike
ride. In all of these conjurings, Sequoyah, like The
Nephew, valorizes as imagination of wolves as lone, rather than, for example,
as members of a pack.
These lycanthropic tendencies
point toward ways in which both novels participate in gothic traditions. As Eve
Sedgwick famously contends, the Gothic novel is "pervasively conventional. Once
you know that a novel is of the Gothic kind... you can predict its contents with
an unnerving certainty" (9). In her thesis, "The Indigenous Gothic Novel," Amy
Elizabeth Gore summarizes Sedgwick's conventions as consisting of "a
melodramatic and foreboding setting, a woman in distress, manifestations of the
supernatural or uncanny, reference to that which is unspeakable, and a haunting
of the past upon the present" (3). Both Jones' and Hobson's novels contain each
of the elements Gore enumerates. Moreover, these narratives are littered with
monsters, with references to dark magics, with families festering in rural
isolations (which is not to say all rurality is such), with brooding,
disturbed, and disturbing folks. Such modern wielding of the Gothic is hardly
surprising. While Gothic once referred to literature that fits Sedgwick's model
and derives specifically from Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century England,
contemporary usage expands its meaning self-consciously as Gothic becomes a
particular mode for (among other things) contesting narratives that uphold national
and nationalist hegemonic norms. In his book-length study of the Gothic, Fred
Botting explains, "In the contest for the meaning of 'Gothic' more than a
single word was at stake. At issue were the differently constructed and valued
meanings of the Enlightenment, culture, nation and government as well as
contingent, but no less contentious, significances of the family, nature,
individuality and representation" (43). In short, Gothic has always served as
an artistic mode for the contestation of fixed, often mainstream, values.
Botting continues,
The
contest for a coherent and stable account of the past... produced an ambivalence
that was not resolved. The complex and often contradictory attempts either to
make the past barbaric in contrast to an enlightened present or to find in it a
continuity that gave English culture a stable history had the effect of
bringing to the fore and transforming the way in which both past and present
depended on modes of representation. (23)
If the Gothic represents a counter-response
to or problematized wielding of the Enlightenment—replete with its
scientific rationalism and positivism—and one that specifically calls
into question the hierarchical or progressivist dyad of civilized/barbaric,
then Indigenous communities and communities of color (among others) possess a
vested interest in wielding it.[25]
Indeed, this move to (re)claim
Gothic traditions and aesthetics manifest in Native American literary critical
approaches specifically. Louis Owens, a key figure in such conversations,
writes against the United States' constructions of the "Frontier Gothic,"
offering instead modes by which, "The gothic Indian, that imagined construct
imprisoned in an absolute, untouchable past, is deconstructed, and the
contemporary Indian is granted both freedom to imagine him/herself in new and
radical ways, as well as responsibility for that
self-definition" (77). Owens recalls Faulkner's Chief Doom character as a clear
example of the Frontier Gothic Indian to be deconstructed. Annette Trefzer offers a reading of Choctaw author Leanne Howe's
novels Shell Shaker and Miko Kings to articulate the ways they "sound
gothic resonances and engage with the region's traumatic wounds as spirits ill
at rest point at Indigenous dispossession and disrupt official historical
narratives" (200).[26] Trefzer hones in on intersectional representations of
Indigenous women specifically. Meanwhile, Michelle Burnham likens Windigo
stories to the Gothic as a tradition to be reclaimed, and Billy J. Stratton
terms Mongrels a "neo-Southern gothic werewolf novel" (1). Hobson
notes that while he sees the capacity to read WDST as a realistic portrayal of a wounded mind, it might also be
read as "a horror novel" (Brennan).[27]
Hobson's
novel's setting of Little Crow itself contributes to the gothic vibe of the
text. When Sequoyah asks George why the "entire towns seem[s] to have such
strange habits," George replies, "'Little
Crow is just a really weird place... The police promote prostitution. There's a
brothel out by the lake. The police know all about it and they don't care... You
could probably get away with murder here'" (118). We note of course that
Sequoyah may have done exactly that: he may (like Merricat)
have gotten away with murder. Meanwhile, the high school is abuzz with rumors
of teens engaging in "strange sex acts and witchcraft" and "similar adult sex
parties, where people dressed like mannequins... and they all wore flesh-colored
bodysuits" (117). Not all of Little Crow's oddities are of overtly sexual
natures, though. Sequoyah notes, "backyard birthday parties involved a game in
which children were blindfolded and had their wrists tied behind their backs.
