Commentary: Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
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"For seven years, from 1999 to 2006, I worked in social services, doing three different jobs, all of which involved working with youth who were on the fringes of collapse, both mentally and physically... Many of them simply felt like nobody listened. They felt like nobody cared. Part of Sequoyah's voice grew out of the many voices I heard from youth who were struggling with their emotional pain, with finding their home, and with their identity in terms of both race and gender... The novel is often described as 'dark,' but there are dark lives all around us."-- Brandon Hobson
I felt a profound sense of emptiness reading Hobson's Where the Dead Sit Talking. And it is the first book I've ever read that saw the emptiness within myself, acknowledged it, and walked with me in it. Like the parts of myself that are empty and lonely found someone else to be empty and lonely with-- someone who knew just how to be with me, like I am with myself.
Where the Dead Sit Talking captures a search for home. Sequoyah, a Cherokee teenager, exists between shelters, between foster families, as his mother struggles to escape drug addiction and abusive relationships. They leave Cherokee county, IL-- a place Sequoyah seems to identify as home in his mind, referring back to it often as he moves farther and farther away. But, before long, Sequoyah's mother is taken from him when she is sent to prison. His social worker, Liz, brings Sequoyah to a new foster family in the rural countryside of Oklahoma. The Troutts are quiet but genuine and Sequoyah meets their other two foster kids, George and Rosemary. Rosemary is Kiowa and the shared bond of being Indigenous connects Sequoyah and Rosemary in an intimate relationship, filled with love, sadness, and violence. Sequoyah does not feel a sexual attraction to Rosemary, but he longs to be near her, to know her, and, also, to be her.
He wants to protect Rosemary from the world, especially from the odd rural town they live in, where rumors of satanic rituals float in the air and child prostitution appears like a ghost, suddenly there one minute and then gone the next. Such mysteries infest this story.
Like watching Twin Peaks, this read is terribly eerie. Images of violence abound, sometimes literal and other times dream-like, as if from another world. Sequoyah hears a story from a local about his foster father. When Mr. Troutt was a boy, there was a hawk that haunted the town. It would swoop down from the sky, flash its gigantic talons, and hurt little children. One day, it grabbed hold of Mr. Troutt's sister, digging into her scalp. His father went hunting for the hawk, to rid the town of its presence. We don't find out what happened to the hawk, or Mr. Troutt's sister. The uneasy mystery hangs in the air around us like smoke from an unknown source. But for all the mysteries, for all the eerieness, this book was, to me, much more about healing.
Sequoyah's bizarre habits and thoughts often led me to wonder if he was going to lash out, to hurt someone, to kill someone, or to hurt himself. I dreaded it, waiting for it, expecting it. But the seemingly inevitable turn never came. After a traumatic incident that happens in the house, Sequoyah actually goes to a neurological center for tests and comes away better understanding himself, his triggers, and how the stress from his traumas impacts him in real life. I found this resolution to be deeply comforting. All too often, kids with trauma are depicted in stories to be so broken that you almost expect them to resort to violence and to become the villain of some Netflix murder show. It was a relief and a much-needed breath of fresh air to see a child with trauma treated as a human being-- broken, yes, but not evil. Just in need of care.
I think I'm not alone to say that I associate home with care. Home, for me, has always been wherever I felt safe, wherever felt careful with me in it. Care-- being around adults who aren't afraid of you, but who instead listen and are present in the most real sense of the word. Care-- being able to be alone when you need it without being made to feel guilty. Care-- being treated when you suddenly feel sick and lost, rather than ignored. All of these examples of care are present in Sequoyah's life at the Troutt's. And I believe that's what makes it home.