Childhood’s end
As far as Sherman Alexie knows, his parents lost custody of the kids just the one time. They were drinking, no doubt. It wasn’t until he was 7 that Lillian managed to quit the booze for good.
In his new book, a memoir of his late mother and their painful, mutually antagonistic relationship, Alexie imagines how the four children, two toddlers and newborn twins, were taken away and placed in foster care. He assumes his father left their residential hotel in downtown Spokane on another bender. He assumes his mother sang the babies to sleep, then went out to join her husband. He assumes she swore she’d only have a couple of drinks.
When the children woke up in their makeshift cribs in the dresser drawers, he imagines their wailing drew the night manager, who must have alerted Social Services.
“I imagine us as a small chorus,” he writes. “I imagine us crying so loud and strong that our weeping became a tribal song.”
After Lillian Alexie sobered up, she did everything she could to care for her children, and for her fellow Spokane tribe members on the reservation. She sold handmade quilts. She worked as a youth counselor, an addiction therapist and a cashier at the trading post. She fed the family and kept a roof, however shoddy, over their heads.
But his late mother was also legendarily angry and vindictive, he claims. She had “a courtroom inside her heart,” as he writes in one of his memoir’s memorable turns of phrase. And her son has never been sure she loved him.
Alexie, the award-winning author of the semiautobiographical young adult novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and the story collection “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” sees the struggle of all Native Americans in his extended family: the physical and mental abuse, the alcoholism, the abject poverty, the marginalization, the sheer despair. His mother, he knows, was made cold and confounding by her circumstances. But that doesn’t mean he can forgive her.
In a poem called “Prayer Animals,” Alexie recalls his mother’s story from her own childhood, when she and a
niece grabbed
a stray cat by the legs and pulled until it “split into bloody halves.”
Would you be shocked to know that I wasn’t shocked
By that story? On the reservation, violence is a clock,
Ordinary and relentless. Even stopped, it doesn’t stop.
This long, episodic memoir consists of dozens of short, discursive chapters, some told in verse. It sometimes reads like first-draft material handwritten in a composition book, though the cumulative effect is far more substantial than that. Reading the workin-progress, he reports, Alexie’s wife notes that his book “is constructed in fabric squares like one of your mom’s quilts.”
Though he tells her he meant to do that, in the book he admits it’s a half-truth. Only later does he recognize in his patchwork tribute “the patterns and repetition of patterns ... the stitches and knots.”
Like the boy in “The Absolutely True Diary,” while coming of age Alexie was known as Junior. He hated the nickname, he writes. In a patriarchal culture, even Crazy Horse was named after his father, “[b]ut nobody called him Junior.” It’s a continuing theme: His recent picture book is called “Thunder Boy Jr.”
As ever, Alexie is obligingly funny, even when the subject matter seems anything but. Native Americans are desperate for acceptance and disdainful of weakness, he notes, most of all their own. They believe their damage is greater than all other damage inflicted on a people.
“We are the gold medalists in the Genocide Olympics,” he jokes.
Like his mother, Alexie is a fabulist. He’ll tell a tall tale if it suits his purpose. (The math book the boy throws in “The Absolutely True Diary” breaks a teacher’s nose; in reality, Alexie admits here, it just hit a wall: “The fictional version is much more satisfying.”)
While trying to research his father’s Coeur d’Alene heritage, he comes across the grave sites of Alexies who died young, relatives he’d never heard about.
There will be plenty of blank spaces in his memoir, he tells a sister. But those blank spaces, he figures, will work in his favor. “I like how they feel,” he writes. “I want my readers to feel how I feel. I want them to feel the loss. To feel our loss, I want them to know how guilty I feel for not knowing this stuff.”
The reader of this modernday trail of tears is bound to share some of that guilty feeling, all right. But Alexie, who seems to be forever smiling, has a lightness, a pronounced mischievous side, that helps his tribal songs go down easier than maybe they should.
Former Chronicle critic James Sullivan is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the author of four books. Email: books@sfchronicle.com