Heart Berries

“The man I had been conditioning was not happy with me. He knew something was wrong, and that’s when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.” 

Mailhot’s early depictions of her love as conditioning and crisis speak to the chaos of her love life, and the pain she experiences in relationships. Here she talks specifically about her relationship with Casey, which later led her to collapse into a mental breakdown. 

“Sometimes grief is a nothing feeling.” 

Mailhot describes the numbness of depression as she grieves the many losses of her life. The nothingness she feels returns again and again in the collection as she struggles with suicidal ideation. 

“I’m going to die an Indian death. I want to lay my neck on the cool steel alloy of the train.” 

Mailhot frequently talks about an Indian death, which is one that is violent, unnecessary, and comes too soon. It may or may not be self-inflicted. Her father dies an Indian death when he is beaten in a hotel over a cigarette, and she anticipates this kind of death for herself. 

“You’re so economic with your language and your time.”

Mailhot both admires and criticizes Casey in this passage for being “economic with [his] language.” She has already established herself as a lyric storyteller, someone who is not economic with anything, particularly language. She wants to be more like Casey, but also has disdain for his cold rationality and lack of feeling. 

“I didn’t say that my mother had spent her life waiting for service. I waited with her in cafés for an order of french fries or something small we could afford. White women didn’t greet her or consider our time.”

Mailhot speaks of the small injustices she and her mother faced as indigenous women in this passage. She hides these small moments from Casey, but they represent a deeper pain—a feeling of alienation, and a lack of courtesy. The fact that their time was not valuable speaks to a greater injustice that Mailhot can only partially convey.

“In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution.” 

While in the hospital, Mailhot thinks about the way her mental health is depicted as a problem that the doctors and therapists want to solve. She addresses the inconsistencies in how Western medicine and indigenous culture portray and manage pain. She comes to terms with pain, she doesn’t solve it. It can’t be solved, only accepted. 

“I wrote like I had something to prove to you.” 

Mailhot writes sentences like this one frequently, addressed to her lover Casey. She thinks of writing as a way to prove herself deserving of her lover—if her words are good enough, she is good enough. This is one of the many ways she tries to prove herself to him.

“I was polite enough, and considerate enough, to hurt myself like a secret.” 

What Mailhot considers polite here is hiding her own pain, including self-mutilation and severe symptoms of depression. She sees hiding this pain as a courtesy to others, who have rejected her because of it. She hides her mental illness and its symptoms from Casey often, to avoid him categorizing her as a burden. 

“It was polarizing to be told there was a diagnosis for the behaviors I felt justified in having. And then, I knew some part of my disease was spiritual or inherited.”

Mailhot struggles with her diagnosis, particularly when her symptoms of bipolar return during her pregnancy. She feels like her behaviors are valid, while others see them as a repercussion of her mental illness. She can see a spiritual inheritance and trajectory for her illness while non-Natives cannot. 

“She taught me that I didn’t own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don’t own our mothers. We don’t own our bodies or our land—maybe I’m unsure. We become the land when we are buried in.” 

Mailhot writes about her mother here. She discusses the lesson her mother taught her about ownership, in life and in death. Mailhot considers this lesson as a mother, an adult woman, and a lover. While Mailhot wants to possess things, her mother’s lesson persists.

“I realized, after looking at my silhouette, seeing our small person expanding my reflection, that pain didn’t burden me. Trying to forget damaged me the most.” 

In this passage, Mailhot writes about being a mother and lessons she learned from pain. She reconciles the fact that while she has experienced great trauma, avoiding trauma has caused her more pain than the event itself. 

“It is my politic to write the humanity in my characters, and subvert the stereotypes. Isn’t that my duty as an Indian writer? But what part of him was subversion?” 

In this passage, Mailhot tries to write about her father and struggles to depict him as something other than a drunken Indian stereotype. But in many ways, he was that stereotype. She thinks about her role as an Indian writer, and what it means to depict others in her culture both truthfully and with humanity. 

“So much of the world shames me.” 

Mailhot writes often about shame, but in this passage, she is thinking about the overwhelming way that not just one person, but an entire world, shames her. There are many reasons for her shame and alienation—womanhood, her indigenous heritage, her mental illness, her trauma. She feels at odds with the world, which tries to fit her in a box that she can’t shrink to fill. 

“Little ghosts don’t carry little wounds. I think our pain expands the longer we’re neglected.” 

Mailhot reflects on her childhood self in this passage, calling herself and other traumatized children ‘little ghosts.’ Though their bodies are small, the pain of these neglected children is great. She feels that this expanding pain and this neglect has shaped her. 

“The other women, white women, were treated like good friends. I could have used that.” 

Mailhot writes about Casey in this passage. She thinks about his affairs and flings with White women, and how those women were offered a kind of acceptance and friendship she was not. She resents Casey for thinking of those women as valuable enough to respect, when she is only valuable enough to love. 

“White women have always made me feel inferior, but I don’t think you know how much.” 

Mailhot addresses this note to Casey to explain her feelings of inferiority around White women. She compares herself to a squaw in these passages—a dirty, sexualized Indian woman. Her inferiority plagues her and is made worse by Casey’s affairs.

“I have dormant fluid in my body, every woman does. I don’t know if I am a cavern or a river.” 

Here, Mailhot writes metaphorically about the grief of women. She describes her body as full of fluid, or tears, something that other women know well. Her capacity for grief is much greater, in her mind, than the capacity of men, for whom tears don’t come so easily. 

“He wanted me to know that I was good and holy, but I didn’t think that my body was a universe.” 

Mailhot is given the name Little Mountain Woman by her chief, but in this passage, she is uncertain about his declaration. He calls her “good and holy,” but she doubts him. She does not find her body valuable and can’t see the strength that he sees. Her use of past tense here speaks to the fact that while she didn’t see her body as a universe then, she is beginning to understand that as an adult. 

“Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers.” 

Mailhot reflects often on the power of narrative to make the world. This comes from her culture, and she insists on it as a way of being and knowing the world. Here, she thinks about the creation story as the world spoken into being. The power of words is apparent for Mailhot, who sees language as the foundation of the universe. 

“My mother’s looming spirit guides me some days, telling me that nothing is too ugly for this world. I am not too ugly for this world.” 

In this passage, Mailhot is coming to terms with a repressed memory of sexual abuse. She recalls her mother’s reassurance that “nothing is too ugly for this world” to soothe herself. She repeats it here to affirm for herself that despite trauma, she is valuable. 

“I remember that motherhood is mostly bearing shame to dress my children, to feed them, and to spare them the things I wasn’t spared.” 

For Mailhot, motherhood is full of pain. In this passage, she recalls picking lice from her son’s hair by hand because the doctor wouldn’t believe her when she showed him their eggs. She thinks about the shame of this act, and what she gives of herself to her children to spare them pain. She describes motherhood as self-sacrificing pain, made more poignant because she experienced much of that same pain as a child. 

“Our boys, their compassion to will away inherited sorrow, it’s what makes them good and mine and Indian.” 

Mailhot has biracial children, and she thinks about how they belong to her culture despite their mixed race in this passage. She considers her boys’ relationship to inherited sorrow, or trauma, and how they are persistent in the face of pain. She sees this as a distinctly Indian trait, one she gave to them. 

“Had I not been born and cultivated in this history, I wonder how dim and dumb my life would be. I feel fortunate with this education, and all these horrors, and you.”

In the penultimate essay of her collection, Mailhot thinks about pain and the education it offers. We learn from pain. In this passage, she is grateful for the “horrors” she experienced because it gave her a full and bright life.