Solar Storms

Agnes Iron, Angel’s great-grandmother, is Angel’s first host following Angel’s return to Adam’s Rib. When Angel first sees her, Agnes has one leg that is longer than the other. Agnes has a slovenly appearance and wears a “blue-gray fur coat, worn in places, sloppy, and unbuttoned,” made from a bear she befriended and then killed after some boys tortured it (23). Agnes is kind, generous, and talkative, and her many stories enable Angel to understand Angel’s place in the world. A typical abandoned woman of Adam’s Rib, Agnes has been widowed for a long time; now in her sixties, she has an ardent male companion named John Husk. On the journey the women take to the Land of the Fat-Eaters, Agnes is the most reluctant to leave. She sickens and dies on the journey, never arriving to her destination. In the narrative, Agnes’s death on the journey is the premonition that the four women’s plans will not go smoothly. 

Angel’s great-great grandmother, Dora-Rouge is “the oldest person” Angela has ever seen, “a white-haired creation thin as a key, who sat as if she had become bone already” (31). Despite her age, Dora-Rouge is warm and joyful, and Angel becomes attached to her, doing everything in her power to ensure the old woman’s comfort. Behind Dora-Rouge’s lightness is a sense of loss and sadness at the way her people were treated and at the slow extinction of their way of life. Unlike her younger sister, who lay in the snow and died from disappointment when the colonists made an appearance in her life, Dora-Rouge has a degree of resilience.

Dora-Rouge lives life from the perspective of nature and spirit consciousness; she makes bargains with water and speaks to her deceased husband, Lance. When she accompanies Angel, Bush, and Agnes to the land of the Fat-Eaters, Dora-Rouge assumes that she is going there to die and is mentally preparing for her death. However, when her daughter, Agnes, dies on the journey, Dora-Rouge lives on, seeing the destruction of her ancestral land and experiencing romantic love with Tulik. Dora-Rouge’s vivacity, warmth, and continued sexual energy mean that she is not defined by her age. In the narrative, her function is to provide a lens on Native American history during the 20th century. Through her stories, the reader gets an idea of the destruction rendered by colonialism prior to Angel’s time.

Bush, the woman who saves Angel as a baby from the murderous clutches of her mother, Hannah Wing, is a quiet and elusive woman, both an outsider and extremely intuitive. Bush was brought to Adam’s Rib from Oklahoma by Agnes’s son, Harold, whom Bush married. 

From Agnes’s description, Bush is “timid and small and not very pretty either, until you got to know her. Then she’d look beautiful” (38). Jilted in favor of the seductive Loretta Wing, whom Harold ran off with, Bush is another abandoned woman of Adam’s Rib. Although she never had children of her own, she experiences deep maternal love for both Hannah and Angel. Her connection with nature is deep, so much so that when she speaks of animals, “she [takes] on their ways of moving”; Angel believes that Bush has “the bright and brilliant soul of an animal” (95). 

In the narrative, Bush is shown to be resourceful and self-sufficient as she figures out a way for the women to travel to the land of the Fat-Eaters. When the protests against the dams begin, Bush stands by her convictions that peace is paramount and refuses to take part in militant actions.

Prone to “long, brooding silences,” Bush is a woman of few words and strong convictions (116). Her narrative journey is to learn to forgive, to soften, and to change her mind. She rejects the courtship of the well-meaning LaRue Marks Time and initially is utterly disgusted by the man himself; however, by the end of the book, when LaRue has become more vulnerable and humble, Bush grows less proud and begins to warm to him.

Angel’s mother, Hannah Wing, has long red hair, dark skin, and the almandine odor of cyanide that she inherited from her mother, Loretta Wing. Hannah also inherited Loretta’s spiritual malaise. Loretta was possessed by bad spirits because she watched the desperate people of her tribe on Elk Island die and afterwards was abused by men who “fed her and beat her and forced her” (39). Even at the age of 10, when Hannah returns to Adam’s Rib, the women can read Loretta’s legacy in the young girl’s body through her unforgettable “empty eyes,” which show that, like Loretta, Hannah has neither a heart nor a conscience (40).

