Faces in the Moon by Betty Louise Bell (review)

Reviews 215 At other times he isnot assuccessful. His incessant anthropomorphizing— Mr. Squirrel, Mother Bluebird—reminds this reader of Marty Stouffer, who once asked a Yellowstone fish, “Well, Mr. Cutthroat, how does it feel to be a trout?”Yetin one ofthe bestsections, “AMountain Pony,”one forgives Millsfor ascribing human qualities to a remarkable horse, Cricket, since horses arejust people with extra legs. Butwhere does one draw the line? Mrs. Coyote? Citizen Beaver? While Mills feels kinship with his four-legged brothers and sisters, he doesn’t seem to have much use for human companionship. Winter or summer, he takes to the trail alone. Mills shares the contemporary neurosis for solitude but is refreshingly pre-modern—his attention is always on the external. We learn almost nothing about him. He talks about the tree-in-itselfand its history, not about how its gnarls and twistedness give expression to his own turmoil. Some sections might persuade us to utter the name Enos Mills in the same breath asJohn Muir and MaryAustin. Other parts of this book belong on the shelfbeside our collection of “Wild America”videos. KEVIN HOLDSWORTH Wayne County, Utah Facesin theMoon. ByBettyLouise Bell. (Norman: UniversityofOklahoma Press, 1994. 193 pages, $19.95.) On one level, BettyLouise Bell’sunassuminglypoetic Faces in theMoon tells a universal story about the influences of family and upbringing on a woman’s sense of self. On another level, it tells the particularized narrative of three generations ofCherokee womenwho negotiate, through avarietyof strategies, not only generational conflict but cultural displacement and disparagement. Bell fuses these textual strands, collapsing one into the other, by anchoring Faces in the Moon on the redemptive act of storytelling. In so doing, she, as do writers such as Amy Tan, raises and challenges the spectre of a “usable past”: what isusuallyconsidered a path to private revelation—the telling and retelling ofone’s experiences—becomes an acknowledgment ofcultural identity. The novel opens simply, with the narrator announcing the powerof sound and words: “Iwasraised on the voices ofwomen. Indian women . . .telling their lives in stories.”Then, in a slight but immediate shift reflected in the literal structure ofthe narrative (a chapter change) we are thrust into the immediacy ofthe present—Lucie Evers must travel homewhen her mother suffersa stroke. Once there, Lucie unexpectedly (or not) confronts the ghosts of a Oklahoma childhood tenuously left behind through purposeful assimilation (a “re­ spected”career as a college professor and a marriage—ultimately failed—to a “white man”). These ghosts inhabit a landscape marked by rootlessness and poverty, yet one also marked by love and spiritual belonging. 216 Western American Literature Here we meet Gracie Evers, awoman whose longing for autonomy inwhite America seems to prompt stereotypical “Indian” behavior; a woman who throughout her life seemsto put her daughter Lucie second to the various men who live in her house. We meet Gracie’ssister and cohort, spinster auntAuney, a survivoroffour marriageswho “told no tales and didn’t hit.”Butwe also meet great aunt Lizzie, a stern yet lovingwoman who gives Lucie, when she is sent to stay on the farm, alternative ways of living in the world—ways rooted in the earth, in religiosity, in history and myth, and in Cherokee values. Bell isnot merelyconcerned with personal discovery; she isalso concerned with the revaluation of cultural identity. Aswe hear these women’svoices and conversations, weglimpsewhatitmeans tobe an Indian in aparticular time and place—what itmeans to be told bythe Department ofInterior thatyou maynot sell or dispose of“said allotment,”yetthat this allotment maybe “revoked at the pleasure of the court”;what it means to hear tales ofawarrior, such as Quanah Parker. We learn to see the literal world metaphorically and to hear the metaphoric word literally. She does all this by calling our attention to the very act ofstorytelling. Chapter titles such as “Raisingvoices,”“In the hour ofthewolf ... ,” “Traveling back . . . and “Nu la . . . hurry”serve as visual markers and audio clues into its enigmatic power; intrachapter sections further our aware­ ness by juxtaposing subjective renderings of the present against seemingly objective recountings of the past. In the end, we, like Lucie, find the collective meaning ofthe stories in the old composition book in which Gracie haswritten the story...