All Those Daughters

From the very first book in Tony Hillerman's Navaho series featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee, The Blessing Way, I was hooked. Each and every story in the series is a gem. When his daughter wrote her own book to add some sparkle to the series, it seemed appropriate to focus on a female perspective. This made me consider all sorts of daughters, and I might be writing about a few of them over the next few weeks.

Spider Woman’s Daughter (October 1, Harper/HarperCollins), by Anne Hillerman

Monday morning at the Navajo Inn has been a favorite meeting place for the Navajo police, going back to when Joe Leaphorn was just a young detective and making his reputation as someone with a sharp mind. These meetings had become brainstorming sessions for unsolved cases, which segued into routine matters of budget and staffing. Joe was talking about a woman who hadn’t shown up for a meeting, when Captain Howard Largo called the meeting to order. Despite the fact that Leaphorn was retired from the police force and working as a PI, he was welcome to stay. Largo also incorporated a young officer on a rotating basis each week, and this week it was Officer Bernadette "Bernie" Manuelito. She had been on the force for several years and had been married to Jim Chee for two of these. She was honored to drive the hour it took to get to Santa Fe.

After the meeting, Bernie is looking out the window while making a call from her cellphone when she sees a slight person wearing a hoodie approach Leaphorn and appear to shoot him in the head. She is powerless to stop the attack. The shooter then jumps in a pickup and drives off. After Bernie gives the only eyewitness statement, she is told to stay out of the way of the investigation. When the dust settles, Bernie’s job is to contact Joe’s family and friends.

Naturally, the first place to look is at Joe’s present cases and perhaps at old grudges. Revenge is not a Navajo attribute, but many Navajo have changed, so the field is wide open.

In the Navajo mythology, Spider Woman is the Holy Person who taught the Navajo to weave and gave the Hero Twins the weapons they needed to find their father, the Sun, and to rid the world of monsters. In this world, sometimes there are very messy situations with many threads, and those women who straighten everything out may be called Spider Woman’s Daughter. That is the role Bernie Manuelito plays in this mystery. She is the kind of person who notices details that others miss: a silver bracelet with hearts on it, doodles with triangles that have deeper meaning, misplaced pottery that others overlook, patterns and reflections.

I don’t think that Manuelito will replace Leaphorn and Chee, but she is a great addition. The same goes for Anne Hillerman. Her dad Tony Hillerman’s books are there for us to reread any time, but now we have the pleasure of reading hers. Fortunately, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The Headhunter’s Daughter (2011, Morrow), by Tamar Myers, tells the tale of another kind of daughter. This one lived between two worlds.

The gravel pits that were the residua of deep excavations along the great Kasai and Tshikapa rivers left by the Europeans digging for diamonds in the Congo were known to be haunted by a Belgian woman who had drowned in them. One day in the years after World War II, a boy of the Bashilele tribe came here to fulfill a ritual that would allow him to become a man. He had to take a human life and, along with it, the head of the person he killed. The skull would be used as his mug, with which to drink his palm wine for the rest of his life. Despite this, his people were not cannibals and they looked down on those river tribes who were.

What the boy found at the river looked like a beast eating a child, since he had never seen a perambulator before. When he heard the sound of a truck coming––another unfamiliar sound––he grabbed the unusual-looking child and ran for miles back to his hidden village, taking the child to his mother and dying, clutching his chest, before he can explain anything. About 13 years later, rumors come to the ears of the Belgian authorities of a white girl living with a tribe of headhunters deep in the jungle. Captain Pierre Jardin of the local Belgian police has asked two women to accompany him to the interior. One is a local newly-arrived American missionary from South Carolina, Amanda Brown, whose native name is Ugly Eyes, and a woman who works for her, known as Cripple. In this part of the world, names always mean something. As a matter of fact, the local people think that names with no meaning are foolish.

The once-little baby is now going through puberty, and is the daughter of the Chief Headhunter. She too is known as Ugly Eyes because of the odd color of here eyes, but she, like all the other women, has been made attractive by having been scarified on her face and back and having had her front teeth removed. No one knows how these customs got started, but it is well ingrained despite the fact that they all bemoan their loss when it comes time to eat. The Chief Headhunter thinks it might be a good thing for his daughter to spend time with the people known as the Breakers of Rocks, because they are everywhere and are now in power, but the Headhunter continues to be amazed how such a primitive and ignorant people had managed to subjugate his own.

What happens to both of the Ugly Eyes will have you on the edge of your seat. Cripple, whose early life was chronicled in The Witch Doctor’s Wife (2009, Avon), is always the voice of reason. One of her take-home lessons is: "Life is very simple if you don’t think it too much. Act first from the stomach, and then see what the head has to say."

This is an engrossing story of many layers. There is, at first, the mystery of the kidnapping of a baby ensconced in what at first seems to be a satire on cultural differences and overt and covert racism. But then one is intrigued to find out that Tamar Myers grew up in the Belgian Congo and was raised alongside a tribe of headhunters, the Bashilele. Much of what she describes of the life of the different tribes, including the Belgians and the missionaries, is true to life.