They bobbed for dead snakes from a tub of water"; these same families use
snakes in their church (117, 118).
In a further manifestation of an
anti-positivist uncertainty and general secret-keeping common to the Gothic,
each story offers a narrative that it, sooner or later, undercuts. While over
the course of the novel the reader comes to accept The Nephew's werewolf
narrative, Mongrels begins, "My grandfather used to tell me he was a
werewolf" (1). This opening offers at least a layer of doubt to the
grandfather's story, a layer that remains throughout the first chapter of the
text. Still in the first chapter, The Nephew relates, "none of Grandpa's
stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different
way" (25). The Nephew's grandfather is relating stories that convey messages,
values, morals, etc. As such, that the details of the stories may never have
happened doesn't necessarily make them untrue. Of course, what The Nephew
communicates here might just as easily be said of Jones' novel itself, or of
all fiction, or of all stories. Elsewhere, Jones explains, "Truth isn't in
verifiability. Truth is always in the narrative; truth is how well it coheres
together and how it makes you feel" ("Observations" 24). We are reminded here
of a host of canonized Native authors (if Native American literature can be said
to tend toward canonicity). Leslie Marmon Silko's (Laguna Pueblo) famous
introductory words in Ceremony explain, "I will tell you something about
stories... They aren't just entertainment./ Don't be
fooled. / They are all we have, you see,/ all we have
to fight off/ illness and death" (np). In a scene in Chris Eyre's (Cheyenne and
Arapaho) Smoke Signals, Victor asks his mother whether he should bring
Thomas with him on his journey and she launches into a story about making
frybread (the message of the story conveys the importance of community).[28]
Daniel Heath Justice describes stories that "give shape, substance, and purpose
to our existence and help us understand how to uphold our responsibilities to
one another and the rest of creation... good stories—not always happy, not
always gentle, but good ones nonetheless, because they tell the truths of our
presence in the world today, in days past, and in days to come" (Why 2). In short, there is a long-established
precedent of the ways that Native stories carry both power and message, what we
might teach in our literature classes as the "theme" of a work. The narrator of
Mongrels goes on to declare that such a practice runs in the family,
stating that his uncle "Darren was just like Grandpa, telling me one story, meaning
another" (100). As such, the werewolf narrative of Mongrels takes on a
self-consciously metaphorical significance.
Among
the secrets that Mongrels keeps from the reader is the racialization of
The Nephew and his family. One evening at a convenience store, The Nephew runs
into some kids from his grade, one of whom, gesturing at The Nephew asks, "He Mexican?" (61). Another follows, "What
are you really?" (62). Jones' choice of "Mexican" in this instance is itself
rich. Mexico and its denizens are, of course, profoundly diverse, and that
nation celebrates (rhetorically, at least) its diversity in the form of the
mestizaje in ways that counter the US's historical anxieties over racial
mixing. Placed in the context of the werewolf narrative, especially one called Mongrels,
we are reminded of ideas of purity and the ways those ideas fail in the face of
the complex mixings that life creates (and requires).[29]
Yet, of course, for many in the United States, the term "Mexican" is very
specifically racialized. It denotes a particular, but flexible, range of brown
skin along with whatever other phenotypic elements happen to exist—or
not—in the eye of the beholder. It likewise connotes foreign-ness, and
the classmates in this scene echo these stereotypes as they say to The Nephew,
"Still wet... piso mojado,
right?" (61). Jones turns the joke back on these boys (who our narrator names
simply and tellingly "Yellow Hair" and "John Deere Hat"), by having them
conflate the slur "mojado" with "piso
mojado" (wet floor). Moreover, Yellow Hair stands in
contrast to werewolves broadly, as we learn later in the novel; Libby tells The
Nephew, "I don't think there ever has
been a blond [werewolf]" (112). "'The only place you could hide would be a
wheatfield, I guess. Or a stack of gold.' This is funny to her. Hilarious.
Werewolves never get the treasure" (112). The fact that werewolves are never
blonde offers another potential reading of racialized phenotype, but since
people with (naturally) blonde hair make up a tiny fraction of the world's
population (something around two percent), this isn't as big a tell as one
might think. The Nephew's addendum that Libby's laughter stems from the thought
of the werewolf getting the treasure returns the reader to a more ambiguous
sense of alterity.
