week of 9/11/02
 
 
 

A sense of timelessness
Earling’s latest a swirl of circumstance, superstition and separation
SMN
Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling.
New York: Blue Hen Books, 2002. $24.95 — 296 pp.


After finishing this novel, I noticed the summary blurb inside the dust jacket and was amazed to learn that Perma Red takes place in the 1940s on the Flathead Indian Reser-vation. My surprise was a response to the time frame. At no time in the course of the novel did I have any inkling that the action allegedly occurred some 60 years ago. Then, I realized a much more significant fact. It didn’t matter. Like much of contemporary “reservation fiction,” Debra Magpie Earling’s novel has a kind of “timelessness.” In Perma Red, like Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the fictional landscape seems frozen — a world trapped in amber. However, for Earling’s characters, the awareness of this “separate land” can cause either joy or despair.

This beautifully written novel, with poetic passages that capture the bleak beauty of Louise’s world, resembles a delicate web which can only retain its balanced structure through the interplay of tension — a kind of attraction versus repulsion that affects most of Earling’s characters. With the singular exception of Baptiste Yellow Knife, who remains as fixed and unalterable as a stone axe, Perma Red is filled with confused souls who alternate between pursuit and flight, fear and love.

Louise White Elk is heir to a world populated with mythical figures and traditional beliefs. Yet, her earliest memories evolve around her inner conflicts about her culture — should she flee from it or embrace it? This ambiguity is especially evident in her childhood response to her classmate, Baptiste Yellow Knife, a young Flathead who both repels and attracts her. Despite the determined efforts of the Catholic nuns to convince their students that they must discard “the primitive superstitions of their forefathers,” Louise and Baptiste continue to inhabit a land haunted by spirits. Baptiste’s mother, Dirty Sparrow, can summon rattlesnakes and send misfortune on her enemies. Baptiste, who has an unabashed reverence for “the old ways,” seems to live a charmed existence. Louise’s grandmother listens to the wind, watches the path of lizards in the dust and hears the voices of the dead at night. Louise reveres the traditions of her people, yet she dreams of escape, waiting for an opportunity to travel beyond the nearby tavern at Perma — a place where, as a teenager, she will become known as Perma Red.

Then, there is Charlie Kicking Woman, a Flathead who has made a compromise with life. Like Louise, he feels driven to rise above the stifling poverty and ignorance of his people — an escape he accomplishes by becoming a BIA policeman. Ironically, his job inspires contempt from both his white associates and the Flathead community (he is branded an incompetent in the former and a deserter in the latter.) Yet, as Charlie watches Louise walk the uncertain boundary between truancy (she runs away from schools and foster homes) and victim (she frequently becomes the hapless prey of others), he comes to love her. Gradually, he ceases to be an agent of the law and becomes a kind of inept (and unwanted) guardian.

For Louise, Harvey Stoner, a wealthy white man who drives a gaudy Buick, comes to represent her opportunity to escape. When Stoner takes her to a city where she dances, dines and buys clothes — all of which Harvey pays for — she has a momentary sense of escape. This is it, then, her dream realized. Despite an ill-adivsed marriage to Baptiste, and a growing reputation as a short-tempered, hard-drinking mixed breed, she has risen above the poverty and bordom of reservation life. It is a brief respite.

Charlie Kicking Woman senses that Harvey Stoner is a predator — a man who has learned to thrive on the Flathead reservation. He is a master of “investments” and land development schemes, and he is equally adept at misusing and sometimes injuring women. Baptiste, who loves Louise, watches her drift towards Stoner and destruction. Both men appear incapable of interfering. (They also despise each other). When Louise inadvertently learns that Stoner has murdered a reservation prostitute, she realizes that Stoner is capable of killing her as well — especially since Louise is the only person who knows what he has done.

As Perma Red escalates, Earling’s characters move toward a brutal and fateful confrontation. It is an event that seems designed to provide each character with an opportunity to perform acts that can either redeem or destroy themselves and/or others. Charlie Kicking Woman, the inept policeman; Louise White Elk, perverse, beautiful and unhappy; Baptiste Yellow Knife, stoic, maddeningly traditional and loyal ... and Harvey Stoner, the opportunistic lecher with an ornate Buick. The final convergence will come with a speeding car on a remote road during a snow storm.

Perma Red will make a great movie.

(Gary Carden is a writer, storyteller and lecturer whose book, Mason Jars in the Flood, was recently named Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com.)