Joshua Whitehead’s debut novel is a coming of age or homecoming, told in vignettes and non-linear memories, as two-spirit protagonist Jonny grapples with questions of home and belonging as he tries to get back to the rez for his stepfather’s funeral.
If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes. Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group.
“These queer stories are already ingrained in the land, and I’m just trying to find them. Things are never forgotten, they’re just forgone.”
Love, in all its forms, permeates this novel. Complicated love, messy love, nourishing love, platonic love, sexual love, familial love, secret love.
When I got a little older, I think I was fifteen, I remember watching Dan Savage and Terry Miller on the internet telling me that it gets better. They told me that they knew what I was going through, that they knew me. How so, I thought? You don’t know me. You know lattes and condominiums—you don’t know what it’s like being a brown gay boy on the rez. (7-8)
It turns out that Johnny Appleseed is some American folk legend who became famous by planting apple trees in West Virginia. I didn’t understand why we’d sung about him at camp—I wanted to know about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St, Marie, but instead we were honoring some white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America. … All I know is this: apples are crazy expensive on the Rez and they had now become bad things in my head. My stepdad Roger called me an apple when I told him I wanted to leave the rez. “You’re red on the outside,” he said,” and white on the inside.” (10-11)
Leaving always hurts—home isn’t a space, it’s a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. (20)
You have to perform in any situation, so you may as well pick your battles. Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer. You can’t win in every situation, that’s just the way it is. Best to avoid those topics, save your energy for when you’re down to your last pack of cigarettes and ramen noodles. Shift when you need to–become your own best medicine. (44)
It turns out that tradition is an NDN’s saving grace, but it’s a medicine reserved only for certain members of the reservation, and not for self-ordained Injun glitter princesses like me. This tradition repeats throughout my life. I’m expected to chop wood for ceremonies rather than knead fry-bread, learn how to hunt with my uncles rather than knit with my aunties, perform the Fancy Feather dance when I really want to do the Jingle Dress dance. “Man up” was the mantra of my childhood and teenage years, because the dick between my legs wasn’t enough proof of ownership of NDN manhood. There are a million parts of me that don’t add up, a million parts of me that signal immodesty. When I think of masculinity, I think of femininity. Everything’s finished in beauty. (79)
Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I’m in pain with you.” (88)
Once, before I set the rule of never meeting clients in person, I agreed to go out with this guy… He said he was straight but sort of a “tr*nny chaser”; I told him I was Two-Spirit, not transgender, and that tr*nny was an out-of-date word. (99-100).
My voice, my body, my life–every piece of me is a bundle of medicine that gives and burns and smudges. (109)
I thought about now, thought about my mom’s advice: if I want to survive, I’d have to leave. But it’s hard, you know? Each second I’m away from home is time that’s gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end. How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one. (205)