Shell Shaker

"Thoughts, Voices, and Grandparents plant corn on top of the sacred mound and hundreds of years come into view in the dance of Green Corn and tomorrows. Delores marvels at creation and wants to remain forever with her ancestors, but a dust devil the color of a panther wobbles in the wind toward her. It's time to go" (159).

Shell Shaker by Leann Howe

The ancestors, so far back that the narrator humbly acknowledges being “watery versions of them” (1), heard a wind from the East tell them that cruel and greedy forces were coming toward them. Listening, one ancestor of the Billy family strapped shells to her ankles and danced until they were bloody, winning the trust of Italuichi, the Autumn Equinox, who made a pledge to her. When called upon, he would “make things even” (2). In the centuries since, the scales have risen and fallen, adjusting ever closer to a reckoning. Shell Shaker is the tale of this making things even.

The fates and actions of the Choctaw Billy family intermingle over many generations in this story. Shakbatina’s peace-keeping sacrifice of herself for her daughter Anoleta in 1738 is bound up in Susan’s willingness to take the fall for her own daughter, Auda, in 1991. Anoleta’s relationship to the greedy Red Shoes (a historical figure) is in many ways indivisible from Auda’s relationship with the greedy and immoral Chief Redford Macalester (a fictional figure). The women of 1738, while no longer living in body on earth in 1991, are present to their descendants through visions and messages, helping guide and inform them. Also present are Grandmother Porcupine, alias Sarah Bernhardt, the trickster spirit without whom the whole story would never be realized. And of course there’s indomitable sisters Delores and Dovie, erstwhile Wild West show performers, current burial singer and astrologist, respectively. There’s a green-haired teen, a lovelorn uncle— not to mention a lovelorn lawyer—and a car called the Peanutmobile. Auda has two sisters, too, and their stories really bear more than a mention as quick as this; both Adair and Tema add strength, humor, wisdom, and further visions of what it means to be a Choctaw woman.

As suggested above, Shell Shaker’s characters are vividly realized. Their realistic and often humorous dialogue is used both to move the plot along and to seamlessly provide historical information and other backstory. At the same time, many of the central characters also spend time in more solitary communion: internal dialogue, casual reveries along private trains of thought, and full-fledged visions are all experienced by the characters at various points. These narratively challenging episodes are well-executed and often evocative.

These internal moments are often where the novel tracks back and forth between two main time periods: 1738 and 1991. While it was clear that there were parallels between characters in 1738 and 1991, it was admittedly difficult to remember at points who exactly paralleled whom. I was on the point of drawing myself a chart, in fact, when I considered that perhaps knowing the exact name-to-name parallels mattered less than a broader knowing: ancestors live on in their living relatives, stories and energies do not end with death from the body.

The novel is set variously in both time and space, moving between—and at times intermingling—1738, 1991, Oklahoma, the Southeast, and other places. These physical locations are crucial. Oklahoma—where the Choctaw people were relocated after the passage of the infamous Indian Removal Act—as well as the Choctaw’s ancestral home in the Southeast both figure in prominently as lands of resistance and return: the almost animate Billy house in Oklahoma, built by Susan’s great grandmother, Nowatima, is not a bitter outpost in a land of exile but rather a physical center from which carefully nourished community and family relationships can flourish in spite of the Choctaw’s history of forcible relocation. The return to the Nanih Waiya burial ground in the Southeast is an emotionally loaded act with inextricable threads of both healing and loss.

This recurrence of the intermingled and inextricable characterizes Shell Shaker. Even beyond the instances already mentioned, there is the encroachment of European forces into Indigenous lands and communities. There is the deeply interwoven fabric of family, which the novel triumphs. Even as a reckoning occurs between Auda and the abhorrent Redford Macalester near the novel’s end, slivers of light are admitted which, without excusing Macalester’s actions, cast them into more nuanced view. Nothing here is without context, complexity, and relation to a greater landscape and community. Indeed, what the novel shows most unambiguously is that it is precisely by attending to the strength and health of one’s community that one can in fact be a strong and healthy individual. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): rape, violence, death, the residential school experience, cannibalism (brief, tangential mention), war.