Myers adds a postscript to the story, as she tells the tale of her ancestor, Joseph Hochstetler, who was captured by the Delaware Indians during the French and Indian War. Surviving records tell the story that he was ritually scrubbed in the river by the women and told that he was now part of their tribe, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone and that his white blood had been washed away. He was 10 years old at the time. When he was released nine years later, he did not want to leave his new family and he visited them often. One is not just the color of one's skin; one is the color of one's heart.

There is also an old movie, The Light in the Forest, with this theme. In 1764, when a peace treaty between the Delawares and the British requires that all captives be returned to their families, Johnny Butler (a very young James MacArthur of Hawaii Five-O's "Book 'em, Danno!" fame) is forced to return, but the injustice he sees sends him back to the wilds. And you can see Fess Parker in this film as well. I thinks it's only available on VHS.

To Eat or Not To Eat

Traditionally, Lent is a time of fasting and repentance that is commonly practiced by giving up a favorite food or habit. When I think of this behavior, I always have the image in my mind of the mayor of the little French town in which Vianne Rocher opened a chocolate shop just across from the church during the weeks before Easter in the movie Chocolat. In my mind's eye I can see the suffering man eating his measly dinner, then finally caving in and almost drowning himself in chocolate in the store window. Giving up a little food would be a good thing for me in many ways, and if I did this incredible thing I would also have to avoid reading books about delicious cooking.

The Cooking School Murders and The Baked Bean Supper Murders by Virginia Rich were the first books I remember reading with recipes in the back. This was back in the early 1980s. A decade later I found Tamar Myers's Pennsylvania Dutch series that featured Magdalena Yoder, the owner of a Mennonite inn in Hernia, Pennsylvania. She made me laugh when she said that she came from a family with so much intermarriage that she was probably her own aunt, niece or cousin and could have a family picnic if she went outside to eat all by herself. I did try one or two of the recipes that Myers included in her early books, but they all failed dismally. The one I wanted to succeed most was a form of chocolate pie.

Spaghetti in Ink

It is always intriguing to read about the food my favorite protagonists eat and some of it would be perfect Lenten fare because I would have no trouble passing it up. Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano loves his seafood but I would give his pasta with squid ink a pass. He always names his dinners in Italian which I always look up, sometimes to my dismay.

On the other hand, Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur Sveinsson loves his boiled sheep's head, which I initially took for a cauliflower dish, but the real thing is quite popular in Iceland. Yes, put that on my menu for Lent.

Gerald Samper, in the book Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson, declares that a good dish must remind us that the world is an unexpected place full of unfamiliar challenges. Some of his recipes include kidneys in toffee, lychees on toast with peanut butter and hard cheese, and any animal or other creature you might see in your back yard skinned and eaten with a mixture of a variety of fruits and veggies, some of which should be getting old and possibly maggot-ridden. For the extra flavor and protein, you know. These recipes would put me on a starvation diet and it would be so great for my body and soul.

The most curious cuisine that I have come across in my reading was in the book Red Mandarin Dress by Qiu Xiaolong. I knew that food is an important aspect of Chinese life, but what I learned in this novel was that sometimes people ate certain foods to produce certain moods and to reinforce the power in their life.

Mandarin Dress

In this story, a young woman has been found on the safety island in the middle of a busy Shanghai road. She was wearing a red mandarin dress made a few decades past. Police Inspector Chen Cao is engaged on a case of real estate corruption and, at the same time, he is trying to pursue his literature studies. The case is turned over to Detective Yu Guangming, who is Chen’s partner. Everybody is startled when a second young woman is found dumped and displayed in a similar fashion. A serial killer is the first one of his kind in Shanghai, and the public is stirred by the loss of two women in their flowering age. Chen must put his mind back on the job at hand, and a friend arranges a meal at a special restaurant that he will share with several successful men.

This unusual dinner that Chen Cao was invited to in order get him on the right path was a cruel food experience. This was a multi-course meal that took several hours. The menu included fried sparrow tongues followed by live caged monkey brains. The diners apparently enjoy the live brain fresh and bloody. The live caged monkey with shaven head was brought to the table. There was also live shrimp in wine. In this dish the shrimp become intoxicated as they swim in the wine. They are fried alive at the table and they hop about on the skillet. There are a few more dishes in this vein, but these few choices are also enough to put us off food for a while.

Drunken Shrimp

This is the best of the Inspector Chen series so far in my reading of the series. Chen's approach to solving this case has less to do with forensics and more with history. This version of traditional Chinese dress that originated in the mid 1600s was created in the 1920s, restyled from the original baggy outfit for courtesans and celebrities.

For those of you who have chosen to give up a favorite thing for Lent, I hope it wasn't reading. Whatever you are denying yourself, hang in there. Before you know it, the 40 days of penance will be over and menus can return to comfort food and satiety.