POWER AND INHERITANCE IN CHERIE JONES’ “HOW THE ONE ARMED SISTER SWEEPS HER HOUSE” – PART I – ACCOMMODATION RESISTANCE COMMONALITIES AND CURSES
“When Wilma Wilkinson is asked by the police, right there on Baxter’s Beach, to tell them what she knows about her granddaughter, Lala, Wilma decides to tell the story of conquerors. She does not tell the story about how her granddaughter ran off with a giant who beats her. She tells the police instead that Lala is from a line of landowning women who do not need a man to survive. All Wilma has, she says, will be Lala’s when she dies. It is important for them to know, says Wilma, that any tragedy which befalls Lala is of her own making. Lala is not a woman without an inheritance.” (“How The One Armed Sister Sweeps Her House”, Chapter 11, page 76.)
This is a story about power and inheritance. All the main characters of the novel inherit poverty. Most of them inherit violence. They will all seek to escape one or both of their inheritances. Each of them will claim their power by any means available to them.
How The One Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is primarily Lala’s story but Lala, like all of us, does not live in a vacuum. She is a member of a family. She is a member of a community. To know Lala’s story, we must first know the story of her mother Esme and before her, Wilma’s story. We must appreciate that Lala, Wilma and Esme were all little girls left to the mercy of big, merciless men.
In Wilma’s imagination, she will leave Lala a legacy of wealth. In reality, there is a legacy which Lala has already inherited from Wilma - trauma.
The enemy Wilma is determined to defeat is poverty. As she perceives it, the route to her vision of conquest is through accommodation. It does not occur to her to question the patriarchal underpinnings of her society. In Carson’s old age, Wilma will perform the role of a dutiful wife, tending to his physical needs despite the fact that she despises him.
When Carson rapes Esme, the only daughter of the union between himself and Wilma, Esme is 14 years old; the same age Wilma was, when at age 34, he married her. Esme whimpers, “Mammy, mammy, mammy” (pages 85 and 86) as Wilma tends to her wounds. Wilma is a pragmatic woman of action. Her mission is to treat Esme’s physical injuries. She accepts that she has failed in her efforts to prevent the attack and she has no time for Esme’s need “to wade in … deep waters of emotion” (page 85). Wilma instructs Esme that, “All this fussing don’t make no sense. What’s done is done.” It does not occur to Wilma that the psychic injuries Esme has suffered will linger long after her physical injuries have healed. The solution, as Wilma perceives it, is to forget that it ever happened. “Listen to me” she tells Esme, “listen good. Don’t tell nobody. ‘bout this, you hear?” (page 86). Elsewhere in the novel, the omniscient narrator wonders out loud, “What are secrets but things we want to forget?” (page 182).
Wilma moves Esme to Aunt Erlie’s house after the rape. There is no doubt that Wilma’s intention is to move Esme out of harm’s way but Esme receives Wilma’s decision as salt rubbed into a gaping wound. A 14 year old girl violated by her own father is entitled to expect her mother to inform the police, to ensure that her husband is permanently banished from their household; but Wilma was delivered from abject poverty through her marriage to Carson. To her mind, surviving without his income is not an option. Confronting the shame of having a husband who will be known to the community as the rapist of his own daughter, can never be an attractive proposition.
After Esme dies and Wilma is left to raise Lala, she tells Lala the tale of the One Armed Sister. The story is meant to frighten Lala into submission for her own good. Lala is to stay in her lane; to walk through life assuming that danger lurks beyond the beaten path. Lala will choose to seek power through resistance. She will take her chances.
Wilma did not devise her strategy of survival through denial on her own. That lesson was taught to her through a community source of public education; “A Sunday School teacher had once told Wilma that the best way to deal with any bad situation, even a really bad one, was to make a mental list of things to thank God for. So while she tidied, she did: she thanked God that her only child was still alive” (page 81). Then we get an indication as to why Wilma had thought she needed to take extreme measures to secure Esme from Carson. Wilma, “thanked Him for the fact that He had seen it fit to bless her with offspring, irrespective of the circumstances of Esme’s conception” (page 81). Lala, it appears, was not the first child born to a Wilkinson woman through a brutal conception. For Esme and Lala, the curse of violence will not end with their conception.
