Jonis Agee Spins The River Wife’s Tale
A Review by Jia Gayles
Has a book ever made you forget your life? Did the phone call go unanswered or the email unchecked? Only a master storyteller can spin a tale so intricate that you willingly succumb to its sticky web, and Jonis Agee has accomplished this feat with her first foray into historical fiction – The River Wife. The Nebraska native is the Adele Hall Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and it was her childhood memories of summering near the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri that inspired her to create a vivid three-dimensional world of brazen, complicated, cursed and beautiful women living on the early 19th century frontier.
The New York Times Book Review declared Agee, “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape.” In this novel, our forest guide is Hedie, a young naïve bride settling into life on Jacques’ Landing with her bootlegging husband Clement Ducharme. As her husband trolls the town’s underbelly late into the night, Hedie finds refuge in the forgotten journals of her “river wife” ancestors Annie Lark, Omah, Laura and Maddie.
The massive New Madrid earthquake of 1812 changed the topography of Missouri forever in the formation of new lakes, sandboils and riverbends in the mighty Mississippi. Annie Lark’s story begins trapped underneath a fallen beam in her family’s abandoned cabin. Convinced the Day of Reckoning had come to New Madrid, Annie’s family hurriedly runs from the wrecked town, leaving her to die alone. Jacques Ducharme, a crude French fur trapper, happens upon Annie as he scavenges her cabin. Taken with her, he hazards the unsettled structure and engineers his ox-driven cart to pull her out.
After a few uneventful years of nomadic frontier life (save the errant grizzly bear), the impending arrival of their first child drives Jacques and Annie to settle down along the Mississippi River. Jacques sees an opportunity to garner business from the nearby river traffic and opens an inn. Money awakens insatiable greed in Annie’s husband, which crescendo in one terrible, gruesome night – irrevocably changing their relationship. After that night, Annie is left broken but defiantly seeks out her own interests in science and the arts. She even entertains a passing flirtation with famed ornithologist, John James Audubon. After her untimely death, she remains a ghostly apparition, haunting her descendants and remaining Jacques’ one great love.
Omah follows in Annie’s footsteps, crowned as the new “river wife” after her parents’ death leaves the sixteen-year old freed slave alone in the world. Jacques offers the teenager room, board and protection. Omah realizes the high price for living at Jacques’ Landing when she is recruited to help raid a passing riverboat. Her new career as Jacques partner-in-crime begins. Omah’s platonic relationship with Jacques is borne out of respect and deep loyalty; perhaps the only reason she somewhat escapes the cursed Ducharme legacy.
Maddie Ducharme is spawned from the May-December union of Jacques and his second wife, Laura Shut. Laura is an unabashed goldigger who married the old river pirate for his rumored ill-begotten treasures. Not suited to solitary river life, Laura leaves Jacques’ Landing to quench her wanderlust. But the trip precipitates Laura’s quick end. Maddie Ducharme grows up motherless, and strives unsuccessfully to bring an end to the cursed Ducharme legacy. In an interview with BookPage, Agee shares that the original novel clocked in at 700 pages. Maddie and Laura’s stories are the shortest in the book, making them easily identifiable as the most wounded victim’s on the editor’s chopping block.
Annie Lark, Omah, Laura, Maddie and Hedie are connected by Jacques Ducharme, but he is merely the needle that pierces the dense cloth of their collective experience. The women are front and center of the novel, as Agee pulls back layer after layer revealing the complex juxtaposition of depression, bisexuality, fragility, passion, intelligence and perseverance. Each layer reveals the true essence of real women, and human-kind in general, who are perfect in their imperfections. As the karmic spell continues to play out, a sort of 19th century version of Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around…Comes Back Around,” each women confronts the effects of loving Jacques Ducharme, a mysterious, ageless man with a dark heart and brilliant mind. But make no mistake; this is no saccharine historical romance with requisite burning loins and fainting heroines.
Jonis Agee has been distinguished with three Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times – Strange Angels, Bend This Heart and Sweet Eyes. She is a Gold Award winner and recipient of the Loft-McNight Award of Distinction and the NEA grant in fiction. Her novel Weight of Dreams received the Nebraska Book Award.
