53 pages • 1 hour read
A Council of Dolls
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary: “Naming Ceremony”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism, religious discrimination, emotional abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, sexual content, sexual violence and harassment, bullying, child sexual abuse, graphic violence, illness, and death.
It is Chicago in the 1960s. Sissy, who was born in 1961 and whose given name is Lillian, the same as her mother, lives with her mother and father, Cornelius, whom she calls Mama and Dad. Lillian is from North Dakota and of Dakhóta heritage. Cornelius is from South Dakota and of Lakhóta heritage. Sissy nicknames her father Kneeling Corn in her mind, based on the sound when she reverses the first two syllables of Cornelius. She envisions him kneeling on corn because it’s safer down on the ground than if he were to stand up and face Lillian, who has a temper. Lillian is angry about prejudice and injustice against Indigenous people, for one thing. She also gets angry at Cornelius and Sissy and at times becomes verbally and physically abusive toward both of them.
When Sissy was four years old, she heard a newscast about Richard Speck’s killing spree; it described how one woman survived by hiding under a bed. Sissy learned to hide under the bed when Lillian is angry and has done so ever since. She draws comfort from her doll, Ethel, who speaks to her. Sissy named the doll after her godmother, Lillian’s best friend, whom Sissy now thinks of as Big Ethel. She’d asked her father for the Black version of the doll because she felt it looked more like her than the white dolls.
Lillian is truly beautiful. Sissy worries she’ll never be beautiful—never live up to her mother. Lillian doesn’t like to be alone, so she takes Sissy everywhere with her. She tells Sissy stories from her childhood so she’ll know about her heritage. As a girl, Lillian was forced to go to an “Indian boarding school” (6), as they were called at the time. The nuns who ran the school were mean and abusive—especially Sister Frances. Lillian still harbors hatred for Sister Frances, though she’s long been dead. Lillian also likes to have Sissy watch horror movies with her. When Sissy is seven, they watch The Bad Seed together, after which Lillian starts calling Sissy “Bad Seed” after the seemingly perfect—but actually murderous—eight-year-old in the movie.
When Lillian has an affair with the neighbor, Ben, she takes Sissy with her to play with Ben’s daughter, Brooke. Brooke is the same age as Sissy. Both girls are excited to play with Brooke’s birthday gift, a fancy Mary Poppins doll with all the dresses she wore in the movie. Before they get a chance, however, Lillian storms out of the bedroom. Ben follows, nude, with blood pouring from his lip. He kissed Lillian on the lips even though she told him not to, so she bit him. The affair ends and Sissy doesn’t see Brooke again.
Lillian receives a call from her father, Jack, that greatly upsets her. She hasn’t seen him since he left the family when she was a child. She and her mother and siblings were left to endure extreme hardship while Jack got remarried and started a new family. Now, he tells Lillian he’s sick and that he wants to see her before he dies. She doesn’t want to see him, though, and Cornelius supports her decision. Instead, he suggests they visit her mother in North Dakota.
Sissy’s grandmother (“Grandma,” whose given name is Cora) lives in a tiny house on a dirt yard, with only two chairs and a cot for furniture because she gave the rest away to a family that lost everything in a fire. Sissy, Lillian, and Cornelius stay with another relative nearby. Lillian and Cora lament the fact that they can no longer visit the places most meaningful to them, like “the old cabin and Proposal Hill” (30), because they’re underwater. In 1960, the government evicted them from their land for the Oahe Dam project and flooded the place they’d called home.
On her birthday, Sissy gets a set of jacks. Lillian teaches her how to play. Sissy leaves them on the floor, and Lillian trips over them and falls. In a rage, she punishes Sissy by crushing the girl’s palm around the jacks until she bleeds. Afterward, she coaches Sissy to tell her father a lie about how she was injured. Sissy teaches the lie to Ethel, but Ethel refuses to repeat it. On another occasion, Sissy hears her parents fighting, so she hides the knives, heavy pots and pans, and even the corn holders.
