Heart Berries Read online

  advance praise for

  Heart berries

  “Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small. She writes of motherhood, loss, absence, want, suffering, love, mental illness, betrayal, and survival. She does this without blinking, but to say she is fearless would be to miss the point. These essays are too intimate, too absorbing, too beautifully written, but never ever too much. What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined, testament.”

  —roxane gay, author of Hunger

  “Inside Terese Marie Mailhot’s phenomenal memoir, Heart Berries, the truth wrestles a knot between hustle and heart. How does a woman raised on a reservation in Canada forge a life story in the face of a culture hell-bent on keeping her quiet and calm? By and through her body, is how, and this woman’s body rages, desires, screams, and whispers its way into the reader’s body, as if to remind us that the rest of the story will not be silenced. Terese radically reinvents language in order to surface what has been murdered by American culture: the body of a woman, the voice of a warrior, the stories of ancestral spirit jutting up and through the present tense. I am mesmerized by her lyricism because it is shot through with funny angry beautiful brutal truths. This is a writer for our times who simultaneously blows up time. Thank oceans.”—lidia yuknavitch, author of

  The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children,

  Dora: A Headcase, and The Chronology of Water

  “There is some word we have not invented yet that means honesty to the hundredth power, that means courage, exponentially extended, that means I will flay myself for my art, for my survival, for my family, to keep breathing, to keep writing, to keep being alive. Inside that opening is beauty beyond all measure, the truth that art was invented to carry, and power enough to light the word. This book is that kind of opening.”

  —pam houston, author of

  Contents May Have Shifted

  “Heart Berries is an epic take—an Iliad for the indigenous. It is the story of one First Nation woman and her geographic, emotional, and theological search for meaning in a colonial world. It is disturbing and hilarious . . . Terese is a world-changing talent and I recommend this book with 100 percent of my soul.”—sherman alexie, author of

  You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me

  “In this debut memoir, Terese Marie Mailhot sends across generations a love letter to women considered difficult. She sends a manifesto toward remembering . . . She writes prose tight as a perfect sheet, tucked . . . To read this book is to engage with one of our very best minds at work.”

  —toni jensen, author of From the Hilltop

  “Heart Berries is phenomenal. I finished the book and went right back to the beginning to read through once again; my understanding deepened, as did the mystery. Mailhot’s voice is so clear, so disruptive, so assured, and always so mesmerizingly poetic—it somehow startles and lulls all at once. I was KNOCKED DOWN.”

  —justin torres, author of We the Animals

  “Unearthing medicine and receiving power requires you to give your life and, in her debut memoir, Mailhot fearlessly delivers. By turns tender, sad, angry, and funny, Heart Berries is a thought-provoking, powerful exploration of what it means to be a contemporary Indigenous woman and mother.”

  —eden robinson, author of

  the Scotiabank Giller Prize short-listed novel

  Son of a Trickster

  “This book is ache and balm. It is electric honesty and rigorous craft. It concerns a woman who veers into difficult and haunted corners. She meets ghosts and hospitals. She ends up in a mutinous wing of memoir; disobeying all colonial postures, ‘neat narratives,’ formulas and governments. The resulting story is brave and bewitching. I am so grateful to Terese Marie Mailhot, a fiery new voice, whose words devoured my heart.” —kyo maclear,

  bestselling author of Birds Art Life

  “Heart Berries makes me think of a quote I have always loved: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats). With a keen eye for intense truth and thoroughly crafted beauty, Mailhot’s debut sings like poetry, and stays with you long after you’ve finished the last page.”—katherena vermette,

  author of The Break

  “Mailhot fearlessly addresses intimately personal issues with a scorching honesty derived from psychological pain and true epiphany . . . Slim, elegiac, and delivered with an economy of meticulous prose, the book calibrates the author’s history as an abused child and an adult constantly at war with the demons of mental illness. An elegant, deeply expressive meditation infused with humanity and grace.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Copyright © 2018 by Terese Marie Mailhot

  Introduciton copyright © 2018 by Sherman Alexie

  Afterword copyright © 2018 by Joan Naviyuk Kane

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mailhot, Terese Marie, author.

