Book World: A maternal bond that never breaks

By Kelli Jo Ford Grove. 288 pp. $26

••• There are countries within countries and one of the most fundamental of all is the country of family. In “Crooked Hallelujah,” a collection of interwoven story-chapters, Kelli Jo Ford takes her readers on a compelling journey through the evolving terrain of multiple generations of women.

The book opens in 1974, in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, where 15-year-old Justine lives with her single mother, Lula. Seven years earlier, Justine’s blue-eyed father dropped Lula and Justine off at a church service and never returned. Lula relies on the precepts and strictures of her faith to guide them, but Beulah Springs Holiness Church is tough and inflexible - proponents of faith healing, visions and eternal marriage, to name a few. And Lula’s daughter is more interested in worldly enticements than sainthood. One day, Justine manages to track down her missing father who has, it turns out, remarried and had a child. His response is to invite her to Six Flags amusement park for a family outing.

The very idea of letting Justine go on an excursion with the man who abandoned her devastates Lula and sends shock waves through the Holiness community. Justine is determined to go, but the trip turns out to be a disaster - her father seems to have little idea of how to interact with his daughter, and Justine is overwhelmed: “By the time they got there, Justine felt so nauseous and frightened of dying and going to hell that Six Flags was one of the worst days of her life.”

In many ways, the church functions as a stand-in for Justine’s broken family and community. This is one of the central paradoxes of the book: The church provides coherence and connections, but it’s also harsh and unyielding, imposing outside values on the Cherokee community. Going on an excursion to Six Flags is seen as disloyal to her mother and community - choosing her father and his callow world, if only temporarily, over the one that has nurtured her.

Ford unfolds Justine’s story without passing judgment, which is one of the great strengths of “Crooked Hallelujah”; she writes close to her characters, the narrative stripping away explanations, allowing readers to feel real involvement in the action.

Both protected and hemmed in by the church, Justine consequently has trouble telling the difference between her mother’s projected fears and more tangible dangers. When she sneaks out with a boy, he assaults her, and in a paroxysm of guilt and disorientation, she fears she might have somehow been responsible.

She doesn’t tell anyone what happened, but the evidence still emerges: At a far too young age, Justine becomes a mother. In effect, Justine and her little daughter, Reney, must grow up together, the two of them struggling and scrimping to get by. Justine takes on multiple jobs, at one point becoming a Mary Kay saleswoman - in direct opposition to the teachings of the church. But even as she leaves one form of family behind, another emerges, along with the promise of stability in a new place.

Ford’s connection to her characters shines through the writing, infusing these voices with a sweet, sidelong zing. Reney sums up her family dynamic in a few sharp sentences: “My father wasn’t a wound or even a scar, not a black hole or a dry desert. He just wasn’t. Not for me anyway. Mom was my sun and my moon. I was her all, too, and that was us.”

This language is rich but never dense. There’s a lightness to the perspective which shifts and bends, prismed by a matrilineal succession of Cherokee and mixed-race women. At one point, Reney observes, “It hadn’t taken many run-ins with boys for me to realize that I’d met my soul mate as a girl, and she was my great-grandmother.” In fact, there are so many parallels among the women’s stories, in both experiences and sensibility, that at times it’s difficult to tell them apart, as Lula blurs into Justine and Justine into Reney. Though this may be deliberate on the part of the author as these characters live an ambivalent plurality, simultaneously running away from and toward each other.

The stories of Lula, Justine and Reney, along with Lula’s mother, Granny, feature generations of problem men, terrible backbreaking jobs, and children having children. But while there is great pain, there’s also great compassion and generosity toward these characters. Reney muses “She thought she was long past crying over her place in life. It was a place she had made as a girl, and then as a young woman in a wave of stubbornness, and now in near indifference. She hadn’t seen community college as a means to an end. She hadn’t stopped long enough to consider the end.” As the newest generation, Reney carries the hopes and expectations of this family line, and we are fortunate readers to be taken along on her remarkable journey.