Hannah’s coldness is exhibited in her rejection of motherhood and her savage repulsion towards her children. She harms Angel twice, first leaving her out in the cold to die and then biting her face and causing Angel lifelong scars. While Hannah has caused Angel endless amounts of pain, Angel must understand and seek out her mother before Angel can truly come of age. She learns about Hannah from the stories Bush and her grandmothers tell and she also meets Hannah in person, just before Hannah dies. Prior to Hannah’s death, “what possessed her was now gone” and she is a mere, fragile shell of a woman (250). Hogan thus shows that Hannah’s cruelty is the result of possession by the spirits of maligned ancestors and her own mother, rather than anything intrinsic. Her new baby, Aurora, for example, is innocent. This realization enables Angel to forgive her mother and move on.

Tommy is Angel’s love interest and, later, her husband. Tommy is a resident of the Hundred-Year-Old Road in Adam’s Rib. He’s “a graceful young man with large, beautiful hands” and hunts and fishes to provide the elders with food (29). Angel is attracted to the fact that Tommy is a provider and responsible, unlike the dissolute, selfish young men she knew before arriving at Adam’s Rib. She also likes that he is proud of his Native-American heritage and that he speaks the indigenous languages, in addition to English. 

A taxidermist  and a dealer in animal bones, LaRue Marks Time, at the beginning of the novel, has just returned from the Vietnam War. Handsome, with his hair in a long, thin, ponytail down his back, LaRue is passionate about Bush. She, however, is put off by his macho attitude and disharmonious relationship with nature. LaRue’s lack of sympathy with nature is apparent from his house, which is “frightening and smelled of things that should have been buried or thrown into mud or water” (130). By the end of the novel, LaRue has become softer and more vulnerable, making him a more suitable match for Bush. 

Physically, Tulik’s “skin was dark, his face bones fine and delicate, and he had happy eyes” (227). Tulik is a judge living in the land of the Fat-Eaters with his daughter, Auntie, and his grandson, Calvin, who goes by the name of Grandson. Their home, Lynx House, hosts Dora-Rouge, Bush, and Angel. 

Insightful and wise, Tulik’s “appraisal of people was almost always on the mark; he could size up a man’s drunkenness in a glance, could determine when a child would be born by the way a woman walked, and whether it would be a boy or a girl” (237). Tulik's instinctual judgment and affinity with nature make him a good match for Dora-Rouge. Tulik is devastated by the destruction wreaked on his home and dies a year before the campaign to stop the building of the dams is won.

The white authorities who contain the Native Americans’ protests in the land of the Fat-Eaters occupy several bodies, appearing in the novel both as dam construction-workers and policemen. However, Hogan treats them as a conglomerate that follow orders from above and:

[goes] against their inner voices […] the cellular will of the body to live and protect life, land, even their own children and their future. These were men who would reverse the world, change the direction of rivers, stop the cycle of life until everything was as backwards as lies (289). 

Whereas the Native Americans are collectively on the side of nature, the white authorities, in general, oppose it. Still, Hogan shows how Angel observes the white authority figures carefully and makes allowances for their human frailty. For example, when Angel approaches a young dam worker who blocks her way, she observes that his throat is “young and bony like that of an adolescent. He swallowed. He wasn’t going to move” (287). The gesture of swallowing suggests that the young man is just as terrified as Angel and has to draw upon all of his resolve to block her way. This image of inexperience and uncertainty suggests that while collectively the white authorities are united in presenting an invincible front, on an individual level, they doubt their actions. This arguably serves to make them seem more pitiable than monstrous.

John Husk is one of the few men at Adam’s Rib. He fishes and delivers groceries to people in remote parts of the region and is passionate about science. His main desire in life is “to prove that the world was alive and that animals felt pain” (35). He is short, smells of soap, and has “a fine face, skinny legs, [and] no hips to speak of” (34). When Angel arrives at Adam’s Rib, John Husk is nearly 70 is in an ambiguous romantic relationship with Agnes (whose house he frequents, though he is rarely seen in public with her). As the narrative progresses, their love for each other becomes apparent. Pitted against the white authorities, Hogan positions Husk as a man in Tommy and Tulik’s league, one who is respectful of nature and Native traditions.