  Title: Heart berries : a memoir / Terese Marie Mailhot.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017051069 | ISBN 9781619023345

  Subjects: LCSH: Mailhot, Terese Marie—Health. | Post-

  traumatic stress disorder—Patients—Northwest, Pacific—

  Biography. | Manic-depressive illness—Patients—

  Northwest, Pacific—Biography. | Indian women—

  Northwest, Pacific—Biography.

  Classification: LCC RC552.P67 M3555 2018 | DDC 362.19685/210092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051069

  Jacket designed by Donna Cheng

  Interior designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Karen Joyce Bobb (Wahzinak)

  I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

  —maggie nelson

  Contents

  Introduction by Sherman Alexie

  1:Indian Condition

  2:Heart Berries

  3: Indian Sick

  4:In a Pecan Field

  5:Your Black Eye and My Birth

  6:I Know I’ll Go

  7:Little Mountain Woman

  8:The Leaving Deficit

  9:Thunder Being Honey Bear

  10:Indian Condition

  11:Better Parts

  Afterword by Joan Naviyuk Kane

  Acknowledgments

  introduction

  by Sherman Alexie

  Terese Marie Mailhot arrived in my life via vision. Well, she was due to give birth at any moment and couldn’t attend the writing workshop in person, so she was beamed into the classroom via Skype or iChat or Facebook streaming on somebody’s laptop. She became the cyborg writer in the room. It was hilarious at first. It never stopped being hilarious. But as the week went on, I realized that Terese’s lack of physical presence g
ave her voice more power. When she spoke, we all had to lean toward the computer to better hear. And then we’d sometimes forget she was in the room. It’s easy to forget about a computer. But then Terese would speak—would politely seek our attention—and we’d turn toward that laptop as if it were a shrine. Hilarious. It all seemed like a contradiction. But that twenty-first-century technology turned Terese into an ancient. Well, it made her feel like she was powered by something ancient.

  So, in reading Heart Berries, I was not surprised to learn that Terese, as a child in search of answers, in search of protection, pretended to be ancient.

  I didn’t say any of this at the time. I didn’t want to single her out. Or praise her too much. I was the professor and I needed to be fair, objective, and critical. But what I really wanted to say was, “Terese, when I sat down with your manuscript and began to read your words, I was aware within maybe three sentences that I was in the presence of a generational talent. I was in the presence of something new.”

  To be glib, Terese is putting the “original” in aboriginal.

  So, yeah, I didn’t say it then. But I am saying it now. Terese Marie Mailhot has arrived in all of our lives now, and she is ancient. She is pretending to be ancient. She is speaking from an ancient place. She is smart and a smart-ass. She is wounded and seeking to wound. She is forgiving and vengeful. She is mentally ill and smarter than all of us. She is cynical and deeply, deeply romantic.

  She is the metaphorical love child of Emily Dickinson and Crazy Horse. She is the biological child of a broken healer and a lonely artist.

  Terese is a healer and an artist. She is broken and she is lonely.

  Just read a few of her out-of-context sentences:

  Observation isn’t easy, and the right eyes can make me feel like a deer, while the wrong ones make me feel like a monster.

  The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you.

  I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.

  I am not too ugly for this world.

  I walk backward up the steps, knowing my feet like I never did.

  This book is not only memoir. It is poetry. It is meditation. It is mystical, but not in the kind of old-time Indian way that Terese wants to avoid. It is a hard-earned mysticism. A blue-collar mysticism. The mysticism of callused hands and blistered feet. It is the mysticism of resilience. Or something larger than resilience.

  As you will discover in reading this book, Terese is suspicious of the word resilence. She is suspicious of all words. Because she is acutely aware of their ability to heal and harm, often at the same time.

  But as a writer, as a storyteller, Terese returns to the words, to the stories, because she must. She doesn’t have a choice. She was given this extraordinary gift. And this gift of vision, of words, has sent her screaming into the night. It has left her weeping naked in the shower. It has pushed her into a mental hospital. It has fractured her family and her own soul.

  But here she is, still standing, and she is interrogating the world. She is the judge and jury. But she is a powerful indigenous woman who interrogates herself.

  Yes, I think, in the end, this is perhaps why I believe Terese is a spectacular talent. She is willing to look deep into the mirror and tell us what she sees. And in doing so, Terese herself becomes a mirror, and we, her readers, can see our reflections.

