A Story of Depth and Delicacy
A Review of
High Hawk: A Novel
Amy Frykholm
Paperback: U of Iowa Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Maryanne Hannan
The introspective, spiritually adrift, cast aside Roman Catholic priest has been the protagonist of at least two remarkable 20th century novels (Graham Greene and Georges Bernanos, authors). Now, add that lonely figure to a moribund parish on a fictional South Dakota reservation, Windy Creek, in an era in the 1970s and early 1980s when the institutional church was overlooking, even sanctioning, crimes committed in mission schools against children and you have the starting point for Amy Frykholm’s powerful novel, High Hawk.
The title refers to a red hawk feather left on the church altar by Alice Nighthawk, the Lakota woman at the heart of the reservation, whose wisdom and knowingness anchors Father Joe, the parish, her family, and all who go to her in their time of need. When, at the novel’s opening, an infant is left at Father Joe’s doorsteps, Alice swoops in and raises the child as her own.
But this boy, on the cusp of manhood, is on trial for attempted murder. To keep the trial in the tribal court system, they must find documentation that he is of Lakota blood. The red hawk feather Alice leaves is a talisman for how to look, and nearing the book’s end, Alice declares that Father Joe has changed, that he “knows how to find lost things,” at least a little. They have saved Bear, the baby they rescued, by identifying a birth mother, only to have Bear turned over to the system for detention. He is “broken,” Bear tells Father, who responds, “That’s the thing nobody tells you. We’re all broken.”
If the celibate Father Joe has this shadow family – Alice and Bear, and then the wandering child Rowena – he also has an Eloise figure, in the renewed correspondence with a woman whom he might have married years before. After many years’ absence, Veronica discovers his whereabouts in a diocesan profile and writes to him, initiating a complex conversation. Shielded by distance, they self-examine and self-reveal in ways they might have been too shy in other contexts. Eventually they do meet in person.
This relationship is not the expected stereotypical one. They each have doubts and insecurities and loneliness, but they share a deep spiritual longing. Father Joe has continued his intellectual life on the reservation; he is translating the psalms and meditating on open-ended words of mystery, even meditating on the notion of words. Veronica likewise has an intense reading and reflective life, in the midst of having been married and having raised children. Toward the book’s end, they watch a sunset together, watch the light fully yield to the darkness, sharing the hope from Walt Whitman, that “all parts away for the progress of souls.”
Much of the book’s power derives from Father Joe’s gradual understanding that first, priests were abusing young children within the confines of supposedly safe, dedicated religious institutions; second, he was not the only person to know it; third, rather than heeding the call of warning, the priests who spoke up against their brother priests were themselves banished. It takes him a long time to discern the full extent of how and why he wound up with his assignment at the reservation.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the good priests’ experience, men who gave their lives to an institution that betrayed them, made them look suspicious to the rest of the world, men who took vows of celibacy and became associated with the worst kind of sexual predation. There are many such men.
High Hawk imagines this scenario in the character of Father Joe. As he tells Veronica, he hadn’t been able to see it; then “one day he could.” Thankfully, what he discovers about the church, he does not hold against God. Accordingly, the book asks what to me is a central question in this fraught period of time. In Father Joe’s words, “What if the church itself is the sinner? To whom can it confess? Who can absolve?”
In addition to the depth and delicacy with which this painful topic is treated, the book also entertains. The writing is excellent; likewise, the pacing, narration, characters, the unfolding mystery. I enjoyed every moment of reading it, especially the profound insight into indigenous culture. It is possible to read many explanations of indigenous respect for the land, but the following passage elicited a Wow from me. Truth embedded in story.
Father Joe, driving to Sioux City on his red feather quest for answers to the mystery of Bear’s birth, recognizes he’s approaching white people land by “the careful demarcations.” He reflects how in the past, with government on their side, people declared: “this patch of nothing will be mine and that patch of nothing will be yours. And so it was.” That insight can change how we view our neat neighborhoods. At least it will alter mine.
Maryanne Hannan
Maryanne Hannan is a poet and frequent book reviewer, and also a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in upstate New York and is the author of Rocking like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.
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