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Contemporary Fiction Views: 'This land is trying to kill every single one of us' [1]
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Date: 2023-05-02
Montana's Great Plains
When a novel is designed to be one kind of story, but then takes a twist that makes the original story resonate more deeply, it's a novel I'm glad to have found.
Lone Women by Victor LaValle is such a novel.
The story begins in 1915. A 31-year-old Black spinster, Adelaide Henry, is setting fire to the farmhouse that has been her only home. Her parents' bodies are upstairs in their bedroom. She is on her way from the Lucerne Valley in California, where the Henrys were one of several Black farming families, to Montana. She read a train periodical piece about lone women, on their own, homesteading and making good in Big Sky Country.
Adelaide is determined to become one of them.
She overcomes the disdain, attempts to cheat and other hardships in getting to San Francisco, then sailing up to Seattle and taking a train to Montana. Accompanying her is a heavy steamer trunk that men have a hard time picking up. Riding in a hired wagon to her property with a woman who has four blind sons, danger comes from an unexpected source. But she makes it to her new home. There is a building and a root cellar. The nearest neighbor, a woman and her cannot-sit-still son, visit and begin to form a friendship. A young ranch hand shows an interest.
And then it all goes wrong. The earlier danger resurfaces. And then, so does another one. A danger far more primeval and relentless. And so the historical novel becomes a horror story.
And yet both dangers, both genres, illuminate the themes that made the story compelling from the beginning.
Did Adelaide set fire to her home and run away because she didn't want to be trapped on the farm for the rest of her life, as her parents expected? Was there more than the wish to live her own life, not tied down to a life of drudgery, the only reason? After all, one of the books her parents read to her over and over, always spoke to her. Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's beginning is what Adelaide sees in herself:
My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in-shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel.
Those words, originally written about a young white English man, fit an older Black woman. Adelaide encounters prejudice against her skin color, against her womanhood, against what she knows and does not know.
When Adelaide first arrives in Montana, she is told:
This land is trying to kill every single one of us, let me tell you. And we keep each other alive. Your neighbors may not welcome you, but I promise you they will help you if you need it. Because they will need you to help them eventually. For better or worse, that’s the best I can give you.
Later, she realizes a great truth about land. Especially the Western United States:
This land overpowered people, but it hadn’t come to them, they had come to it. It wasn’t trying to kill them; it didn’t even notice them.
This evokes the best of Annie Proulx’s writing about Wyoming and the people there. It’s a sign of how strongly written Lone Women is.
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