Margaret Verble grew up close to the real Glendale Park and Zoo, outside of Nashville,Tennessee, which was built on the site of a desecrated and looted Native cemetery. She now lives in Lexington, Ky.
Two Feathers, from Oklahoma, is a young single Cherokee woman who works as a horse diver in the amusement park in 1926. This was during the Scopes monkey trial being conducted locally, and at the height of the quack evangelist Amie Semple McPherson’s popularity. Both feature obliquely in the story, the former more than the latter.
I was not previously aware of horse diving, i.e. driving trained horses off a high platform into a pool, as a spectator sport, but apparently it was quite popular and dangerous in the south of that era. When things go wrong, the horse is killed and the injured Two Feathers falls into an underground cave; the consequences strain the fragile race relationships. Taboo romances develop between Indians, blacks and the dominating, rich, white folk. A soldier experiences vivid hallucinatory flashbacks and visits from his compatriot killed beside him in the trenches. In modern DSM-4 parlance, this would be labelled as PTSD, but here it is just treated as a normal response to the memory of war horrors.
As the story progresses, reality is totally abandoned for magical fantasies as a ghost visits multiple characters and apparently kills and scalps a rogue white man. Two Feathers discusses developments with a hippo, a bear, a turtle and a buffalo, and seeks their advice. I admire Native Americans’ close connection to, and reverence for, nature and other species of flora and fauna-closer than that of most white folk- at least as depicted in this and much other fiction writing. Here communication and understanding between animals and humans pervades the whole story. And I can kinda, sorta enjoy some ghost and spirit world stories. But Little Elk’s spirit from beyond the grave describing a baseball victory to the enclosed buffalo herd in the park is mysticism and spiritualism that stretches my imagination beyond the breaking point. And the far-reaching consequences of the mysterious premature death of the park’s hippo and a bear cub are hard to reconcile with reality.
This novel has been selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. There is perhaps no better illustration of the discrepancy between what the literati of prize selection committees enjoy in novels and what I enjoy. Although there is some interesting local colour and perhaps a hidden message about the importance of connecting with nature, I simply cannot recommend it.
Thanks,
Book Browse.
The Passionate Reader 