In Other Words

by Tatjana Soli, Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 384 pages

The Removes by Tatjana Soli

“We honor the past most when we depict it as accurately as possible without contorting it to contemporary mores. By doing this we allow ourselves to better understand our present.” Tatjana Soli writes these words in the author’s note to

The Removes, her historical novel set in 1860s and 1870s America. It is an America divided against itself, barreling westward into already occupied lands. True to Soli’s statement, her novel is stripped of glamorization and judgment. It is a stark depiction of what it meant to fight and survive on the frontier, for three people in particular: George Armstrong Custer, his wife Libbie, and the fictional homesteaderturned-captive Anne Cummins.

Anne’s story comprises the titular removes. After a Cheyenne attack on her Kansas homestead, during which her family is killed, she is taken by the tribe at age fifteen. She is starved, assaulted, and constantly propelled forward as the tribe migrates in search of increasingly spare food sources. They are also on the move to avoid “Yellow Hair,” the Civil War hero Custer, who is responsible for enforcing Native settlement on the reservations. If they refuse, he declares war.

Custer, or “Autie,” as he is called, follows orders even as he critiques them: “The truth was that politicians cared for what filled their pockets, and that was railroads and settlements. Empty spaces did not.” In Soli’s characterization, Custer is full of contradictions — that is to say, he is human. He is preening yet often withdrawn, a combatant who prizes honor but whose troops kill women and children and desecrate Native burial grounds. He is loyal to Libbie in spirit, but not in action. And he seems to respect the tribes and maybe even prefer their way of life to the confines of white society, even as he sets about ensnaring them and being a principal force in the destruction of that way of life.

“If I were an Indian, I often think, I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in,” Custer wrote in My Life on the Plains. (Soli intersperses historical quotes throughout the novel, without commentary but with clear intent. We see, for instance, Andrew Jackson’s justification for the Indian Removal Act, and Comanche chief Ten Bears’ elegiac address to General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1867 — “for campfires they lit our lodges.” Perhaps there is a bit of hindsight-backed judgment, notwithstanding the author’s note.)

Of course, the Custer we know today is the one who died, along with all the men who rode with him, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, in a battle against the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho in June 1876. Soli traces his career up to that point, and intertwines Custer’s own perception of it with Libbie’s. She, like Anne but with significantly more choice in the matter, migrates from place to place, following Autie first to the Virginian battlefront in the last years of the Civil War, and then to Kansas, Kentucky, and Dakota Territory. Soli depicts Libbie as determined and hyper-aware of her husband’s imperfections and transgressions. Looking the other way is also her choice. Soli, whose previous novels include the acclaimed

The Lotus Eaters, tells the characters’ stories in alternating chapters, along with interludes that give glimpses into the perspectives of others, including Custer’s brother Tom, and, most interestingly, Golden Buffalo, a (fictional) Cheyenne scout for Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Golden Buffalo hopes to learn the white man’s way in order to try to save his tribe’s. His startled impressions of the gruesome Plains battles become our own, keen reminders that the “civilization” Custer fought for had a loose definition. After the Battle of Washita River in present-day Oklahoma, Golden Buffalo acknowledges that “he was weary of being human.”

Being human is itself wearying, and evanescent, two qualities that Soli documents powerfully in her novel. Threaded through each characterization is the sense that nearly everything is a fight, and nearly anything that is held dear might soon be gone. Despite that grimness, the novel has an agile energy to it, a forward momentum that propels us, along with its men and women. Soli is an impeccable storyteller whose particular strength is in developing characters’ interiority. That strength becomes especially effective in Anne’s story: We learn enough about Anne to understand her motives, even though her story never becomes predictable. (Custer’s motive in hiring Golden Buffalo as a scout, despite knowing his intentions, is less clear, although his arrogance might have made him unconcerned.)

“I believe literature by its nature is political in that it gives us empathy for those unlike ourselves,” Soli writes in the author’s note. There is deep empathy in The Removes, though never pathos. The frontier would brook no such thing. — Grace Parazzoli

The novel has an agile energy to it, a forward momentum that propels us, along with its men and women. Soli is impeccable storyteller.