When Wilma admonishes and beats Lala, her only objective is to protect her. Perhaps it is because Lala understands that Adan has no such objective that he is able to succeed in subduing her where Wilma has failed. But when Lala succumbs to Adan’s gaslighting, we see how the legacy of denial which Wilma bequeathed her, has prepared a space in Lala’s mind which makes doubting her own perceptions inevitable. When Tone meets Lala as Adan’s wife, Adan has so successfully terrorised her into submission that Tone “almost did not recognise her”. It was “as if some imposter had clothed itself in her body and forced her lips to say things Lala never would” (page 182). Tone struggles to find even the shadow of the defiant adventurer he had known in their early teen years.
Tone himself is at core an accommodator. He remains loyal to Adan, who does not deserve his loyalty, out of a sense of honour. Although Adan dismisses him as a mere soldier (page 139), we discover that when it counts, Tone will rise to the occasion. His sporadic bouts of extreme violence, unlike Adan’s customary violence (for which, also unlike Adan, he invariably pays dearly) are triggered not by congenital brutality, but by a memory of intense trauma.
Adan, who instinctively claims power through extreme violence, is the reason Lala’s life intersects briefly but dramatically with Mira’s. When we meet Mira, she is imbued with the privileges of a wealthy white woman. But she was not always privileged, nor was she always white. Raised by Martha, her poor “Redlegs” mother, on the fringes of her wealthy black’s father’s life, Mira rebels against the strictures of her poverty and her consequent relegation to second class social status.
Martha, like Wilma, considers poverty her most lethal enemy. Also like Wilma, Martha subscribes to the philosophy of conquest through accommodation. Neither woman is inclined to buck the system. They are members of a conventional army and they will fight their battles using conventional weapons. Thus, “First and foremost, Martha Mason knows her place” (page 52). Mira’s father, “James Martineau puts his mistress and his Mira into a tiny stone house in Britton’s Hill and hardly visits them there at all. This is not an issue for Martha, who understands that a Martha is not a woman befitting a Martineau … Martha understands this, but she struggles to explain it to Mira” (page 54). Martha believes that “extremes of anything are bad, and the two extremes of possession – deprivation and deluge – are especially crippling to the soul. For that reason Mira Whalen’s mother has always advocated having just enough. Enough to to keep you happy. Enough to eat. Enough to drink. No more or less” (page 33).
Mira wants more. She wants excess. She will “use what” she “has to get what” she “wants”. (Page 35). Like Lala, Mira prefers to take her chances when seeking empowerment. For Mira and Lala rebellion is costly. Lala endures abandonment from Wilma, intense physical and psychic abuse from Adan and the loss of their child. The trappings of wealth which Mira has fought hard to obtain, will make her the target of Adan’s criminal ambitions.
Mira and Adan are not as dissimilar as they seem. Like Adan, Mira will not accept financial deprivation. Like Adan, she will rise above her limitations by fair means or foul.
Through Adan, Mira will lose her husband. This will be after Mira has miscarried three pregnancies. Through Adan, she will also lose her life.
It is unlikely that the connection between rebelliousness, child loss and suffering at the hands of Adan which Lala and Mira share are coincidental. It is very likely that the author wanted us to notice the similarities between Adan’s and Mira’s ruthlessness. It is unlikely that the author did not consciously create Wilma and Martha to resemble each other in how they approach empowerment. It is more likely that the author wants her readers to consider that members of a society have more in common than appears on the surface; that all human beings occupy the same Earth and want the same things; that ultimately, our lives are intertwined.
Readers of this novel may find themselves asking, what is the moral of the story? The novel does not appear to suggest that either resistance or accommodation as a general approach is inherently the wiser. Perhaps better questions to ask are: is there a moral of the story; does there need to be a moral of the story? The novel, after all, suggests that both accommodation and resistance may have some degree of value but both are necessarily fraught. The only character who appears to have escaped relatively unharmed by her choices is Martha and even she, we must assume, suffers some degree of fallout as Mira finds her insufferable. Cherie Jones does not presume to don the robes of Moses descending from the mountain bearing commandments. Instead, she shows us unvarnished options. She leaves it up to us to make of those options, what we will.
