Cherie Jones: Author of "How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House" Discusses Learned Behavior, Violence and Being Surprised By Our Characters
Cherie Jones’ debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, is a heartbreaking yet compelling story of trauma felt generation after generation. Set on a fictional strip of Caribbean shore called Baxter's Beach in the town of Paradise, we meet Lala as she is running down the beach in search of her husband who has just shot a man while trying to rob him, as she is about to give birth to their first child. From there the novel moves among the perspectives of several characters, including Mira Whalen, the widow of the murdered man, Lala’s grandmother, Wilma, and Tone, a childhood friend of Lala and also partners in crime with her husband, Adan. Through these stories, we see a web being weaved consisting of intergenerational violence and trauma that is inherited and perpetuated towards the women on the island. Jones's beautiful prose creates a sad and moving portrait of learned behavior, class, race, and what it means to love when all you have known is violence.
I spoke with Cherie over the phone where we discussed this learned behavior, violence against women, and how as the writer we can still be surprised by our characters.
Kailey Brennan: I’d love to start and ask what sparked the initial idea for your novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House?
Cherie Jones: I was traveling home from work on the bus. I was working in the UK at the time. It was pretty late in the evening and cold outside. A character just popped into my head and starting to talk to me and tell me bits of her story at that point in time. What I was hearing or what I was seeing in my mind's eye was the scene when Baby falls and eventually dies. I just felt a really strong compulsion to write the story. I remember going home when I got off the bus and going into the house and dealing with the kids and so on. And when I finally put them to bed, I was so relieved to have the opportunity just to sit down and work on just getting out what I had heard on the bus. I did that right through to the following morning. My writing process is less of having an idea. Or I don't write to a theme like well, I want to write a story about domestic violence or intimate partner violence. It doesn't happen like that. I just hear a story. I hear a character telling me a few lines from a story. I'll see something in my mind. And then that initial process of writing it down is just trying to understand what it is I'm seeing or hearing and getting those details down. So that would be the initial inspiration. After it was really about asking the right questions and understanding what the real story was because up to that point in time, the character that spoke to me the most was Lala. So yeah, after it was about crafting the full story, and then it was about editing once I had a good understanding of what the story was and how I wanted to tell it, what techniques I felt would be useful in telling it. And then taking everyone else out that wouldn’t contribute to that.
KB: This novel is laced with violence throughout, particularly towards women. Lala understands marriage to be full of violence since that is what her mother and her grandmother experienced, thus that is what she has known. I’m interested in this generational trauma. Why was this something you wanted to explore?
CJ: First of all, I wanted to explore it because I felt it was necessary to the story that I was telling. So in writing about Lala, I had to sort of widen the lens of the whole bit and look at who her mother was and what she was like and how her choices and experiences and understanding of social norms and requirements, especially for women, how they would have influenced her own behavior. And also how they express love to the men in their lives and each other and how that then influences Lala’s understanding of herself and therefore her response to trauma.
Because for me, and certainly growing up, there are things that children understand by osmosis almost and by observation. They're not explicitly taught, but a child will just observe something that repeatedly happens around him or her and understand that to be the norm or the expectation. So it was important for me to establish how the trauma that these women had themselves experience would have helped to lead to the choices that they made, the choices that they expected Lala to meet, and then the choices that she actually made for herself in similar traumatic circumstances. An easy example I can think of is when Esme goes running back to Wilma when she has one of these episodes with Rainsford and Wilma kind of says to her, well, you know, you made your bed, so you're going to have to lay in it. And that is something that I've personally observed with older women that I know. These are some of the expectations, certainly as it relates to intimate partner violence in this part of the world. Unfortunately for some older women, that would be an expectation. This is a part of married life or a grownup woman's experience. And therefore there would be an expectation perhaps that Lala would understand and accept some of those occurrences as natural in her own life.
KB: Yeah. That actually ties into my next question for you. The story grapples with the question, how do you learn to love a man? That question seems unanswerable or very subjective according to one’s experience. As the reader, it felt like most of the men in the story were completely unlovable. Is this another result of generational trauma?
CJ: So I think the question of having to learn to love a man is linked to that whole issue of generational trauma is that implied in the question is that there's some particular way to love correctly, that applies to all men, which absolutely isn't true. But within the parameters of the society, in which these women live, they are certain expectations when it comes to men and interacting with men in a loving relationship and what women should expect in that type of relationship. There is also this understanding, particularly for this family of women, that they are at fault if men express rage against them in the form of violence. Wilma expects that and relates that story to the policeman and says she prays not for the women in a situation like that, but for the men. So it's almost as if there's this acceptance of a fault. And therefore when Lala asked that question in chapter 25, it's almost as if she saying, well, obviously I'm doing this the wrong way. How do I learn to do this? And by the end of that chapter, to me, she comes to the realization, that perhaps there isn't any one right way to love all men, but certainly, for the right man for her, she doesn't need to learn to love that person. Love just occurs naturally.
