Novel explores women’s bonds on Cherokee land
‘Crooked Hallelujah’ weaves stories of mothers, daughters
Kelli Jo Ford’s debut “Crooked Hallelujah” is an ode to the fearsome bond between mothers and daughters, and to the way that potent connection twists and tightens over the span of a life — especially in the absence of fathers.
The novel follows four generations of Cherokee women. There’s Annie Mae, or Granny, as her family mostly calls her, and Annie Mae’s daughter Lula, who holds herself together after her husband leaves “with a religion so stifling and frightening that Justine, the youngest and always the most bullheaded, never knew if she was fighting against her mother or God himself, or if there was even a difference.”
We meet willful, complicated Justine in the novel’s opening, as she rebels against Lula’s strictness and yearns for a bigger life. But at age 15, Justine conceives her daughter, Reney, and her options narrow.
The lives of these four women unfold largely in the Cherokee Nation of
Oklahoma — where Lula attends her Holiness church and shares a bedroom separated by a flimsy curtain with Granny — and in a North Texas town plagued by tornadoes, wildfires and oil pumps, where Justine eventually flees.
The novel is told in cleverly connected stories that span time (from 1974 to the near future) and point of view — a prismatic lens that emphasizes the way each woman’s story depends on the women who came before her. Ford’s pages ache with tenderness and love and no small amount of frustration — her characters are all trapped in different ways, by crappy jobs with toosmall paychecks, by men who fail to do right or stay, by the debt of love they owe their mothers, their daughters.
“It’s all so much bigger than him and bigger than me, bigger than us together,” a grown Justine thinks as a wildfire bears down on her. Her very location in history is its own kind of trap, hostile to women and Native people, hostile to the earth itself.
And yet, “Crooked Hallelujah” isn’t a mournful novel. Ford’s prose is so absorbing that you’re right there, helping Justine and Reney free a garbage bag full of goldfish or watching the sunset with them over Lake Tenkiller; their lives are difficult, yes, but full of joy, too. Now and then, Ford will turn up the volume in a sentence, sing a little. A list of gifts presented to Reney by her mother’s suitors includes a “bonehandled jackknife, a book of knots, the licks of a bobtailed dog” — the consonantal alliteration (those glorious k’s!), the living animal in the final clause, are a reminder that Ford’s writing is full of poetry. These stories stand up beautifully to rereading; they made me excited for what the writer will do next.
The intricate web of love, memory and blood that binds the women in “Crooked Hallelujah” together feels as if it were born of careful attention, of listening. Annie Mae, Lula, Justine and Reney know each other beyond language; they know each other in their bones.
Or as Reney, whose father remains unnamed on her birth certificate, says: “Mom was my sun and my moon. I was her all, too, and that was us.”