How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
by Cherie Jones

Book Review by Colleen Lutz Clemens

Cherie Jones’s debut novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House focuses on the generational legacy of violence in the lives of Wilma, Esme, and the protagonist Lala.  Told from varying points of view—from a sex worker, a police officer, a young man dealing with the trauma of being raped, a wealthy Barbadian widow, an abusive husband, and several others—the novel recounts the story of the birth and soon thereafter accidental death of Baby, Lala and Adan’s daughter born on the night Adan commits a robbery that ends with the shooting of a wealthy white man, Mr. Whalen.  The reader watches how Baby’s death triggers a series of events that reveal the lineage of abuse the main three women endured—and continue to endure—at the hands of their husbands and fathers.  

The polyphony uses Baby’s death as a starting point for making sense of the characters’ own relationships to power.  Adan devolves into exacting more horrific abuse on Lala.  Tone, a friend of theirs (and more, as the reader learns), becomes a protector up until the final pages.  Wilma returns to her role of caretaker of the forsaken granddaughter.  Mrs. Whalen does not know how her widowhood is connected to the story of the dead baby in the newspaper. All of the characters from many walks of life connect in a way that keeps the reader wanting more and more and more—until the satisfying, if heartbreaking, conclusion of the novel.  

The town of Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, specifically its neighborhood Paradise, is itself a character, drawn in stark detail by Jones who transports the reader to its hospital, its segregated neighborhoods, its beach, and, most importantly, Baxter’s tunnels—dug by colonizing British soldiers—where bogeymen lurk waiting to steal children (but are in fact mainly used for drug trafficking).  The one-armed girl who sweeps is an object lesson for children lest they think the tunnels are a safe place to explore.  Jones based these fictional tunnels on the Garrison Historic Area and uses them to bring the novel to its violent conclusion.  

And violence—why some perpetrate it, why some must endure it—is the main theme of the novel.  In her review of Jones novel, National Book Award Winner Deesha Philyaw writes:

One of Jones’s many gifts is the ability to show us flawed human beings with their humanity fully intact, to call us to examine the terrible beast within ourselves. What does justice look like when a victim who has never known it victimizes another? What does freedom look like when your entire world is a prison? Or, as Lala wonders, “What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other?”

Lala’s question highlights the tyranny the majority of the men in the novel have wielded against the women.  No woman goes untouched by violence in the book.  Barely any of the women escape the violence—and the rare freedom for women comes at a great cost.  Though the United Nations reports that Barbados as a nation is working to end domestic violence, it is hard to know exactly the state of its work against intimate violence as there is no reported data for the country according to the World Health Organization.  One must only hope that it is not nearly as bad as Jones’s depiction—though data focusing on intimate partner violence in Barbados during the COVID lockdown indicates that Jones’s depiction may sadly be true, with an 83% increase in reports of such abuse during this time.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps the House leaves the reader rooting for Lala and sad for the remainder of the characters.  There is too much that could be given away, so readers should pick up the book for themselves and enjoy the operatic novel that humanizes all of it characters with lush prose and brilliant storytelling. 

Colleen Lutz Clemens is a professor of English at Kutztown University where she also directs the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities program.  She is the mother of one and the teacher of many.  Her musings and publications are housed at her blog.