Sissy’s father takes her to the natural history museum on a day when Lillian isn’t feeling well. While there, he tells Sissy a story about how a tornado gave his older brother, Luther, an extra spark, making him fun and energetic. Lillian originally intended to marry Luther, but he died in the Korean War, while Cornelius made it home. Sissy’s father also explains to Sissy that he doesn’t speak his native language often because, at boarding school, he and the other students got in trouble if they spoke it. The school authorities wanted to erase Indigenous culture and beliefs. In time, he and Lillian remembered less and less of it.
Lillian has two sides. In addition to her angry, abusive side, she also has a very loving, nurturing side. This complicates Sissy’s feelings toward her. One day, Lillian keeps Sissy home from school with plans for a fun day together. They see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the movie theater, go to lunch, get books from the library, and then go to the park. They have a wonderful time until a man at the park exposes himself to them. Lillian runs at him with a Swiss Army knife until he flees.
Lillian thinks Sissy is too soft and sensitive and will get hurt by men like the one in the park. When Sissy was much younger, a girl at the park was bullying her. Sissy wouldn’t hit the girl back, so Lillian took Sissy’s hands and made her shove the girl. Then Lillian lied to the girl’s mother, saying she tripped and fell. Lillian tells Sissy a story from her childhood about a girl being hurt by a man. On her reservation, a German immigrant married a Dakhóta woman and they had three girls. After his wife died of tuberculosis, the man molested his daughter and impregnated her. The Catholic priest wouldn’t do anything to help. The baby was born dead. It appeared as if a pin had been pushed into its head to kill it. The story is so disturbing it makes Sissy vomit. When she returns from the bathroom, she finds one of Lillian’s sewing pins stuck into Ethel’s head.
When the drugstore owner gives Sissy toffees, she saves the pretty wrappers and hides them under her bed. One day, Lillian finds them and is enraged. Sissy locks herself in the bathroom while Lillian slams against the door with the heavy phone cradle. The next day, Lillian buys a new doll dress for Ethel and talks to Sissy about how people can overreact to things. Even Grandma can, she adds, citing the time Grandma threw her precious diary in the fire one day after her husband was especially cruel to her. She was so tired of being hurt, Lillian explains, that she threw her love in the fire to kill it.
Sissy goes with her parents to the wačhípi dance at the American Indian Center. Big Ethel and her husband, Lee, are there as well. Sissy overhears Lee telling her father that he was golfing late the other night when he encountered the ghost of a woman who’d been murdered on the golf course in the 1930s. The story frightens Sissy, but she distracts herself with music and dancing. She’s thrilled when Lillian dances with Cornelius since her mother usually never dances.
On Thanksgiving, Sissy and Lillian are walking home from the store when Sissy falls and smashes their bag of groceries. Lillian is furious. Sissy runs away but Lillian chases her. Lillian catches Sissy at the top landing of the apartment stairs. Sissy senses Lillian is about to use violence to hurt her, and she covers her eyes. Then she hears a noise like a “scuffle of tangled feet” and a scream (67). She opens her eyes and finds Lillian lying dead at the bottom of the stairwell. Ethel implicates herself in Lillian’s fall, saying she “took care of” the situation because “[s]omebody had to” (67). Sissy doesn’t tell her father or the police what really happened.
Part 1 Analysis
Although Sissy narrates Part 1, the story she tells is as much about Lillian as it is about herself. This is partly because Lillian’s personality and trauma tend to overshadow everything else—a fact that will become a major source of Sissy’s internal conflicts in the future. Part 1’s focus on Lillian also occurs because Sissy is at an age where she’s still learning about the world mainly by observing her parents. The structure of the novel, in which different sections feature characters that narrate other sections, demonstrates the overlapping connections between the three women at its center. Sissy builds her worldview around Lillian’s words, such as her comment that “Mayor Daley has his big fists wrapped around our necks” and “doesn’t care about brown people like us” (1). This quickly establishes an external conflict between the protagonists and a prejudiced society. More specifically, the conflict is between the protagonists, as members of the Dakhóta nation, an Indigenous people, and the non-Indigenous society represented by the US government.
