Title & author
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones
Synopsis
In Cherie Jones’s debut novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, Jones lays bare the impact structural inequalities have–and don’t have—on different people, whether that be because of their gender, race, and/or class. By crafting a narrative that centers on Lala, a mother in an abusive relationship, and using it to subtly amplify lessons scholars have been teaching for decades, Jones makes clear that structural racism cannot fully be combatted until those institutions are rebuilt to enable safety and support for everyone.
Who should read this book
Fans of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer and Celestial Bodies
What we’re thinking about
The systems in place that are meant to protect, but really oppress
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, sexism
Structural oppression is labeled as “structural” for a reason: it’s rooted in our societal practices and institutions, amplifying white supremacy and patriarchal values. In Cherie Jones’s debut novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Little Brown, 2021), Jones lays bare the impact structural inequalities have–and don’t have—on different people, whether that be because of their gender, race, and/or class. By crafting a narrative that centers on Lala, a mother in an abusive relationship, and using it to subtly amplify lessons scholars have been teaching for decades, Jones makes clear that structural racism cannot fully be combatted until those institutions are rebuilt to enable safety and support for everyone.
Born and raised in Barbados, Lala moves out of her grandmother Wilma’s home at a younger age, marrying her husband Adan largely in part to escape Wilma’s restrictive oversight. Not long after, Adan turns abusive, forcing Lala to comply with his rules; she knows “what he will do if [she] don’t” (Jones, 29). His abuse is both physical and emotional, beating her, verbally abusing her, and stealing from her. The house they live in is “weather-beaten” and “splintered,” just down the beach from “the big houses” with “impenetrable wooden gates, unscalable walls, and hedges higher than her grasp extends” (8-9). As wealthy white individuals begin to vacation in Baxter’s Beach, the town changes, especially as they put an emphasis on security through not only the designs of their vacation homes, but also their reliance on policing.
From the opening pages, Jones paints a stark difference in wealth between Lala and Adan and those that occupy the large homes of Baxter’s Beach, and from this depiction emerges a full world tainted by structural oppression and the subsequent divides. Lala hides her money in case “ever presented with a justifiable emergency,” such as leaving Adan and his abusive control (95). Yet when she goes to remove the money from its hiding spot, “it must be a sudden blindness, because it cannot be that the money is not there. Or there. Or there,” (95). And without this money, this security to leave and establish herself elsewhere, “where can she run to, now” other than “back to where she came from?” (137). She cannot “call the police, it will just draw more attention” (137). There is no escape for Lala in a world that has created structural barriers to keep her financially dependent upon the man abusing her and afraid to talk to those authority figures supposedly meant to keep her safe.
Jones also introduces us to Mira, a woman who lives in one of the large homes on Baxter’s Beach. Lala’s lack of escape is in stark comparison to Mira’s ability to leave whenever she so desires. After her husband Peter is killed, Mira knows she “cannot stay here but [she] cannot leave Peter here alone” (33). Mira “wants the regimen of...the gym and the salon and the shopping and parties and dinners” that she and Peter were used to (34). Despite Mira not feeling like she can leave until Peter’s death is brought to justice, and despite her not having the same life to return to, Mira has the means to leave at any point and start anew. She, unlike Lala, can leave and create a new life for herself. And she has a support system: her mother, sister-in-law, and friends all offer to help.
Still, somehow under it all, it’s clear to those from Baxter’s Beach that “Mira Whalen is really just a local who married a wealthy white tourist” (34). Born to a white mother and Black father, Mira marries into money, enabling her to have a life that societal inequalities attempt to prevent. And, yes, this does afford her an amount of privilege that Lala and many others at Baxter’s Beach do not have. But at the same time, Jones makes clear that Mira’s privilege is very much not her own, rather a product of her “crowning achievement” of “becoming a wealthy man’s wife” (57).
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is full of hard-to-swallow events and truths, so beautifully complimented by Jones’s powerful, descriptive imagery. She crafts the events of Baxter’s Beach as the real world, and not as a separate one from the one in which we live, not as a story to “escape” into. And the structural inequalities she lays bare between the contrasting opportunities for Lala and Mira are even further emphasized by the intergenerational plotlines. “Of course she did not leave him,” reflects Lala’s grandmother. “What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other? Had her own mother not tolerated such beatings?” (133). One might not help but be reminded of Hood Feminism when reading this story and the societal and political actions Kendall outlines as necessary for getting women out of systemic and abusive situations. From survivor counseling, to food and housing support, to true child care, what would Lala’s escape have been like if she had access to such resources? And what about her mother? Wilma? Wilma’s mother?
“In those tunnels, you understand that you do not learn to love a man, because for the right man there is no need for the learning, the love is the most natural thing in the world. You understand that if you must learn to love a man, he is probably not the man you should be loving.”
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How do the differing plotlines for Mira and Lala shape our reading of the story?
The novel begins with the one-armed sister’s folktale. What role did you take this tale to play throughout the story?
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