Unspoken Intimacies, The Miko Kings, HIU, and Red-Black Convergences: A Conversation with LeAnne Howe

In the last weeks of March 2010, the students, faculty, and staff of Hampton University came together for the annual Read-In, a twenty-two-year fixture of intellectual and cultural life at the school. The selection for this year's Read-In was LeAnne Howe's The Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story; the novel was chosen in part because of the connections that the story has to the school. The Read-In activities included a miniconference, in which both students and faculty participated, a book signing, and a keynote address delivered by Howe.

The Miko Kings, as Howe describes it, is multiple novels, multiple stories, in one book. Framed around the narrative of Lena Coulter, a twenty-first-century travel writer, the novel follows her character as she researches and writes a story about Indian Country at the turn of the twentieth century. The catalysts for her project are the documents that she discovers in the wall of her Indian Country home. As Lena, the would-be author and central narrator of the novel, researches the documents, the stories of Hope Little Leader and Justina Maurepas emerge. Hope is one of the greatest pitchers that the Choctaws have ever known, and Justina is a legendary figure from the black nationalist movement and a woman of mixed-race heritage: African, Indigenous, and European. The tie that binds these two characters, we soon discover, is their great intimacy, which has its roots on the grounds of Hampton Institute.

The choice of The Miko Kings for the Read-In selection was significant. It was the first novel by a Native American author to be selected for the event. As such, this year's Read-In presented an unprecedented opportunity for Hamptonians to grapple with the history of the school's Indian program and how that history shaped the contemporary institution.

During the two-day event, I had an opportunity to sit down with LeAnne Howe to talk about the novel, Hampton Institute, and red-black convergences.

On Hope and Justina, Love and Language

LaRose Davis:

We are here today because your novel, The Miko Kings, was chosen as the 2010 Hampton University Read-In selection. So I want to start with the book and with you talking a little about what you think your novel is about. You mentioned in our other conversation that you believed that there were multiple novels and multiple stories in a single frame; so for you, what is the takeaway? What do you want people to get from reading this book?

LeAnne Howe:

The Miko Kings is about . . . first off, it's about a love affair. It's about a relationship that happened because of this colonialist manifesto of the Hampton experiment. It began, for me, here at Hampton. I mean, the germ of the story happened at Hampton. But the boarding-school experience, that manifesto of "We are going to colonize you. We are going to take away your land. We are going to take away your bodies. We are going to take away your mind. We are going to take away your language. We are going to replace that, all of the things that you are, with ourselves"—that story is embedded in The Miko Kings.

I started with the love affair to ground me here, at Hampton, because Hampton begins, or it is a good model for the beginning of, replacings. I'm replacing your language with English. I'm replacing your religion, or not even religion, your beliefs—it's not beliefs, it's a system of knowledge—with our knowledge. And you can go to the gravesite and look at all of the children of that experiment, here at Hampton, who lie dead, in the cemetery as monuments to that replacement narrative. They've lost their family connections.

So all of those things are just like a ball when it's thrown. The fingers of God, or the baseball player in this context, have put the spin on the story. That's what I was working toward in The Miko...