‘Black Apple’ by Joan Crate

Reviewed by Charlene Van Buekenhout

Black Apple is a fictional story set in a residential school in Canada during WWII. Sinopaki Whitewater is torn from her family, her life, her culture and forced to be schooled in, and live, a Christian / white life. Acclaimed Métis author Joan Crate, known for her award-winning fiction, including Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson, has written a compelling account of one woman’s journey to find a place where she belongs. Although we know the painful legacy of the residential school system, we know what the school represents, we know what the girls will be subjected to, Crate does not let us get ahead of her characters. The immediacy of her writing pulls the reader into the story’s present moments, slowing us down so we can start from the beginning and take the journey along with Sinopaki.

The book is broken up into three parts, beginning at the moment of separation. A child of five or six, Sinopaki is at home with her parents and baby brother when the priest comes for her abruptly, touting the law. Sinopaki knows it’s bad news, and Joan Crate doesn’t do more than she has to when describing events. Briefly, on the very first page, Sinopaki sees that her father cannot stop the priest from taking her: “She peeked out, and that’s when it happened. Oh, Papa with his what can I do? look stepped backward into the house, no longer fierce, his colours breaking apart like the reflection of the moon in runoff water.”

You feel her father’s helplessness in the only way that she, a child, can interpret it. Sinopaki’s experience of people and the world is often described in their colours or as animals. Here Crate employs magic realism. It is known early on that Sinopaki has the power to see both forwards and backwards, spirits leaving animals when they die, and then later, more surprising and disturbing sights.

The addition of her ability is so compelling that it often caught me by surprise. It’s almost like reading about the (spoiler alert) madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In fact, this book reminded me a lot of Jane Eyre: The small, resourceful girl, the terrible school with the terrible food and terrible teachers who made examples out of them, but also the special new friend who – well, no spoilers, but in Black Apple Sinopaki (christened Rose Marie at the school) meets Anataki, an outsider who is bullied for “accidentally” stealing another girl’s Christian name, Anne, because it half matched her own Blackfoot name: “Rose Marie, a few feet away, heard her finish her name, her old name, the Blackfoot name she had decided, secretly, to keep. She looked into Anataki’s face and saw a coyote dart behind her eyes. A coyote chasing a chicken. Quick. Then the chicken look was on her face again, dull and stupid. She thought maybe she liked that girl, that Anataki.”

Sinopaki is taken to St. Mark’s – a residential school helmed by Mother Grace, to whose life and thoughts we are privy, along with Sinopaki’s. It is an interesting, possibly contentious concept to include the voice of a head nun along with the child whose “savagery” she is trying to purge, but although she believes she is doing right in the name of God, Mother Grace is a very progressive nun whom we inevitably and perhaps begrudgingly come to trust, just as Rose Marie does. This is an interesting tactic in the writing: a surprising ally yet not unbelievable. Mother Grace’s “tough love” presence in Rose Marie’s life at the school is fraught with confusion and mixed feelings. She won’t allow Rose Marie’s father to take her home for the summer, but she also rescues her from a particularly sadistic nun and sees to it that Rose Marie is never disciplined in that manner again. She takes Rose Marie under her wing, eventually curbing her need to run, and landing Rose Marie on an accelerated assimilation life course. Obviously, a greater kindness would have been to send the girl home to live with her family, but Joan Crate unapologetically shows her characters as human beings, and therefore as flawed. With the addition of Mother Grace’s perspective, we see the cracks of doubt in a person who is charged with upholding a corrupt and ill-conceived system. We see and feel her age, the thin walls, the cold and sparse surroundings, her rheumatism and arthritis: a human being and not just a cog in the machine.

Rose Marie grows up in the school and in part two she is on the cusp of teen-dom. When sickness spreads throughout the school – partially due to being out of reach of medical attention but also because of sanitation issues and overcrowding – Rose Marie’s visions become stronger, and reality becomes entangled with dreams and her unique sight. They blend together when Rose Marie is at particular emotional heights, like when she has just learned of the death of someone she loved:

“She pried her eyes open a crack and saw an angel in black standing over her, a bowl in her hands. The angel of death. Let me die too. ‘Try a little food Rose Marie. Please.’ Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony. The Virgin took one hand and Joseph held the other. They led her away from the dark angel and her bowl of oblivion. No. Grant me death! […] Kneeling on the floor by her bed, the shadow sister raised her head. Sweet Jesus, make sure you take Taki to heaven. Don’t leave her here with the shadow nun! Taki came to her. She smiled, sun glowing through her skin, her brimming spirit flowing. Behind her, the ii-nii grazed and faded into night.”

In part three, Rose Marie leaves the residential school and heads to a town called Black Apple, a post-war mining community. She encounters this new world with a backpack full of prayers and warnings from the other nuns. She is outwardly naïve, but has a strong will that carries her throughout the story. We see both this naiveté and will act together when she encounters a more explicit form of racism than what she experienced at St. Mark’s, where the racism was embedded into the school system itself. In Black Apple, people won’t even sit near her at church: “Oh, Indians. She understood. The church was another version of the Greyhound bus. And Indians belonged at the back. She wasn’t sure what to do. Should she get up and hurry over to the back of a side section?”

Due to its coming of age quality, Black Apple is not a bad choice for young adults (if your young adult is used to some language and content). Crate’s writing throughout is beautiful and evocative, especially as she navigates the dream, reality and spirit worlds. In her Afterword, Crate writes that she was attempting to “show the many sides of human behaviour, to find, through fictional re-creation, a greater truth about who all of us are as people.” A lofty task, and I think a successful one.

Simon & Schuster | 336 pages | $32.00 | cloth | ISBN 978-1476795164