Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, and: Off-Season City Pipe (review)

Reviewed by: Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, and: Off-Season City Pipe Ellen Arnold Allison Adelle Hedge Coke . Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 198 pp. Cloth, $24.95. ———Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Off-Season City Pipe. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005. 84 pp. Paper, $14.00. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Eastern Tsa la gi (Cherokee), Huron, French Canadian, and Portuguese descent, grew up in Texas, North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. The blonde, light-skinned daughter of a Cherokee/Huron father and a white mother, Hedge Coke's marginalization as a mixed-blood was compounded by her status as an outsider in her own family. The middle child between an older sister and a younger brother, Allison was scapegoated as the "extra girl" and the "bad child" by her severely schizophrenic mother. She left home at thirteen, married at fifteen. By her midtwenties, she had divorced and remarried, borne two children, and labored as a sharecropper, a horse trainer, [End Page 344] a packer in a cracker factory, a fisherman, and as one of North Carolina's first female construction workers. Forced to flee with her sons for their lives from her second husband's violent abuse, she entered what she terms an "exile" from her North Carolina homeland that lasted for over two decades. Eventually earning her MFA in writing from Vermont College, Hedge Coke went on to work as a community activist, songwriter, playwright, director, poet, photographer, and teacher in California, New Mexico, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and New York; most recently she has joined the Writing and Native Studies faculty at Northern Michigan University. But Hedge Coke's writing and identity have remained centered in the South—in the North Carolina piedmont farmlands and coastal waters where she came of age, in the mountains of Qualla Boundary, the ancestral Eastern Cherokee homeland that provided sanctuary and sustenance in the midst of turmoil, and in the Southern working-class experience. Hedge Coke's first book of poems and winner of the American Book Award, Dog Road Woman (1997), is a furiously paced autobiographical collection that chronicles the struggle to survive emotional and physical abuse, rape, and drug and alcohol addiction. At the same time, it celebrates the fierce spirit of resistance, the physical strength and imagination, and the relationships and heritage that enable her personal re-creation. For example, in the title poem, the poet learns to quilt from a ninety-two-year-old Cherokee woman, who also . . . taught me to butcher without waste and who spun stories on your card whenever I would listen, we fashioned stars. (13) The publication of Hedge Coke's 2004 memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, and her second poetry collection, Off-Season City Pipe, in 2005, coincide with her first return visits to North Carolina in more than twenty years and carry her deeper into both personal and ancestral memories. Hedge Coke's memoir extends Dog Road Woman's commitment to witness to unnamed traumas and to empower those who suffer. Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is a head-on, often brutal, but riveting account of a childhood "forged schizophrenically" (23) and a harrowing coming-of-age. The security and continuity her father tried to provide his three children through his storytelling, homemaking skills, and steadfast loyalty to his ill wife were constantly buffeted by the "cyclone" winds of her mother's insanity—her ongoing war with the "buggers" who continuously threatened her, raped her with radio waves, and steered her [End Page 345] car off the road and into the paths of oncoming vehicles with her children in the back seat. What Hedge Coke's father constructed, her mother took apart (2). In unflinching detail Hedge Coke describes the violence and indignities of her mother's numerous hospitalizations and electroshock treatments; the periodic removal of the children by social service agencies, despite their father's presence; the horror of her teenage brother's attempted self-immolation and his physical abuse of both Hedge Coke and their mother; and numerous near-death experiences from beatings and accidents that ushered her into young adulthood. Yet, Hedge Coke never lapses into self...

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