Heart Berries

Mailhot tells the story of her life in brief, lyrical snippets that exist outside time and space. She begins by saying “my story was maltreated” (1) and proceeds to describe the mistreatment of her body and her story by men who see her story, which depicts incredible pain, as a “solicitation” (1), or a way of using pity to ask for hand-outs. Mailhot begins to share her stories with women. She writes about the Indian condition—a deep grief and drive for survival. Most of her memories revolve around the life and death of her grandmother, a nursery teacher who dewormed Indian children on the reservation using laxatives. After she dies, Mailhot’s mother calls in psychics to exorcise Mailhot’s grief and cure her tuberculosis. Mailhot lies about communing with the spirit of her grandmother. She foreshadows the pain of leaving the reservation with glimpses into her young adult life: she marries as a teenager, her husband Vito takes her first son Isadore after a battle in court, and she gives birth to another boy, Isaiah, in the same month as the custody trial. She leaves the reservation soon after and begins to take writing courses.