The
Nephew further hints but does not reveal, "The same way animals and cops know
werewolves, so do security guards and salespeople and clerks. If you asked them
why, they might not say 'werewolves,' would probably just shrug, say there's
something shady about us, isn't there?" (90). Of course, Jones' narrator
expresses the vague sentiments of unconscious bias (or obfuscated conscious
bias) in this "something shady." All of this is to say that we can read a racialized marginalization
into these werewolves, though one that needn't necessarily mark them as, say,
Indigenous. In the
same conversation with Stratton that I use as my epigraph above, Jones
explains, "people are always asking me, 'What's Indian about this' So I started
writing about zombies and aliens to stop getting that question because I hate
that question. That question means people are going into this book with their
miner lights turned up too bright looking for just one thing (Stratton 52-53).[30] Lycanthropy
in Mongrels might signal any of a
number of forms of alterity (racialized, classed, or based on status within
governmental structures of naturalization to name a few), but whatever it is
standing in for in whatever reading someone has, it is clear that to be a
werewolf in this novel is to fall outside of the mainstream. It's to come from
a population whose story is not told.[31]
Paul Tremblay refers to such moments in Jones's work as his "beautiful
sentences that both tell and keep secrets" (357).
And that telling, or not telling,
of werewolf stories or secrets lies central to Jones' novel. Significantly
later in the text, The Nephew explains the family's lack of connection,
community, and concomitantly, history: "The reason we don't know where we come
from, it's that werewolves aren't big on writing things down. On leaving bread
crumbs" (215). There might be any number of reasons why this family has either
been elided from official and unofficial record keeping or has obfuscated
itself therein, as is true with many marginalized communities. The grandfather
tells a story of his participation as a soldier in World War II during which he
learns the history of werewolves (the novel offers multiple, sometimes complementary
and sometimes competing—if not contradictory—werewolf origin
stories). The Nephew contends, "Maybe grandpa did go to war, and he did
make it back... but those years in between, those years between shipping out
and straggling back home, those are story years. Years without any photographs
or paperwork or newspaper articles to prove them" (216). Again, the record of
this family and their ilk is sparse, both in terms of personal memorabilia
(photographs) and official and historical documentation (paperwork or newspaper
articles). What they have instead, what all communities maintain, are their stories.
These secrets represent a classic
Gothic mystery that The Nephew intends to unveil and chronicle. But, in so
doing, he also ultimately explains that werewolves are an image, a device, or
an allegory. Libby tells him, "I know
you've been writing it all down in that shoe box you keep in that old blue
backpack... About us" (292). In reply, The Nephew explains, "'We never had a
camera,' he says. It's his only excuse" (292).[32]
But, as with all the stories in the family tradition, he explains, "'It's all different anyway,' the nephew
tells her. 'The way I did it, I mean. Nobody would know anything, if they found
it'" (292). He continues, "You may have fought a bear," referring to a moment
earlier in the novel when Libby-turned-wolf does exactly that. It is at this
point—in the final pages of the novel—that the reader is reminded
that this isn't really a werewolf novel at all. Werewolves are a cover,
a disguise, for something else that this family is.[33]
Mysteries likewise abound
particularly in the vexing and unresolved endings in WDST, as we realize
that the story we are reading might not
be exactly what happened. The final sentences of WDST create a new kind
of doubt in the reader as Sequoyah concludes, "As the weather grew warmer,
Harold [Sequoyah's foster father] helped me build a tepee in the backyard,
where I spent most of my time... I started writing my
own stories, about Indians and monsters, about brainwashed killers, about
mysterious deaths in a mythical Oklahoma town" (273). Of course, we wonder if WDST
is one of those stories about a mysterious death in a mythical town
(particularly since Little Crow seems to not actually exist). But, more than
that, the novel's treatment of its own dramatic conclusion, Rosemary's death,
is deeply ambiguous. As Sedgwick reminds us of the Gothic, "The story does get
through, but in a muffled form" (14).
