Calling for a Blanket Dance, Bundled Up

I'm sick. I listened to Calling for a Blanket Dance from my couch, wrapped in an heirloom quilt. 

The book, told through the points of view of multiple characters, follows Ever Geimausaddle from infancy, to a battered youth, to an angry adolescence, to single fatherhood. 

 *Spoilers Follow*

It begins in the voice of Ever's Cherokee grandmother, Lena Stopp, whose worry for her children sometimes dresses up in cruelty. She knows this, so when infant Ever is present for the brutal beating of his father at the hands of Mexican police, and Ever's mother doesn't take him to a medicine man for healing, Lena has to take matters into her own hands from a distance. She finally opts to sew healing into a quilt for her grandson. Babies cannot be exposed to violence without consequence, she tells us.

The quilt, and ones Lena sews later for Ever's children, disappears from the page for a long time as we watch the damage inflicted on Ever, continual and clear, follow him into adulthood. Then, near the end of the book, Ever sells his children's quilts out of financial desperation. 

Only when the quilts make it back to Ever and his children does the stability they need soon follow. The medicine sewn into them appears in the form of Kiowa generosity of the personal variety, and Cherokee Nation generosity of the bureaucratic. Ever's people sew together a safety net. 

My own quilt was hand sewn by a maternal great great aunt whose name I can't remember. She didn't know my mother, or me, and yet, wrapped in her handiwork, I consider the power of love and attention. Knowing what I do about my ancestors, no medicine was intentionally sewn into this blanket. Nonetheless, snotty, coughing, fevered, here I am drawing comfort from the stitches that were placed a century ago.  

I borrowed this audiobook from my library and listened through Libby. The author, Oscar Hokeah, read the male voices in the book, and Rainy Fields read the females. It is 6hours and 49minutes long.