Review by Deborah Locke
(Spoilers are included in this review.)
Morgan Talty (Penobscot Nation) in “Fire Exit,” (Tin House Publishing 2024) weaves together a compelling story about these: blood quantum on reservations, parenting, truth versus lies, addiction, and more. The reader learns that there can be a steep price for telling the whole truth about lineage, yet to hold back a truth may create an insurmountable burden.
The protagonist, Charles Lamosway, is non-Indian and acts as story narrator. He was raised in reservation housing by his mother Louise and by a native stepfather, Fredrick. Fredrick is a wonderful father to his stepson –and lovingly raises Charles as his own. His wife, Louise, is depressed through most of her life and shows signs of dementia. They live on the Penobscot Reservation in Maine.
Later Charles impregnates Mary, who is Penobscot and has the minimum tribal blood quantum. That means their child will be viewed by the tribe as non-Indian and will be granted no tribal benefits. Mary convinces Charles to let a Penobscot man, Roger, raise the baby, so the baby is accepted into the tribe. She is named Elizabeth.
That’s the backstory. Charles matures and goes on to obsess about his daughter Elizabeth who lives with her parents across a river and within view of Charles’ home. He spends decades striving to get a mere glimpse of the girl, all the while pretending to be busy with projects in the yard.
The line between his avid interest in the girl and actual stalking is thin and troubling. Just what is it with this guy with no life of his own — and his non-stop regret for missing out on raising Elizabeth as her biological father? He wanted to marry Louise and raise Elizabeth and have more children, but Louise gave more weight to her daughter’s ability to get tribal benefits. Charles spends massive amounts of energy ruminating on why the girl should know who her biological father is, so much obsession that you know that truth telling is inevitable. And what is the fallout from truth? Who will it harm or help? Dear reader, humans have asked that question since human thought first developed.
Additionally, humans have long contemplated blood ties and family relationships. Charles acknowledges that Roger is a wonderful father to Elizabeth — loving, protective and generous. Charles says:
“Blood matters only enough to keep us alive. Elizabeth was Roger’s daughter in the same way I was Fredrick’s son, and I knew deep down he was as good to her as Fredrick had been to me.”
Yet that genetic bond weighed Charles down the way a water drip wears away a rock. To the above, he adds “I saw her as mine, as part of me…The only thing I could be certain about was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can’t be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” Cleaning the stain would be a self-erasure, “no different from the ways I’ve seen Native people erase their own kind.”
This slim novel (225 pages) lays bare the essence of blood quantum-based membership, cultural and historical identity, parental love, and more. The fact that Charles is white adds a unique twist. He knows that he’s within close proximity of the Penobscot, but he will never be of them. Charles says:
“I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what is was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being. We’re all alike, even when we’re not.”
Charles also showed a streak for caregiving, so much that he was sometimes mistaken for a medical professional. Through about the last third of the book, his mother slowly sank into dementia. With amazing patience, Charles went to extraordinary measures to care for her, while also providing support for his alcoholic friend, Bobby.
In the end it’s the voice of a young person who points Charles in a healthier direction. Elizabeth tells her biological father to start to take care of himself for a change. “You should stop worrying about me and start worrying about yourself,” she said.
This is not to say that the book tidily and happily wraps up and everyone goes home to a log fire and dinner. The questions Talty poses about fallout from truth, no matter how painful or painless that truth, aren’t easily answered.