Of course, for the reader to be
aware that secrets exist in a text, the narrative must both reveal and withhold
certain details. To that end, WDST establishes itself as a chronicle of
a death foretold; as Carnes notes, Hobson's novel is "retrospective" (239). The
third sentence informs the reader of the details we will soon encounter, "The
period of my life of which I am about to tell involves a late night in the
winter of 1989, when I was fifteen years old and a certain girl died in front
of me. Her name was Rosemary Blackwell" (1). From the beginning, the reader
knows the novel's ending, or at least, the story's dramatic height.[34]
What is left is the slow unveiling of how these events came to transpire. We
know the narrator's age; we know the year. And yet, while the novel's outset
begins with this foreshadowed denouement, the as-yet unnamed narrator denies
the reader any mystery or revelation, continuing, "I'm alive and she's dead. I
should tell you this is not a confession, nor is it a way to untangle the roots
and find meaning. Rosemary is dead. People live and die. People kill themselves
or they get killed. The rest of us live on, burdened by what is inescapable"
(1). And, yet, untangling the roots and finding meaning are certainly what the
reader finds themself doing. Such a quest seems precisely among the burdens of
what is inescapable—indeed the quest to make meaning of this story might be
precisely what is inescapable, it
might be exactly what stories demand, and what readers do. Moreover, returning
to the passage above, I want to examine two key elements: the assertion that
this is "not a confession" and Sequoya's note that "people kill themselves or
they get killed," because while Rosemary's death is ruled a suicide, the novel
leaves it quite unclear whether that is the case (did she kill herself or did
she "get killed"—a phrasing rich in its passivity). WDST is not
only, as Hobson notes, a horror story, but also potentially, a murder mystery,
though one that remains unsolved.
The
central mystery of WDST takes the form of the specific mechanics of Rosemary's foretold
death. She tells Sequoyah that "There're taking me out of here. They're sending
me back to rehab," and then tells him "just leave me alone. I don't like you
any more" (245). Finally, Sequoyah narrates:
"You never
listen," she said, and these were her final words. In the dimly-lit room I
couldn't tell if she was laughing or sobbing. A surge of anger struck me. It
stopped me cold, seeing her standing there. I noticed the gun in her hand.
Beyond that, I remember hearing a slight hum that seemed to vibrate from
somewhere in the room. The vibration moved across the floor and entered me, my
body, my mind. The vibration was its own malicious presence, some isolated
entity that existed only in that moment. I knew I was not myself, and it felt
stimulating and good. I was someone furious, someone hurt, someone blighted by
infectious rage. A split second later I could not contain myself and sprang
from the bed and placed my empty hand on her gun-gripping hand, my hand on her
hand, and we held on, both confronting ourselves, both relentless. (246)
Thus ends the chapter, as the reader grapples
with what has happened. Early in the next chapter, Sequoyah recalls, "They
found Rosemary's suicide note... It was her handwriting, there was no
question... Nobody even suspected murder" (247-48). Between Sequoyah's implanting
of the possibility of (unsuspected) murder, his rage, his understanding that he
was "not himself," and the malicious presence of the vibration he sometimes
thinks he hears and feels in stressful situations, the reader encounters much
uncertainty as to how Rosemary died.
When we read the gendered nature
of these dark revelations of possible, even likely violence and Sequoyah's
feelings of entitlement to Rosemary's interest alongside The Nephew's
rejections of Libby, we note the cautionary elements of these stories in regard
to certain brands of isolationist masculinities, particularly in terms of these
disassociated adolescent boys who long to flee, whether in the form of
running—a theme repeated throughout Mongrels, or flying—a
theme repeated throughout WDST.
After all, the specific
masculinities of these two adolescents are central to these novels. The Nephew
seeks out a particular brand of machismo that he mimics from his uncle.
Sequoyah, on the other hand, pairs a hyper-masculine and violent self-narrating
with androgyny. He likes to wear Rosemary's clothes and make-up, for example.
Hobson reminds the reader of the temporal setting of his novel to underscore
these elements of Sequoyah's character. He explains that Sequoyah is "exploring
identity issues with his gender and with this overall appearance. In 1989 not
many boys wear eyeliner to school... Sequoyah is a little more androgynous" (Michal).[35]
With these tendencies in mind, we must recognize the lionization of Darren and
Rosemary, respectively in these texts. Both novels frame the domestic sphere as
feminine. That is, The Nephew spends the majority of Mongrels rejecting
the domestic and what he frames as its feminization, as well as his female role
model, Libby, while Sequoyah longs for the domestic, replete with specifically,
but also not entirely gendered elements, embracing it, along with his female
role model, Rosemary, albeit to an unhealthy degree. The Nephew comes around to
the importance of his aunt and the dangers and harm of the brand of masculinity
he has been privileging, but I argue that both texts tell of fraught formations
of marginalized masculinities.
