The Monster That Lives On the Homestead

Victor LaValle, Lone Women: a Novel

Adelaide Henry carries her family’s oldest secret in a steamer trunk when she hurriedly leaves California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Her parents’ sudden deaths leave Adelaide unmarried, Black, and a woman during a time in America’s history when these are among the three worst things a person could be. So she packs only what she can carry and flees to the one place that will take a fugitive like her: the rural northern Montana plains.

This novel began when author and Columbia University professor Victor LaValle discovered that Montana didn’t discriminate in distributing lands under the Homestead Act. Where most states and territories required a male head of household, and usually only accorded land to White people, Montana took anyone who could sign the paperwork. What, LaValle wondered, would drive a woman to Montana’s severe, dry climate? His apparent answer is: everything that’s the opposite of the traditional Western genre.

The Montana which Adelaide encounters doesn’t jibe with the enthusiastic railroad pamphlets that enticed her here. It’s dry, austere, and weatherbeaten. But word gets around quickly about the young Black woman living alone, and allies begin making themselves available. Seems Adelaide isn’t the only “Lone Woman” homesteading these prairies, which have offered a semi-warm welcome to outcasts of all kinds. As long as her deadly secret stays inside her steamer trunk, Adelaide should be fine.

LaValle upends the stereotypes of Western literature. The classic genre authors—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour—praised White, male individualists who didn’t need anybody else, invented their own rules, and survived by violence. Many Westerns, including Wister’s genre-defining The Virginian, feature the protagonist losing their baggage, whether by having it stolen or by abandoning it along the Trails. By contrast, Adelaide’s baggage is the most important treasure she owns, and she’ll die defending it.

Adelaide’s baggage is both literal and metaphorical. She’s terrified of whatever lives inside her steamer trunk, and sings it lullabies to keep it mollified. But she also carries paralyzing guilt. From page one, we know Adelaide feels responsible for her parents’ violent deaths, which she flees in a literal blaze of fear. We don’t know who or what killed them, because she won’t tell us, because she won’t accept what really happened and face up.

Victor LaValle

But underneath Montana’s ceaseless skies, Adelaide discovers she isn’t alone. All the “Lone Women” have secrets they’d rather bury. But they also need each other—another stark reversal from the Western genre, which usually preaches radical self-reliance. Nobody in this Montana can survive alone. But that mutuality takes two different forms. While the homesteading Lone Women learn to trust one another, exactly as they are, the townspeople close ranks against those they regard as outsiders.

Meanwhile, whatever lives inside Adelaide’s steamer trunk dominates her life. Here, LaValle takes on Jungian subtexts, as we increasingly suspect Adelaide is harboring her shadow self. Though we don’t get a glimpse inside the steamer for eighty pages, the Thing We Don’t Talk About becomes larger and larger, until we know, with doomed inevitability, that Adelaide’s big secret will come crashing out. And when it does, it’s guaranteed to hurt everyone she’s dared to trust.

In this, LaValle acknowledges something traditional Westerns ignore: that the people who settled the American West weren’t heroes. They were mostly people without a homeland, often fugitives, who took land stolen from Native peoples because they’d lost everything else. (LaValle addresses the land theft only obliquely, but it’s there.) The West was alienating and lonely, and it destroyed American illusions of class and race. White America celebrated the first settlers only after they were dead.

Traditional Westerns feature protagonists, often nameless (“The Virginian”) or mononymic (“Lassiter”), who never completely tell their stories. The past, to Western heroes, doesn’t matter. By contrast, in LaValle’s Montana, the past is all-important. Adelaide and her allies try to bury their past, but in keeping their secrets, the past becomes all-encompassing, threatening to destroy any present they might have. Their epic becomes a matter of determining who they can trust, and what they can share.

This novel starts out as Adelaide’s story, and early on, hews closely to her. But our ability to see through others’ eyes blossoms outward to the exact extent that Adelaide learns to trust others. As she starts seeing other Montana homesteaders as equals, so do we, and we begin receiving their stories of heartbreak and recovery. We begin seeing how everyone has their own steamer trunk, literal and metaphorical. And we, too, learn to trust.

See also: You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle