Margaret Verble is an “enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma,” and her four books are concerned one way or another with the lives of Indians in the modern era. She was a Pulitzer finalist with “Maud’s Line,” then published “Cherokee America” and in 2021 “When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky,” an amazing novel set in Nashville which featured horse diving into a water tank from 40 feet up, at the county fair.
In that novel we learn a good deal about Cherokee beliefs, including the belief that some dead can appear and act in the present, and we are all immortal. Considering what horrors she puts her protagonist through in this newly published novel, set in the late 1950s, we should hope so. The life she is in presently is no fun. Kit Crockett lives on a small, 15-acre farm, with her father. Life is lonely and narrow. Kit’s mother died of cancer; her Uncle Joe was killed in a bar brawl. Her father grieves and drinks and has a temper.
On her way to her fishing hole, Kit passes her uncle’s cabin, now occupied by a single woman, Bella, who is also part Indian. The two become friends in an innocent and tender way with Bella taking the role of the mother Kit has lost and still needs. But Bella’s rent is paid by two different “boyfriends” who each visit once a week and she is being spied upon by a nosy, narrow-minded neighbor, Mrs. Burnett.
This novel is plot-driven, so telling too much would actually be spoiling. Suffice to say, Mrs. Burnett, dirty-minded as she is, misunderstands the relationship between Kit and Bella and sets in motion a series of events which land Kit’s father in jail and Kit in a Christian boarding school. We learn of all this from Kit’s secret journal, honest and moving, in the voice of a bright 9-year-old. The story may or may not end happily.
In this novel and elsewhere, Verble takes up the destructive power of rigid and hypocritical Christianity when dealing with the indigenous “heathen.” Preachers in this novel are particularly awful, vain and hypocritical. The fire and brimstone preaching is described not as an attempt to save souls, but to demonstrate power. Even the funeral service itself is the preacher having the last word.
All of this pales, however, beside the cruelty suffered at the Christian boarding school. Kit is sexually abused by the Director, Mr. Hodges, in what I thought were startlingly explicit scenes. This is not a PG novel, by any means. Verble had written “Stealing” some 15 years earlier but it would not be accepted until she had the readership and clout she has now and, as she has noted, there is a wave of interest in the mistreatment, even deaths, of native Americans in schools in the USA and Canada.