The Nephew gradually reveals the
damage of his individuated ideology and ideation to both the reader and to
himself. He ponders, for example, what he would do if his family were to stay
in one place long enough for him to have what he describes as a normal life,
staying at a single school long enough to graduate. He declares, "I liked
reading enough, but what was I supposed to do with a diploma? Getting a degree
would be like I was deciding to trade in my heritage, my blood" (56). For this
boy, formal or institutional education represents a betrayal of family and
community, a trade-in of marginalized sub-culture for hegemonic over-culture.
But it is also more than that. For him, it's about foregoing ever truly being a
part of that community, never coming of age. He continues, "And if I started
making those kinds of gestures, then that was the same as asking to never
change, to just stay like this forever, not need all Darren's advice" (56). The
fraught and interstitial masculinity that The Nephew craves exists always and
only on the run. To stay in one place means to never become the kind of man he,
as a boy, hopes to be. Moreover, it means that his bonds with his beloved and
idealized uncle would come to naught. The Nephew, then, at the same time he
declines certain kinds of community, privileges his homosocial and homofamilial ones. These masculinist relationships are
further underscored by the novel's contextualization of this particular
passage. Namely, in privileging Darren's advice, he simultaneously negates
Libby's advice. This negation glares in light of the fact that Libby has just
given The Nephew a multi-page and, within the narrative, ten hour long
"werewolf version of The Talk," covering topics ranging from the dangers of
driving-while-werewolf, eating from garbage cans, the delicious but addicting
and always human-related smell of French fries, pantyhose and stretch pants,
and, of course, silver poisoning (37-46). Libby's advice takes the form of
"ways to not die"; these are all critically important tips for the protagonist.
But, because of his gendered priorities, he undervalues them, and, in truth,
Libby as well, despite the fact that she serves as his primary caregiver and
the only steady and stable figure in his life.
The Nephew's revelation regarding
masculinist ideology becomes pinpointed by the matriarchal Libby. Specifically,
The Nephew realizes that when members of the family leave, that means that the
rest of the family is being left, being abandoned. When it seems as if Darren
has left the family, The Nephew asks, "Do werewolves do that, just leave?"
(250). It is telling that this question arises from a protagonist who has been
emphasizing the fact that werewolves do that, just leave, for over eighty
percent of the novel at this point. The Nephew realizes he might not be the one
who leaves, but the one who is left; he is realizing what it means to be a
member of a community that another member opts out of, and he doesn't much like
it. In her response, Libby clarifies the gendered nature of The Nephew's
approach to glorifying running as he has done throughout the novel. "Her eyes
when she looked up to me, they were ancient and tired and sad and mad all at
once. 'Men do that,' she said" (250).
It turns out that the quality of werewolves that The Nephew has been
celebrating all along is not a quality of werewolves after all, but rather one
of human men.
Sequoyah, by contrast, reveals a
strong longing for home and stasis, seeing his one constant moving as an unheimlich
mode of being. He explains, "Moving from place to place, from shelter to foster
home, almost always took its toll, and at fifteen I'd never gotten over the
crippling anxiety of sleeping in a new room, a new bed, living in a whole new
environment" (37).[36] We note the
ways that each character, despite privileging motion and flight, nonetheless
feels and communicates the ways they suffer from that motion.[37]
For Sequoyah, moreover, that longing for flight even comes in the form of his
relationship to selfhood. He explains, "I recall the desire to become someone
else completely" (220). We are reminded of the "shift" that the narrator of Mongrels
similarly longs for (and of Sequoyah's fantasy diagnosis in the hospital), a
fundamental transformation of self that he hopes lurks somewhere within him.[38]
Both protagonists eventually
understand the appeal of staying in one specific location, though Sequoyah,
living as he has on the move but without a sense of community seems to long for
it more. He explains, "This was the type of life I always dreamed about living
someday, being alone in a house deep in the woods somewhere. To be happy,
safe... To live alone, without a wife or kids" (18). We note that while he pines
for a house in the woods, he also craves solitude. He describes the Troutt homes in idyllic terms, "A house in the country,
gleaming in the light that slanted through the trees. I saw a tall oak tree in
the front yard with a tire swing" (19). The oak with its tire swing offers both
an icon of stability and a welcoming of children and play that belie the fact
that this house, with its foretold untimely death (among other things) is
absolutely haunted.[39]
The
domestic security of the Troutt's rural home comes
forth in Sequoyah's imagistic description of their kitchen in particular, a
room (as we've seen with his burns) with rich significance for his character.