So I think that is one of the parts of the book, in which on reflection, Lala perhaps is growing to understand herself a lot better and to kind of be her way out of the circumstances that she's found herself in simply because previously she would have subscribed to some of those beliefs and some of those norms and some of those rules for women. So I think that really is the answer to the question. And I think that is one of the points in the novel when, on reflection, Lala understands that her energy is misdirected in trying to learn to love Adan.
KB: The women in this novel have very little agency in their lives and at times as the reader, it felt frustrating. I wanted to help them. Did you feel this way writing these women? Was there a character you felt more drawn to than others? I know you mentioned that Lala was their first voice, but if there was any other character you felt really drawn to when writing?
CJ: Oh, yes. So I'll answer the last question first. Tone actually didn't have a part in early drafts of the novel. When I started writing this story when it first assumed novel form, in early drafts believe it or not Tone wasn't there. The novel was focused on Mira and Marla, but Tone kind of popped out of nowhere.
I was so drawn to him that by the time I really started working on him and writing him into the novel, he just assumed a much higher level of importance as a character than he had at the beginning. I felt a very high level of compassion and empathy for him. I was rooting for him. I wanted to see him do really well. I just really, really grew to like him as a character.
In terms of whether it was difficult writing about women without agency and whether I was frustrated by that - there were some points in the story when I thought, for goodness sake. I think maybe people might be surprised to understand that I did have those moments too. For example, with the Queen of Sheba. When I started writing her, I didn't actually know that there was going to be that rape scene with Sergeant Beckles. And at the beginning of the novel, she's one of the people on the beach searching for Baby, and she's sort of very feisty. Forgetting about what she's doing, she is demonstrating some level of agency, in terms of how she's using her body to achieve some of the things that she dreams of. Then when I got to that point and I recognize what was going to happen, I thought, Oh my gosh. Even the Queen of Sheba is going to be going through something like this. Yet it was clear to me that that was exactly what needed to happen, and that in fact, although in some aspects of her life, she demonstrated a certain level of power, she was also very, very vulnerable. There was this exchange with Sergeant Beckles where they would kind of make sure she wasn't arrested and she'd be allowed to walk the beach and get clients and therefore get money. But of course, he then becomes a little more possessive and you see that power just being eroded. So it was frustrating for me, but I just felt that that was authentic. That was what was happening in this story. So I had to write it. In writing it, I couldn't look away. And it was very wrenching at times and sometimes I had to just put it down and come back to it.
So it was frustrating, but it was also absolutely necessary. I did feel as if I had a little bit of power, at least in terms of how I delivered this story. So even if I had to write about things that happened, that was frustrating for these women or demonstrated a lack of agency, a lack of a voice or some other form of disempowerment or disadvantage, I at least have the choice in terms of how I portrayed that and how I relayed that. That was a small comfort, but it was there. It counted for something.
KB: That’s so interesting that Tone came so much later since he is such a huge part of the story.
CJ: Yes, he is. When I first met Tone, it was actually because I had Lala breeding the hair of this American woman on the beach and the American woman was actually one of my favorite characters. I was writing the scene and the American woman had this lover who worked on the beach and operated jet skis. And she paid him for his services, which does happen sometimes in the Caribbean. I just wrote this scene where Lala was braiding this woman's hair and up comes the lover and he's talking to her about different things. And he just kinda looked at that.
And her response to him surprised me in the story as I received it. And that made me do some digging and then I kind of recognize, okay there's a history to these two people. The more I went into that, and the more I bought into Tone as a character and the more that I loved him. So yeah, he wasn't there initially, but when he was, he was a secret that Lala even kept from me. He was a joy to write.
Cherie S.A. Jones was born in 1974. She received a LL.B degree from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 1995, a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine, Trinidad in 1997 and was admitted to the Bar in Barbados in October 1997. Cherie won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 1999. She won both the Archie Markham Award and the A.M. Heath Prize at Sheffield Hallam in the UK. A collection of interconnected stories set in a different small community in Barbados won a third prize at the Frank Collymore Endowment Awards in 2016. She still works as a lawyer, in addition to her writing.
