Yearning for Stories

“The story that wouldn’t die.”
—Grand Avenue

In the first of 10 stories in Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories (1994), we meet teenage Jasmine, who moves from her mother’s crowded apartment to her Auntie Faye’s, where she sleeps on the sofa with her cousin Ruby. From Faye, Jasmine learns the implications of a historical family tragedy—the poisoning of her great-aunt Sipie—and its effects in the present. On Faye’s wall is a mural of a forest, covered with crosses painted in nail polish, meant to serve as a reminder of the family’s misfortunes. She tells Jasmine to touch each of the crosses every day, to ward off the curse that runs in the family.

Sarris’s fictional Waterplace Pomo community resides in former army barracks in the South Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, located on the titular Grand Avenue, where the author spent much of his time as an adolescent. The novel (and the two-part HBO miniseries adaptation, released in 1996) was groundbreaking as one of the earliest fictional presentations of urban Indians, creating “visibility,” as Sarris says, for his people. Grand Avenue remains important in the late-20th-century canon of Native literature for these depictions and for its reclaiming of urban space.

Grand Avenue is a master class of storytelling. Each of its interrelated stories is narrated by a different character—a narrative structure reminiscent of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) and used since by Tommy Orange in his 2018 award-winning debut, There There. The stories told by Sarris’s cast of multigenerational narrators span multiple time periods and sometimes conflict with one another, challenging any sort of unified “truth.” In this communal telling, no one voice rises above the rest; the narrators make up a “we,” who are effectively proclaiming, “This is our story.”

The story of Sipie Toms’s death—the curse that Faye alludes to in the first chapter—emerges through its multiple tellings by different characters. Cousin Nellie Copaz, a basket weaver and traditional healer, is called upon to heal Sipie (Nellie is no doubt based on Cache Creek Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman Mabel McKay, whom Sarris had known since childhood and about whom his Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream is written). In Faye’s version, it is Old Uncle who poisoned Sipie. Faye’s sister Billyrene argues that it was an accidental poisoning, that Old Uncle was trying to poison another woman. In Nellie’s retelling, Sipie’s father, Sam, is responsible: While trying to steal a love song from her, Sam “pulled the life right out of her.” In other versions, Nellie caused the death (though according to Nellie, Sipie was dead by the time she’d arrived).

Another recurring story in Grand Avenue and in its much longer sequel, Watermelon Nights, published in 1998, is about how the Waterplace Pomo ended up in Santa Rosa, and more precisely about how the community has tried to stay together despite historical encroachments and removals. Sarris reveals a specifically California history, of waves of immigration, of stolen land and rancherias, of agricultural and fishing industries, of Sherman Indian School, and of domestic labor. Grand Avenue maps these multiple removals, as the Waterplace Pomo move from their village near the Santa Rosa Creek to Benedict’s rancheria, then to a prison camp, into Santa Rosa proper, onto a shared reservation space near Sebastopol, and, when that reservation is terminated, back to Santa Rosa. And yet, their ancestral homelands are not forgotten: At the end of Grand Avenue, Nellie hopes to take young Alice, one of Sipie’s granddaughters, to the Santa Rosa Creek, near the old village, to gather the plants to make her baskets.

As he weaves together these multiple storylines, Sarris makes transparent his interest in storytelling itself: how stories transmit knowledge about histories and places; how stories get mapped onto specific, sometimes-sacred locations; and how webs of kinship are established through story. It is through stories that his characters come to know who they are—by retelling the events that define them as a people and by asking to hear them over and over again, like Jasmine with Faye’s nail polish crosses and Alice with Nellie in the chapter “The Water Place.” Storytellers like Nellie play a crucial role as the official keepers of collected or shared memories.

We see this interest in Sarris’s scholarship as well. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993) and Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (1994), published at nearly the same time as his first novel, reveal how he learned the history of his people, Indigenous ways of knowing, the relationship people have with the land, and above all, the importance of knowing the stories from McKay. At the same time, in his academic work, he thinks deeply about what it means to translate oral stories into writing, to fix them on paper as he does. He has since published two books of retellings of Pomo stories, How a Mountain Was Made (2017) and The Forgetters (2024), and a memoir in essays, Becoming Story (2022), which again returns to McKay.

Although Sarris grew up in Santa Rosa, among people he would discover were his relatives, being adopted meant that he did not know he was Pomo and Miwok—at least he didn’t know until he was a graduate student at Stanford. As an adoptee myself, what I see in this novel and in all of his books is Sarris’s process of coming home, of putting in the work of learning about his ancestors and his history, of reconnecting, and of not only learning the importance of storytelling from elders but also understanding how he himself is the storyteller. Just as I recognize McKay in Nellie, I also see Sarris in Jasmine and Alice and Jeanne, young Pomo characters yearning to hear the stories. The gift that Sarris gives us in this novel is allowing us to hear them too.•

Join us on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Sarris will sit down with special guest Lisa See and host John Freeman to discuss Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. Register for the Zoom conversation here.