He narrates:
The
kitchen had a white enamel sink and wooden cabinets painted light blue. The
wallpaper was light blue with pictures of small baskets of vegetables and
fruit. The room gave off a country kitchen feel. It was a reminder I was in a
rural area, a few miles outside of town. I'd never lived in the country before,
so looking out the kitchen window at night was like looking in a
mirror—there was a vast darkness as far as you could see without any
porch lights on. (34)
The rurality of his setting manifests both
inwardly in the country style of the wallpaper and sink, outwardly in the
darkness all around, and back inwardly as the window becomes not a thing to be
seen through, but a thing by which Sequoyah looks upon himself. Gazing outward,
he gazes inward, or at his own exteriority, burns and all. The reflection he
sees is not only of himself, but of himself in this country kitchen, in the
most domestic of domestic spaces in this home that mirrors, so to speak, his
idealized eventual existence. He longs to be alone in precisely the kind of
place where he finds himself. Where The Nephew rejects such domesticity,
Sequoyah privileges it—but while the former locates a need for community
in other people—regardless of emplaced stasis, the latter longs only for
the constancy of place itself.
The
theme of who belongs and who does not, and where, lies central to these two
novels, and both wield specifically gendered constructions of a confounded
human/lupine distinction or indistinction to think through that theme. The
adolescent male narrators search for a sense of self in community through their
respective lupine ideations. Both at some points long to emulate the lone wolf
of heteromasculinist lore. Yet, while Sequoyah
maintains a longing for solitude, he likewise pines for a feminized domestic
space that even in his dreams remains an endangered fantasy. The Nephew, in
glorifying a homosocial idea of community that is forever fleeting, forever on
the run, eventually realizes the damage such an approach inflicts. Where
Sequoyah understands the importance of place and the community it can foster,
The Nephew comes to understand the importance of community as place itself.
[1] Hobson's
follow-up novel, The Removed, also features a child in foster care.
Hobson has noted that, having worked for roughly seven years as a social
worker, he is drawn to telling such stories (McDonnell).
[2] The werewolf as
metaphor for puberty (gaining body hair, trying to understand new impulses and
lusts, etc.) might be a bit on-the-nose. However,
Jones notes, "the age that I'm most comfortable writing a character is sixteen,
and seventeen and a half, or eighteen... what I want to be drawing from somehow is
that hopefulness you have at that age. You always keep the future inside like a
secret, when you grow up you're going to be a Blue Angels pilot or Conan, or a
superstar. And that's all still inside you. You haven't been disabused of those
dreams yet. I like to write about characters who are on the cusp like that"
(Stratton and Jones 22-23). This age cusp alongside the potential, but
not-yet-realized changes of lycanthropy parallel in Mongrels.
[3] Both novels
also, and I don't think this is as unimportant as it might seem, feature
Chevrolet El Caminos prominently. These neither-car-nor-truck vehicles mirror
the in-betweenness of the protagonists.
[4] While the town in question seems
fictionalized, the novel tells us that Broken Arrow is "nearby," which would
put it about fifteen miles southeast of Tulsa and roughly fifty-five miles west
of Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (163).
[5] I read a play on
the "him" here, the lack of capitalization notwithstanding, between never
having known his father and never having known the specific manifestation of
God in question.
[6] Mongrels alternates
longer chapters narrated by the protagonist with shorter ones told in the third
person about the protagonist wherein he adopts a persona (vampire, reporter,
criminal, biologist, mechanic, hitchhiker, prisoner, villager, and nephew) that
is mentioned at some point in the previous chapter. While "the nephew" is not
capitalized in the novel, I do so here to indicate the specific character.
[7] The line break
in this passage represents a new paragraph. Jones' novel makes use of these
throughout, with many sentence fragments, continued thoughts, and punch lines
suspended as paragraphs of their own. These create an effect whereby the
novel's form reflects the kind of frenetic, breathless rush of the family's
life, of The Nephew's adolescence, and of his perception of his uncle Darren's
persona.
[8] The fact that
his mother does not change reemphasizes the gendered nature of The Nephew's
perception of lycanthropy.
[9] At the same time, though, the
narrative offers a counter point, "Maybe God is on the side of the
werewolves... Maybe God had decided that proper humans had made a mess of running
the world, had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human
race was on the threshold of that darkness" (42-43).
