American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
I love reading fiction because it portrays emotional truth that non-fiction can never convey. Sometimes that truth is almost too overwhelming — as it was for me when I began reading this remarkable book a couple of years back. Deeply shocked by the opening scene, I put the book down, but kept in on my shelf, intuiting that one day I’d pick it up and finish.
As it turned out, the right time arrived and I read the novel in the last couple of days. Fascinatingly, this story dovetailed something novelist Elif Shafak said in an interview about her latest book. Doris Lessing, she told her interviewer, said the job of writers was to reflect what had happened in the past.
But, she feels, the era we’re in makes it urgent for stories to be told about our moment in history. Shafak says too that it is a mistake to try to separate the contemporary world’s many problems. Water shortage, climate change, violence against women, and the erosion of democratic government are deeply intertwined, and they concern all of us.
It’s also time to break down the “glass walls” in the world of publishing, where women are expected to write the light, the domestic, the romantic, while male writers continue to control the serious fields of ideas.
This gripping novel by Jeanine Cummins is filled with profound ideas and nuanced emotion. The opening action is the murder of a Mexican journalist by one of the cartels. His widow Lydia knows that “fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice.”
She is also aware that the previous year, “Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone.” Thus, she is convinced that her husband’s murder will go unpunished. “There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication.” Moreover, she and her ten-year-old son Luca are in deadly danger from her husband’s killer, and she must get them away.
The threat comes from Javier, el jefe of the cartel that controls Acapulco, with tentacles that reach across Guerrero and beyond. Javier aka La Lechuza is “not flashy, gregarious, or even particularly charismatic.” But like others of his kind, he is “shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional…a mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman.”
As mother and son flee for their lives toward el norte, they must give up the comfortable lives they lived and risk everything. Forced to confront obstacles after obstacle, Lydia gradually surrenders the old familiar version of herself. In the struggle to survive, she finds the strength to face heretofore unknown aspects of her psyche.
During a brief respite with others at the Casa de Migrante, a priest warns them of the dangers that lie ahead, telling them the path is only for those who have no other choice. “Everything is working against you,” he tells them. “Some of you will fall from the trains. Many will die. Many, many of you will be kidnapped, tortured, trafficked or ransomed…Every single one of you will be robbed” and “only one in three will make it to your destination alive.” Lydia is crushed by the speech, but others, including her son Luca, take it as a challenge, a pep talk.
On their grueling journey north, Lydia and Luca bond with fellow migrants who teach them how to board the train without getting killed. The teenage sisters are fleeing from Honduras. Soledad, at sixteen, “wears baggy clothing and an intense scowl in a failing effort to suppress” the “calamitous beauty” that invited the violent attentions of cartel man Ivan in their home country. In an effort to protect her younger sister from his predation, Soledad followed Ivan “like a Zombie magnet,” and twice saw him shoot people in the back of the head. Now, in their worst moments, Rebeca, two years younger than Soledad, turns to Luca. This sharing of vulnerability helps keep him strong. At the same time, he is aware that he himself “remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside.”
With many miles already behind them, Soledad and Rebeca have learned how to survive. When the illegal passengers descend from the roof of the stopped train at San Miguel de Allende, the girls lead the way toward clean and crowded places and persuade a man in a restaurant to give them a hot meal. Moving toward the relative safety of the plaza central, they pass “a stature of an angel attacking somebody with a sword, and the daylight descends from pink to purple.”
Cummins allows characters and readers alike to rest while she briefly sketches the beauty of the Plaza Principal. As the travelers “duck beneath the portico of a cinnamon-coloured building,” Luca “lets go of Mami’s hand and leans his pack against a wall behind him to watch the people eating and drinking, chatting and laughing. Three mariachi bands are playing, and some strange trees form “a thick spongy grass ceiling,” while the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcangel rises “like a fairy palace,” forming “a stunning silhouette against the sky.”
Among the most terrible losses faced by the migrants is trust. Even Lydia, who has never been the victim of sexual violence, “feels noticed by every single man they see.” The few women migrants, she realizes, “represent something to these men”—home or salvation or prey or reward money.” When she meets the coyote El Chacal, who is to lead them through the Sonoran desert to the United States, she feels unable to trust him, even though she knows she has no choice.
The fleeing migrants are gradually stitched together by complex emotions including guilt and regret. The bonds of trauma form as like veterans of a war, they share an indescribable experience. “Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the fear, grief and fatigue that eat at them.” Along with their collective determination to press on, this “solders them together so they feel like an almost-family.” When they witness a man fall from the moving train as he tries to jump aboard, Lydia dons “the fierce armour of deceit" and tells her worried son the fallen man will be fine.
Lydia is unprepared for how the threats keep changing. “She thought that here in el norte, she’d have to worry more about the Border Patrol, about the possibility of Luca being taken from her, and less about random men with guns enforcing their own decrees.” She is painfully aware that “Whatever their uniforms, their accents, their faces, no importa…anyone they encounter here, in this wild, desolate place, would mean the end.” She fights off speculation about whether it would be worse “to get caught by the estadounidenses, who would take Luca from her,” or “the mexicanos, who would return her and her son to Javier.”
At one moment, the group sits in shadow with El Chacal training his binoculars on a US Border Patrol agent, while the “agent trains his own military-grade binonculars back toward them,” obliging them to remain utterly still to avoid being noticed. A resourceful child, Luca invokes an internal meditation. “We are invisible…We are desert plants. We are rocks.” Calling upon his imagination, “He grows into the earth,” makes his body “a slab of native stone.”
For her part, Lydia prays for the feet of the walkers. “Dear God, keep them strong and unblistered.” And crucially, before the journey ends, she speaks to her persecutor through the unlikely medium of a cell phone, calling him to account for what he has done.
This book touched me deeply, teaching me, as all good stories must, many things I did not know except in the most general way. The Author’s note offered me an extra gift. Even this storyteller, sharing a tale of such towering contemporary importance, felt some uncertainty about her ability to tell it.
“I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book,” she told someone she was interviewing. Her doubts echoes my own, and this gave me courage and comfort. God willing, I too will finish my novels, send them out into the world.