Susan Straight’s Great American Novels: ‘Fools Crow’ and ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’

Impossible to choose — is the great American novel one you love so much you keep it secret, as a talisman, or the book you love so much you give it to everyone for years? This summer, having just taught two great American novels which altered the perceptions of this nation forever for my UC Riverside students, I will choose “Fools Crow” by James Welch and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” by Ernest J. Gaines.

Jane Pittman is a slave girl who might be nine or 10 — her voice begins as wholly immersive, on the first page when Confederate troops come through the dusty hot road of the Louisiana plantation where she has been hauling water for hours to hand each soldier a gourd; she is rebellious, indomitable, orphaned, scarred, and a hilarious dry-voiced narrator. Before the dust has settled, the Union troops come, and she hauls water for them too. This sets up her journey, when a colonel from Ohio gives her a new name — Jane — after his own daughter, and after his departure, she is beaten severely for refusing to answer to her slave name. After Emancipation, she and other slaves leave the plantation, Jane seeking Ohio and absolute freedom.

But this novel is a deconstruction of Reconstruction. For Jane and the new families she forms, freedom means forced labor, vigilante killings, wage cheating and segregation, and Democrats and Republicans who are the opposite of what they appear now — to the astonishment of my students. But it is Gaines’ skill with Jane’s voice, after he’d spent childhood listening to older people tell stories on porches, that makes the novel spellbinding. My students loved the comedy in the narrative, even as terrible things happened. They saw the antecedents to today’s music, storytelling, mass incarceration, and political “retrick,” as one character calls it.

During the same time, in what is not yet Montana but the borderless territories of the Lone Eaters band of the Blackfeet Nation, another wholly immersive narrative begins: “Fools Crow.” Beginning in 1870, this novel has its own language: “He chewed the stick of dry meat and watched Cold Maker gather his forces…. It was almost night, and he looked back down into the flats along the Two Medicine River. The lodges of the Lone Eaters were illuminated by cooking fires within…. [He] raised his eyes to the west and followed the Backbone of the World from south to north until he could pick out Chief Mountain.”

Our Critics at Large pick their Great American Novels

My students love world-building, and this world is seamless with its surroundings and narrative voices, even Raven’s. We made lists of the animals and geographic features and belief system of the Lone Eaters. In the shadow of the Rockies and on the banks of rivers, war and politics and violence are inescapable — treaties are signed and broken, men kill other men, and the American romanticism of homesteading and blue-coated soldiers is shattered forever.

James Welch also listened to the stories of his elders. In April, Joe Medicine Crow, last living war chief of the Plains Native Americans, died at age 102. My students — descended from parents born in Vietnam, India, China, Pasadena, Guatemala, Mexico and Los Angeles — saw his presence everywhere in the pages.

Reinvention of the self, narrative which plays with history and humor and violence and territory, but most of all powerful storytelling in which humans make defiant and unbreakable communities while under fire — these are the stories we’re living right now.

Straight is one of our Critics at Large.