[10] Lalonde notes a
different work by Jones, "The Long Trial of Noaln Dugatti is resolutely centered on writing," a statement
that applies to much of his work, including Mongrels (230).
[11] While I'm
placing these texts within Southern Gothic traditions, Justice's creative work
most notably comes in his fantasy trilogy, later combined as The Way of
Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (another
example of the excellent "genre fiction" being produced by Native authors).
[12] This
inconclusive nature stands central to the aesthetics of these texts. Carnes
notes of WDST, "what I find refreshing about this novel is that it does
not try to be something it is not. Rather than an awakening novel where a young
Cherokee and a young Kiowa become closer to their identities and Native
individuals, this book focuses on the problems that teenagers face in an
especially tumultuous time in their lives" (239).
[13] Here we might recall Aldo Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain"
from A Sand County Almanac in which
the famed naturalist recalls a moment when he and his cohort see a pack of
wolves from above. He recalls, "In those days we had never heard of passing up
a chance to kill a wolf" (130). They all open fire, mortally wounding two of
the wolves, mother and pup. He further relates, "We reached the old wolf in
time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have
known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes... I was young
then... I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would
mean hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that
neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view" (130).
[14] Patrick Wolfe
famously demonstrates, "The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary
liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with
genocide... settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions.
Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it
erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it,
settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event" (390).
[15] The story Hobson
narrates in this piece of a deceased ancestor who learns how to shapeshift from
a wolf reappears in The Removed (237-45).
[16] Lee lists
Jackson among authors whose work Jones's reflects,
along with H.P. Lovecraft, Cornell Woolrich, and Stephen King (259), while the Kirkus Review notes of Hobson's text, "As in a Shirley
Jackson story, everything seems perfectly ordinary until it doesn't" (Kirkus).
[17] This
tie between finger length and lycanthropy also appears in Blish's
story.
[18] Unlike those of
vampires and zombies,
werewolf narratives, while emphasizing transitions between types of existence,
do not always allow for a transition from someone born a human into a
full-fledged werewolf. Such a move is impossible in Jones' construction.
[19] The boy's taunt
is "Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of
tea?" The full version continues, "Merricat, said
Constance, would you like to go to sleep?" "Oh, no, said Merricat,
you'll poison me" (107).
[20] Moreover, as is the case for the
protagonists of Mongrels and WDST, as Eunju
Hwang notes, in Jackson's "Gothic fiction... Home... is not a safe place that secures
one's happiness" (119).
[21] We can also read
a verisimilitude in a character being tired of explaining such a thing.
[22] Even the
roadside location of this telling reflects the boundary between the tamed road
and the wilderness just outside of its reaches, another cusp.
[23] As such, we find ourselves
wondering if he is truthful about the source and accidental nature of his
facial scars.
[24] Sequoyah
continues, explaining that he now "drew
landscapes, objects of my desire, things to represent my longing for
companionship in my time of sickness. This is how I remember it. I drew
buildings on fire. I drew a clown holding a machine gun, and a dog frothing at
the mouth. I drew an old man dead in a rocking chair. His head was slumped over
and he was bleeding from his chest" (167). These disturbing images are fairly
common for Sequoyah, who admits to a violent sexual fantasy regarding Rosemary
as well. To that end, Hobson has noted that most [readers and
interviewers] just ask how disturbed [Sequoyah] is and how dangerous. They tend
to think he's a bad, bad person and that's he's a super psychopath" (Michal).
But, having spent years working with Native foster children, Hobson explains his
complex sentiments for the round character he has constructed, "I feel sorry for him at times, but other times not so
much" (Carroll).
[25] Jarlath
Killeen similarly celebrates the "generic openness of the Gothic and its
ability to migrate and adapt to formal circumstances far removed from its
'original' manifestations in the late eighteenth century" (3).
[26] Kristin Squint's
2018 monograph, Leanne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native
American Literature, takes a similar regional approach.
[27] A great deal of
scholarship works to place Jones's work particularly within various genres,
though he asserts, "The only genre is fiction" (Washburn 79). In discussing
Jones's All the Beautiful Sinners and Growing up Dead in Texas, Waegner notes "gothic and postmodern thrusts are profoundly
interconnected" (194). Quinney avers that Demon Theory's
"multimedia effect" "explicitly position[s] the novel within a genealogy of
gothic literature" (291). LaLonde gothically reminds,
"one is rarely far from death in the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones" (218).
