“A Lone Black Woman in Montana”

Victor LaValle, the author of Lone Women (One World, 2023), has written a Black speculative fiction novel that provides the perspective of “lone women” in Montana, a group of unmarried women who took advantage of the Homestead Acts passed by the federal government between 1862 and 1912. Black speculative fiction, on the rise, and celebrated around the world in October, Black Speculative Fiction Month, encompasses and blurs the genres of science fiction, magical realism, futurism, horror, fantasy, paranormal, and mythology. This fiction creates alternative and futuristic worlds, narratives rooted in traditional beliefs and spirituality, and stories that center the Black experience and raise questions about colonialism, racism, identity, and gender. La Valle’s Lone Women, representative of this genre, explores paranormal experiences in our lives from the perspective of a Black woman.

Set in 1915, the novel centers on the story of Adelaide Henry who moves from a small Black community of 27 families in Lucerne Valley, California to homestead 320 acres of land in Montana. This is a time in the United States of the Great Migration when many Black people migrated to the North, Midwest, and West to escape the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws of the South, lynchings, and the economic hardships of sharecropping and poverty. Migration offered an alternative for self-determination and the raising of one’s family in an environment free of the atrocities in the South. This novel is also set in a time period when the rights of Indigenous people to settle on land in the Midwest and Southwest are violated and they are sent to live on reservations.
Adelaide Henry has a secret and powerful reason for leaving Lucerne Valley, California and beginning a new life in Montana. She knows that if she cultivates the land in Montana and survives for three years in the harsh environment of dramatic changes in temperature, poor soil, and natural disasters, she will become the owner of the land. In addition to facing these environmental challenges, Henry faces racism, sexism, and the dangerous consequences of being a lone Black woman is a hostile space. Henry plans to defy the odds of survival in this new environment.

When the novel opens, Henry has dragged her parents into her former home and set it on fire. She then hires a man to take her and a huge trunk to the port of Los Angeles where she boards a steamship to Seattle and then purchases a railway ticket to Montana.
LaValle is an excellent storyteller who draws upon historical records depicting the history of African American women in the West, the history and treatment of Indigenous and Chinese people, and the blatant racism, sexism, and economic hardships experienced by lone women in Montana. These themes provide a context for understanding a novel whose setting represents an age in this country when as reported by the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,084 lynchings occurred in twelve southern states between 1877 and 1950.

Readers will ask many questions of the protagonist Adelaide Henry. What is she carrying in the huge trunk? Why has she left California and burned her home? What was the strange phenomenon at the time of her birth? Who are the mysterious men and women in the town of Big Sandy, Montana? Why does her mother’s voice permeate her dreams? Readers may also recognize LaValle’s references to novels by Black writers. Henry’s mother’s weighty statement that women are mules, symbolized in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the precarious condition of Black women in the United States, is a recurring theme throughout the novel. LaValle opens the novel with an epigraph from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, “Wanna fly, you got to give up the . . . . that weighs you down.” This theme, symbolic of the price of freedom, is an important part of Henry’s struggle as she strives to create a new life for herself. As readers progress through the novel, they will uncover the answers to these questions and gain a deeper understanding of the symbolism of the referenced texts.

The lone women (two Black and one Chinese) in the town of Big Sandy form a supportive community that reflects the resilience of women who endure hardships, raise families, work the land, and survive illness and disease in the Old West. These women represent those who are unmarried for varying reasons and who are determined to secure their own freedom. LaValle’s use of speculative fiction to narrate the stories of these unsung “sheroes” provides a Black gaze on the mystical, fantastic, and often unspeakable memories in our lives and is a motivation for investigating other narratives that have been omitted from the literary and historical canon of literature in the United States.
Dr. Brenda M. Greene is Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.