  Terese is unafraid now. Does that mean she is calling on us, her readers, her reflections, to be unafraid, too? Or maybe Terese just accepts her fear. Does that mean we readers should accept our fear, too? I don’t know the answer to that question. Terese wants to be “torn apart by everything.” So does that mean I should want to be torn apart, too? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I am certainly aware that Heart Berries has torn me apart. And I fully expect, as I read it again, as I keep rereading it over the years, that Terese and her stories will put me back together.

  Sherman Alexie

  July 27, 2017

  1

  indian condition

  My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity—like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

  Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much.

  The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls.

  Women asked me for my story.

  My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We started recipes and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We started an applehead doll—the shrunken, carved head sat on a bookshelf years after she left.

  When she died nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

  My mother brought healers to our home, and I thought she was trying to exorcise me—a little ghost. Psychics came. Our house was still ruptured. I started to craft ideas. I wrapped myself in a Pendleton blanket and picked blueberries. I pretended I was ancient. A healer looked at me. He was tall and his jeans were dirty.

  He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.”

  My mother said that was when I became trouble.

  That’s when my nightmares came. A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lightning haunted me. My mother told me they were visions.

  “Turn your shirt backward to confuse the ghosts,” she said, and sent me to bed.

  My mother insisted that I embrace my power. On my first day of school I bound myself a small book. The teacher complimented my vocabulary, and my mother told me school was a choice.

  She fed me traditional food. I went to bed early every night, but I never slept well.

  I fell ill with tuberculosis. Mother brought back the healers. I told them my grandmother was speaking to me.

  Zohar, a white mystic, a tarot reader, told me she spoke to spirits, too. “Your grandmother says she misses you,” she said.

  “We could never make a cake,” I said.

  “She was just telling me that. What ingredient did you usually forget?” Zohar asked.

  I knew this was a test, but a strange one, because she didn’t speak to my grandmother either. I remember my mother was watching us, holding her breath.

  “Eggs,” I said.

  My spiritual fraud distanced my grandmother’s sprit from me. It became harder to stomach myself, and harder to eat.

  “Does that happen to you,” I said.

  “What?” Zohar asked.

  “Did you ever want to stop eating?”

  “No,” she said.

  Zohar asked my mother if she could sleep next to my bed, on the floor. She listened to me all night. Storytelling. What potential there was in being awful. My mindlessness became a gift. I didn’t feel compelled to tell any moral tales or ancient ones. I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies.

  My story was maltreated. I was a teenager when I got married. I wanted a safe home. Despair isn’t a conduit for love. We ruined each other, and then my mother died. I had to leave the reservation. I had to get my GED. I left my home because welfare made me choose between necessities. I used a check and some cash I saved for a ticket away—and knew I would arrive with a deficit. That’s when I started to illust
rate my story and exactly when it became a means of survival. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father.

  “What about this boy,” I said, with Isaiah in my arms.

  “They don’t seem interested yet,” my lawyer said.

  I brought Isaiah home from the hospital, and then packed Isadore’s bag. My ex-husband Vito took him, along with police escorts. Before they left, I asked Vito if he wanted to hold his new baby. I don’t know why I offered, but he didn’t kiss our baby or tell him goodbye. He didn’t say he was sorry, or that it was unfortunate. Who wants one boy and not another?

  It’s too ugly—to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?

  I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences. Still, my voice cracks.

  I packed my baby and left my reservation. I came from the mountains to an infinite and flat brown to bury my grief. I left because I was hungry.

  In my first writing classes, my professor told me that the human condition was misery. I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

  The Indian condition is my grandmother. She was a nursery teacher. There are stories that she brought children to our kitchen, gave them laxatives, and then put newspaper on the ground. She squatted before them and made faces to illustrate how hard they should push. She dewormed children this way, and she learned that in residential school—where parasites and nuns and priests contaminated generations of our people. Indians froze trying to run away, and many starved. Nuns and priests ran out of places to put bones, so they built us into the walls of new boarding schools.

  I can see Grandmother’s face in front of those children. Her hands felt like rose petals, and her eyes were soft and round like buttons. She liked carnations and canned milk. She had a big heart for us kids. She transcended resilience and actualized what Indians weren’t taught to know: We are unmovable. Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief, but I don’t think she even measured time.