Nor are these connections unique to Jones's work. As Lush notes, "gothic tropes
have long supported the literary representation of Native peoples" (306).
Meanwhile, Stratton places "the truly malicious descriptions of Native people
in the journals and sermons of colonizers and land-takers such as... Increase
Mather" in the context of "pregothic horror" ("Come
for the Icing" 6).
[28] The screenplay
for this film is written by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), and based
largely on stories from his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight
in Heaven, particularly "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona."
[29] We might relate Vizenor's term "crossblood" here,
which he offers in lieu of "mixed-blood" as well as more pejorative terms like
"half-breed." Vizenor contends, "Crossbloods
hear the bears that roam in trickster stories, and the cranes that trim the
seasons close to the ear. Crossbloods are a
postmodern tribal bloodline, an encounter with racialism, colonial duplicities
sentimental monogenism, and generic cultures" (vii). But, I'm also thinking of
Stacy Alaimo's trans-corporeality. Alaimo explains, "Imagining human corporeality as
trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the
more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the
human is ultimately inseparable from 'the environment'" (2).
[30] At the same
time, Van Alst asserts, "Unless I'm told otherwise,
all the characters [in Jones's work] are Indian. But best of all, very best of
all, they're incidentally Indian" (xiv). Similarly, Lush avers, Jones "does not
emphasize the 'Nativeness' of a character, and that
lack of emphasis actually places the reader in a Native-centric world" (310).
[31] Where Mongrels offers an
awareness of its own narrative as a deflection from something else but leaves
that something else unnamed and its racialization obfuscated, WDST
provides clear references to its protagonist's Indigeneity. Being Cherokee is
important to Sequoyah, and being Native forms much of the bond between himself
and Rosemary that will drive the narrative. I would go so far as to contend
that WDST can be read as an allegory for Cherokee relations to the US
federal government, particularly growing out of Cherokee removal (the much more
direct topic of The Removed) and the ruling in Cherokee v. Georgia that
imagined the relationship between Native nations and the US to be like "that of
a ward to his guardian." In such a reading, we can further place Sequoyah's absent
mother at the hands of settler juridical structures as a manifestation of the
US's attempts to undermine Indigenous matriarchies broadly (see Piatote). That reading lies beyond the scope of this essay,
but I hope and trust such a reading of Hobson's novel is forthcoming. Here I
will simply note that Sequoyah places his movements as a foster child as part
of a larger history of movement, one that he traces through his mother (2) and
the Cherokee Nation (1). Of this tendency to not stay still he ponders, "Maybe
it was in our Cherokee blood" (2).
[32] Libby tells him this chronicling (or his
compulsion to do so) is both "sweet" and "stupid" (292).
[33] As Baudeman notes, "In Jones's novels, human history is
represented as the sum of individual decisions and causal connections that
readers can never fully make sense of, but that in fact only surface here and
there as nodes in a structure of gaps, breaks, silences, and discontinuities"
(151-52).
[34] The text tells of two other
deaths, those of Simeon Luxe (103) and of his nemesis "dumb Nora Drake, who
later died on January 19, 2003 of strangulation" (143). Sequoyah feels jealous
that Rosemary chooses to spend time with Nora rather than with him.
[35] Moreover, Sequoyah's sexuality remains
somewhat ambiguous, but people in Little Crow routinely address him with
antigay slurs, taunts, and innuendoes.
[36] Mongrels asserts
a similar toll that being a werewolf takes its toll on one's body. The Nephew's
grandfathers tells him "We age like dogs... You can burn
up your whole life early if you're not careful. If you spend too much time out
in the trees" (10). Later, we learn from a non-werewolf who is married to a
werewolf and knows considerably more about werewolf health, "You're supposed to
drink as much water as you can before you shift... If you don't, your
skin—you can start to get old before your time" (266).
[37] The concept of
belonging in place is central to The Removed as well; that novel's final
sentence reads, in its entirety: "Home."
[38] Interestingly, Sequoyah notes, "When I was
little I wanted to be someone else" (189). But we have seen throughout the
novel that he has this want throughout the entirety of our familiarity with
him. As such, the reader comes to understand that Sequoyah is frequently not an
entirely self-conscious or self-aware narrator, an understanding that leads the
reader to question key elements of the story of himself that he presents.
[39] Liz, Sequoya's case worker,
explains "how safe it was out here in the country" (23). There's an irony here,
since we know that Rosemary is going to die.
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