'Our ancestors watch over us': A Cherokee family endures in Brandon Hobson's 'The Removed'
The family crises pile up fast and early in Brandon Hobson’s fourth book, “The Removed” (Ecco, 288 pp., ★★★½ out of four). Maria and Ernest Echota, a Cherokee couple in Oklahoma, are nearing the 15th anniversary of the death of their son Ray-Ray, who was killed by a police officer. Their other son, Edgar, is in New Mexico trying to shake a meth addiction. Their daughter, Sonja, is entering a risky relationship. And Ernest’s memory is fading due to Alzheimer’s.
This ought to be a recipe for an overcooked melodrama. But Hobson, whose 2018 novel, “Where the Dead Sit Talking,” was a National Book Award finalist, has written a subtle, powerful novel that connects the Echotas’ immediate struggles with loss and memory to a wider swath of Cherokee history, from the Trail of Tears to the present. It’s a surprisingly magnetic and eerie book, like a concrete brick that cracks open to reveal a sparkling geode, throwing off a strange light.
In alternating chapters, each family member narrates their individual turmoils as they approach Sept.r 6, the date of Ray-Ray’s death. (Pointedly, that date also marks the founding of the Cherokee Nation in 1839, after the tribe was forced west by the U.S. government.) But the family’s flat and often grim reality slowly takes a more mystical turn. An ancestor, Tsala, shares allegorical tribal stories. Edgar has a vision of rain falling upside down, then takes a train to the “Darkening Land,” where he’s recruited to work on a video game about Native Americans that seems suspiciously exploitative. (Its designer is named Jackson, presumably as in President Andrew.)
Meanwhile, Maria and Ernest serve as foster parents to Wyatt, a 12-year-old boy who bears an unusual resemblance to Ray-Ray. His presence seems to revive Ernest’s memory, and Maria allows herself a glint of optimism, as if the whole planet has rebooted. “Maybe this was a season for miracles to occur,” she thinks. “Maybe the earth was healing itself of trembling and drought, maybe the bees weren’t dying, and the swarms of locusts jumbling tunelessly around were feeding all the rodents and reptiles and crawling creatures.”
In time, the connections between the present, near past and long past begin to braid, placing the Echotas in a rich, if often tragic, continuum of Cherokee history. Hobson masterfully balances the family’s realist conflicts with more supernatural touches. This duality is at its strongest and most disorienting in the chapters featuring Edgar in the Darkening Land, where everything has a creepy, horror movie touch that evokes a history of violence: A tree’s bark “resembled the faces of the dead. I saw insects crawling all over the bark. The insects buzzed, twitching their antennae.”
But every character, it’s soon clear, is linked to a history of bigotry and violence, as well as an indomitability that allows them to endure it.
“Our ancestors watch over us,” Sonja says at one point. That’s a familiar statement of faith in family lore, usually said as comfort and not necessarily as a belief system. In this book, Hobson makes that line feel palpable, complicated and true.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A Cherokee family endures in Brandon Hobson's 'The Removed'
