A Ballad for Sallie by Judy Alter (review)

364 Western American Literature shadowy creatures (half-human, half-otter) transformed from people lost or drowned atsea. Fivefocus on the activities—helpful, heroic, vain, malicious—of shamans. Since kushtaka adventures typicallyrequire the timely intervention of a powerful shaman, it is the shaman who is truly the central figure of these stories. Myown favorite is “Xat and the Feather Kite,”in which villagers are pulled one byone into the skybyafeather, “like the knotted tail ofa kite.”Xatisable to rescue them thanks to his selfless tempering of mind and body. In what could well frame a moral for the whole collection, Xat’s grandmother admonishes him: “You need to work at becoming strong and to become clean so you will be ready for your spirit powers when they come to you,”she says, “And respect our traditions even when they seem to contradict what you would like to believe.” Among their other dimensions, all these stories in one way or another are fables, object lessons in the importance ofobserving—and the consequences of violating—traditional patterns ofconduct, from routine habit to sacred ritual. Enjoyable as these stories are, readers should be aware that they are not (nor do they pretend to be) translations of tales performed by Haida and Tlingitstorytellers. Rather, theyare English interpretations oftraditional stories and customs. While they may be carefully grounded in tradition (Beck, a community college teacher, has been gathering such stories for 40 years), the stories themselves are cast solidly in the tradition of the European literary folktale. They evoke the spirit, but do not reflect the forms, of traditional oral narrative. The plus side is that the stories are immediately accessible to a general audience: they have afamiliarfeel, for all their strangeness, and there is no need for lengthy prologues explaining context and motivation, because these interpretive elements are written right into the stories themselves. This isahandsome book, with a clean layoutand a nice cover illustration by Marvin Oliver, a Seattle-based Native American artist. HERBERT W. LUTHIN Clarion University ofPennsylvania A Ballad for Sallie. By Judy Alter. (New York: Doubleday, 1992. 183 pages, $19.00/$15.00.) Judy Alter, winner of the Spur Award for her earlier novel, Mattie, has set her new novel, A BalladforSallie, in “Hell’sHalfAcre,”the section ofFortWorth where people ofthe frontierwentwhen there wasnowhere else to go. Gunsling­ ers, cowboys, madams, and business people searched for success, barely aware of the orphans at their feet struggling to find or steal food for the evening’s meal. Orphans were all too common on the frontier. Some were children Reviews 365 deserted by families unable or unwilling to care for them; others fit the more common connotation of“orphan,”andwere left alone due to the death oftheir parents. These children lived in an erawhen there was no well-developed social services net to catch them, and they drifted to the Acre not unlike Texas tumbleweeds piling against a range fence. Alter molds her fictional characters around the historical skeleton offron­ tier life in FortWorth. She narrates the story through LizzieJones, an indepen­ dent young orphan, whose attitudes are shaped by the rowdy life in the Acre. Sallie McNutt, a young widow from Tennessee, arrives in Hell’s Half Acre to claim an inheritance, but a woman alone in a rough frontier town is faced with almost as many obstacles as the orphans. The interweaving of the lives of the orphans with the life of Sallie McNutt forms the texture of the novel. Alter’s opening line in the novel reads, ‘This is about heroes, and what happens to them when they become real people.”I would also suggest the book is about real people who become heroes. JEAN KEEZER-CLAYTON University ofNebraska-Keamey Bone. ByFae Myenne Ng. (NewYork: Hyperion, 1993. 224 pages, $19.95.) In an unadorned, candid, and crisp style, Ng draws an unsentimental, and therefore powerful, picture of the hopes, failures, and agonies of a San Fran­ cisco Chinese immigrant family. The narrator, Leila, a community relations officer at a Chinese-American school, attempts a new life, but the new life requires that she come to terms with her family’spast: the two failed marriages ofher mother; the family’sjointventure with...