In several scenes, this conflict plays out through the protagonists’ interactions with the Catholic church. In later sections, Catholic nuns and priests either abuse, oppress, or refuse to help members of Indigenous communities. Part 1, on the other hand, depicts a conflict related to Catholicism that is more internal. In confession, Lillian tells the priest she “never felt the presence of anything sacred except at the Sun Dance we go to in North Dakota at summer solstice” (1). Though she attends a Catholic church in Chicago, the beliefs of the Catholic Church conflict with the beliefs and traditions of her native culture. The Sun Dance is now illegal—a result of Cultural Erasure and Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Americans—so saying this to the priest is risky. Her internal conflict becomes external when the priest angers Lillian by calling the Sun Dance “Devil’s work” (1), after which Lillian drags Sissy out of the church before Sissy finishes her own confession.
Part 1 establishes a second significant conflict: one between Sissy and Lillian. Sissy loves Lillian, who can be loving and nurturing at times. She also fears Lillian, who is easily angered and becomes abusive. Sissy notes, “I don’t always know what will make her mad, and what will be just fine” (18). This inconsistency forces Sissy to be in a nearly constant state of alert and anxiety, which takes an enormous mental and physical toll over time. In addition to her outright abuse, Lillian’s lack of support is also detrimental to Sissy. For example, Sissy doesn’t tell Lillian about her nightmares because Lillian “doesn’t like to hear what bothers [her]” (7). This creates a sense that her own mother isn’t concerned with her emotional well-being. Sissy feels nurturing her own needs will put her in conflict with Lillian, so she neglects them. The significance of the conflict between Lillian and Sissy marks Lillian’s death as a major turning point in the plot. While effectively resolving the external aspects of their conflict, it creates new trauma and conflicts in Sissy’s life and character arc.
Mona Susan Power’s writing style contributes to the novel’s literary voice and thematic conceptions of Dakhóta identity. Figurative language, including similes, metaphors, and personification of nature, imbues the story with a sense of how the protagonists see and relate to the world. They value creativity and connection to things unseen, especially Sissy. She talks about “walk[ing] inside a song” (1), evidencing the important role music plays in her life. She describes Lillian’s good mood as “Mama’s sunny weather” and says trying to change Mama’s moods is like “asking a huge storm to simmer down when it wants to roar across the city and knock down trees” (25, 45). Sissy’s father says of Lake Michigan, “I enjoy it when it’s in this mood, playing tag with the shore but not smashing down like it’s angry” (37). Such personification, which Power uses often, imbues nature with a spirit and personality; the metaphors comparing Lillian to weather patterns similarly emphasize the importance of a connection to nature in Dakhóta culture and thus develop the theme of Ancestral Connections and Indigenous Traditions as Sources of Healing and Resilience.
As a historical fiction novel, A Council of Dolls relies on setting to demonstrate how important events have influenced its characters and shaped cultures over time. The book’s nonlinear structure informs its depiction of this. Parts 1 through 3 occur in reverse chronological order; they go backward in time, so from a narrative perspective, the cause-and-effect relationship between events is inverted. Part 1, set in Chicago in the 1960s, depicts outcomes that foreshadow the events that caused them. Lillian’s mood swings and anger stem, at least in part, from traumatic events in her youth that are revealed in Part 2, like being forced to attend boarding schools where abusive nuns attempted to erase her cultural heritage. Part 1 alludes to several other historic events and figures that have shaped Lillian and Sissy’s experiences, such as Sitting Bull and the Oahe Dam project. The novel’s structure thus supports its exploration of The Enduring Impact of Historical Injustices on Indigenous Americans by centering the trauma itself.
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