A Storyteller in the Family Reflections on Margaret Verble’s Novel Maud’s Line BY JOHN HAWORTH
“Margaret Verble gives us a gorgeous window onto the Cherokee world in Oklahoma, 1928. Verble’s voice is utterly authentic, tender and funny, vivid and smart, and she creates a living community – the Nail family, Maud herself, her father, Mustard, and brother, Lovely, and the brothers Blue and Early, the quiet, tender-mouthed mare Leaf, and the big landscape of the bottoms – the land given to the Cherokees after the Trail of Tears. Beyond the allotments, it opens up into the wild, which is more or less what Verble does with this narrative. A wonder- ful debut novel.”
—Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta
enlighten, and to entertain and amuse us. Although there are quite a number of great storytellers in our fam-
A
ily, bar none, my cousin Margaret Verble, now a first-time novelist, is my family’s most gifted living storyteller. When Margaret and I were kids, while we learned a lot from all our
relatives, most especially our beloved grandmother Fannie Anderson Haworth, we had to dig deep to find out the history of the places and people in and around Ft. Gibson and the Arkansas River bottoms. In honing her skills as a writer over the years, Margaret dug deeper
and listened harder. She researched Cherokee history extensively, vis- ited family gravesites, searched the public record, hosted and attended family dinners and ceremonies, and chewed the fat with all our rela- tives, especially from our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. And while Margaret looked to these various sources for information, what she got from our grandmother was incredible inspiration and wisdom. From our grandmother, we learned a lot about farm life and sur-
vival and what grandmother’s world without modern conveniences was like (during our early childhoods, our grandparents’ farmhouse didn’t have running water or an indoor toilet). We learned what it meant to care for chickens, pigs and cows, and curing and smoking meats. From our family, we also learned a lot about Oklahoma wild- life – by which I mean both animals and people, and their habits and natures. Our grandmother had views on everyone and everything, most especially our relatives. Our family also jawboned about the politics in the tribe and Eastern
Oklahoma. Margaret and I learned a lot about the politics of Eastern Oklahoma and Cherokee history from smart kinfolks like Earl Boyd Pierce, who was General Counsel for the Cherokees for about 40 years. He played a lead role in the Indian Claims Commission and fought hard to resolve long-standing issues, including Indian rights related to the Arkansas River Bed which rightfully belonged to the tribes.
42 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2015
mericans Indians generally are recognized for their great oral traditions, and, certainly, the Cherokee people have both strong oral and written traditions. Storytelling is very much part of everyday life for Cherokees, with sto- ries passed down through the generations to teach and
The encounter with our grandmother’s hard-scrabble life – as well
as those of our aunts, uncles and cousins – in rural Oklahoma gave us so many rich memories throughout our lives. But for Margaret, it was her roaming of the land itself that was core to her becoming a writer. She knew it would sustain her, as it had the rest of our family, and she felt an obligation to bring it alive in other peoples’ imaginations. Her new novel Maud’s Line (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2015) is
set in 1928 on Cherokee allotment land in Eastern Oklahoma on the Ar- kansas River near Ft. Gibson. “Line” is a reference not only to the section boundaries of these Indian allotment parcels, but to other boundaries – psychological and physical – of the central character. Margaret’s novel is jam-packed with stories throughout as the characters talk about ev- eryday events to one another in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Her characters reveal significant, peculiar, funny and poignant things about one another and about the circumstances of their lives. The people in Maud’s world tell one another what’s going on through gossip and exaggerated “tall tales” but they frequently have a great sense of urgency talking about consequential events and sizing up what’s going on around
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