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CHERIE JONES' DEBUT NOVEL, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, is set in an unnamed island that is recognizable as Barbados. The story revolves around two main characters, Adan, a gang leader of some influence in the local underworld, and Lala (the pronunciation of whose name is intentionally uncertain), his wife and basic punching bag. These two are surrounded by a supporting cast of beautifully sketched characters who, in one way or another, affect or are affected by the main characters. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is a tale of depravity, a theme that Jones mines with a surgeon's skill.
Lala is the third generation of her family mentioned in the novel, and one senses that she stands no chance of success from the moment she is introduced. Adan, the badman, is the second generation of his family mentioned, and he is coached in criminality by his stepfather. Around these two, the drama of the novel orbits, a drama set in motion by Adan's attempted robbery of a white man's home that ends in the white man's death. Adan's desperate attempts to remain free, and to continue his criminal life, are complicated by the birth of his daughter, Baby, who provides the motive for the literal tug-of-war that begins between Adan and Lala. Tone, who is in love with Lala but, until now, a loyal lieutenant to Adan, completes this unholy triangle.
When the baby is killed while caught between a fighting Lala and Adan, the drama is set in motion as Adan descends into a homicidal rage born out of fear of his capture. Lala, with the child dead, slides into insanity at the loss of her child and her need to protect Adan, while at the same time sheltering herself from his brutality. Tone, pulled between his conflicting loyalties, gradually gives way to the mindless brutality, The Thing He Cannot Name (another unnamed thing), a kind of island Mr. Hyde, that lurks behind his every action. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is a chase crime story, but it is less about the police chase than it is about the characters' chase after their humanity.
I loved the fact that Cherie Jones actually has a story to tell, a true drama of human lives stripped bare. Her language, though simple, is exquisite in its capture of ordinary details, endowing the average with the illusion of the extraordinary. Her authenticity with respect to the detail of the criminal's psychology and the flawless execution of its construction are breathtaking. I don't recognize the women she draws. They are too weak, too frail, and too illogical for my taste and experience, but I believe her view and accept that she writes with an internality that I don't possess when constructing a female character. I am not sure that I believe in privileged knowledge simply because of gender location, but I do accept consistency in character development, and this she achieves brilliantly.
I'm engaged with Lala from the moment I encounter her, fall in love with her, experience her anger, am chagrined at her frustration, angered at her exploitation and her denigration, made furious when she is beaten and brutalized, frustrated and just a little bit contemptuous that she cannot make good decisions. What Jones does is depict a society so oppressive that good decisions mean nothing, for the boot of a cruel and tyrannical social structure is pressed firmly on to Lala's neck. Jones makes the point that this society is not simply neutral but intentionally cruel and exploitative, and its primary face is male. Wilma, the Queen of Sheba, Mira, Esme, all suffer at men's hands—literally. And this leads to an interesting conundrum. Men, in the novel's landscape, are errant moons around female suns.
Women provide the attractive energy that men find irresistible, but once attracted, men's primary instinct is exploitative. They demand food, pussy, money, attention, blindness to their many weaknesses, and acceptance of their domination. There is the criminality of Adan, the thoughtless violence of Tone, the perpetual adultery of, well, Everyman, the intimidating tactics of Sergeant Beckles and his rape of the Queen of Sheba, the generational incest of Carson, or the casual cruelty of the man who reminds Esme on her wedding day that she was a prostitute and she should give all the fellas a last piece before she shut it down (this casual act of denigration leading to her husband slicing her up with a cutlass and causing her death). It is hard not to feel run over by this Mack truck of female exploitation and destruction.
Jones, however, gives us two possible saviors, Peter and Grayson, both white. This is where the novel gets slippery, because Jones gives no evidence of being aware of, or at least caring about, the superstructural political framework so popular with male Caribbean writers. Hers is the internal world of human relationships, where individual acts of kindness are prized because they are so rare. That she locates those acts of kindness in two white men is, to say the least, problematic; for what emerges is a tale of black hatred and brutality, however realistic, with a kind of redemptive influence, a fairy dust, as it were, being provided by white men who are not even part of the society. Peter is caring and forgiving even when Mira, his white Bajan wife, horns him. She had, before the marriage, played the "soft" whore by hanging out at spots where she hoped to find a rich husband. That is how she finds Peter, who promptly leaves his English wife. This act of betrayal is nullified when he first forgives Mira's infidelity and then gives his life for her when they are robbed by Adan.
Grayson, the other white man and, not insignificantly, a doctor, that is, a healer, is first seen as emotional over his dog's death. This contrasts with the absolutely iron-clad exteriors of the black men in the novel. Then he "saves" both Mira and Lala. Neither he nor Peter is deconstructed, and the reader is not given access to either man's internal life, so we are left to judge them exclusively on their actions. Those actions are fundamentally good. So two white men function as saviours in the novel. All of the black characters, though their back stories provide a kind of explanation of their depravity, their denigration and their cruelty, are in need of saving. This, for me, is the most problematic part of the novel.
In the end, Tone murders Adan who was about to murder him, black on black crime at the lowest level. Adan, having killed Peter, Mira's husband, now shoots her, black on white crime. It is not clear if Mira's survives. Lala's hinted-at escape on a BWIA flight seems fanciful at best, but, in any case, if she does escape, then it only confirms the inability of the island to act as saviour. She must go to the USA, a white country, to be saved.
I like this novel. Very much. I think Jones writes beautifully and authentically about a particular slice of experience. Ultimately, like many who write within a political framework, the framework overwhelms the broader social construct within which it is constructed. The framework becomes the totality, and while, in itself authentic, it takes only one step back to see its distorting effects. I look forward to her next novel.
Ronald A. Williams is the author of six novels, including A Death in Panama and The Dark Land. His latest novel is Eurydice’s Song.
