A COUNCIL OF DOLLS
By Mona Susan Power
Literary Fiction
Mariner Books
August 2023
Except for a pet, few things are balm to a child's soul like a beloved toy. Dolls that seem to know everything and speak to the girls who love them are an essential part of A Council of Dolls. Author Mona Susan Power, who won hearts and accolades with her novel The Grass Dancer in the '90s, now has published a novel of healing and the power of love in relating fictionalized versions of the stories of women in her family.
The reader first meets Sissy, a child of the early '60s and only child of a calm, compassionate writer father and a mercurial activist mother. She knows her mother loves them both, but she is not a calm soul. There are times she cannot help but explode. She and her father do their best to tiptoe around those times because despite her soul's anger and anguish, they know she loves them.
Sissy has a Black baby doll that she adores. Ethel, who is named for Sissy's godmother, knows things and counsels her child. Sissy knows to listen to her. She notices the way white people regard them, as do her parents. Her father digs in and works all the harder. Her mother calls their Chicago home "Prejudiced, Illinois". Sissy wants to call it "Sweetland" in hopes that if you are nice to people and places, they will be nice back.
It doesn't work that way, but on a visit back to Dakhóta land to her mother's parents, her grandmother has words of comfort. She tells the child:
Whatever strength I have left is for you. Keep noticing everything. Keep that beautiful heart open. Someday it will save you.
Her grandmother, Iná, calls Sissy's mother "Gathering of Stormcloud Woman" but the child is "Woman Whose Good Works Bring Flowers." Her grandmother's wisdom and calmness are as evident as her mother's unhappiness. Both of her grandparents, including her alcoholic, wounded soul of a grandfather, Jack, show their love of each other, family and life.
Although Sissy and her father try to comfort her mother, they cannot heal her. One day, Sissy accidentally drops a sack of groceries when she and her mother are walking home. Her mother's anger escalates until there is a confrontation at the top of a stairway. Sissy listens to her doll, Ethel, who says she will protect her. Sissy spends decades not sure what happened.
The novel then shifts to Sissy's mother, whose English name that she hates is Lillian. Both Lillian and her eventual husband, Cornelius, were sent to the Carlisle Boarding School, where Indigenous children from across the country were sent for decades and abused to rid them of their Indian ways. Lillian, who was adept at reading and writing English even as a small child, had to give up her beloved doll. Mae was a Shirley Temple doll who named herself, according to Lillian, and was a hand-me-down present for being so gifted.
Lillian and her siblings grew up across the road from the grave of their people's beloved Lalá, Sitting Bull. Her sister, Blanche, is not a calm child. Nor is she one to seek the approval of white people. Lillian doesn't seek it, either, but if it helps her access her beloved books more, well, that matters to her.
She knows Mae is a present for someone the white people consider no better than a trained monkey, but she loves her doll anyway. Lillian has to give the doll up to a little girl dying of consumption, and Mae is buried with her. When Lillian is punished at Carlisle, she feels that Mae rescued herself from that child's coffin and made her way to her child. Although no one else can see her, Mae comforts Lillian when not even Blanche, or Cornelius and his brother cannot. What happens at Carlisle goes a long way to explain why Lillian is the way she is.
The novel goes back farther in time to the childhood of Lillian's mother, when Iná was Cora. Her father was an interpreter for Sitting Bull. When he is killed by soldiers and Indians enrolled as police for the whites, a three-year-old Cora goes with her father to witness the carnage and pay homage.
On a train to Carlisle, the seat next to her is given to a boy whose father is white. Jack has never been, and never will be, treated as white. Being imprisoned at Carlisle is even harder on him than any of the other characters, and he pays for the price for that again and again.
Cora's beloved doll was sewn years earlier. Winona was found after a massacre, when a dog that was trying to save a badly wounded baby brought her to camp. She was handed down to Cora, whose mother opened the doll up and inserted a small stone to serve as her heart. The two immediately connected, as the later dolls did with her daughter and granddaughter. Winona sees her purpose as protecting Cora, who doesn't always listen to her.
When the children arrive at Carlisle, they are lined up for a photograph with all their Indian belongings. Those treasures from home are then taken from them and burned.
Jack finds Winona's heart within the ashes and returns it to Cora.
The stories of what the children endure at Carlisle are horrific. The cruelty is difficult to read. The way the whites, especially those in the white people's church, talk about and act toward the children is reflected today in the prejudicial acts and talk of their descendants toward everyone who is not white and heterosexual.
But then a fourth section of the novel opens. This is where the healing begins. The section features a much older Sissy, who became a writer and a professor of writing. She is honored but her heart is still hurting from what happened to her mother. She is led to keepsakes from her childhood and things that belonged to her mom. When the dolls are gathered together, magic begins to happen.
It can be left to the reader to decide if there is magic realism at work. But it is also easy to see spiritualism and a seeking heart at work here. Talking things over with a trusted friend, who also is an Indigenous professor, helps bring things together. It's a little bit like talking things over as a child with a beloved doll, with more nuance.
There also is the ghost of an ancestor who lived before any of the women whose stories are featured. The wounds her body suffered are there now, and she encourages more than one of the women to explore them. It's to not forget the past, but it is in order to move forward.
There is no true healing without remembering, she tells me in her silent way, and she guides my finger inside a bullet hole that has ripped through her heart. I know I should be horrified, but I'm honored by this connection, this intimacy across death and Time.
And later:
...I learned that we can't heal the story by changing the plot, pretending the awful stuff didn't happen. Tragedy just breaks out somewhere else along the line. The story won't heal until the players do.
That's because
Words can undo us or restore us to wholeness.
A Council of Dolls is a step toward wholeness.
The entire novel uses parts of the lives of Power and her ancestors. Part of her family did grow up across from Lalá's gravesite, and the youngest daughter did go with her interpreter father when Sitting Bull was murdered. Power, like her character Sissy, grappled with the legacy of her talented, activist mother with love and the worry of being an imposter in comparison. All of this is addressed in the novel and in an afterword.
That Power is working with her family's story and with her own story gives the healing in the final pages strength that only someone's imagination would not have. For Power to be able to give her readers such a gift should dispel any fear of being an imposter. She is the real thing, and so is her wisdom.