A review by angelayoung
Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

5.0

Pigs in Heaven was published in 1993 so I'm a bit behind the curve, but even then Barbara Kingsolver was writing about a culture different from her own (she often does) and a large subject (she often does that too). On her website she writes:

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.

In Pigs in Heaven she writes about the desire of the American Cherokee Nation to bring up their children in their tradition, to trace and find Cherokee children who've been adopted out and bring them back. To do right by their people. And she's clear-eyed and very funny about the differences between Cherokee beliefs and traditions and those of the American whites. This quite long quote illustrates (it's a conversation between the father of the adopted Cherokee child and the Cherokee lawyer who wants the child back in the tribe):

Jax leans back on one elbow and begins pointing out constellations. Ursa Major, which Annawake has known since she could walk, and the Pleiades.
'The what?'
'Pleiades. Seven sisters.'
She takes a long pull on her beer and squints at the sky. 'You people must have better eyes than we do. In Cherokee there are only six. The Six Bad Boys. Anitsutsa.'
'Anitsutsa?'
'Yeah. Or disihgwa, the pigs. The Six Pigs in Heaven.'
'Excuse me but you're making this up.'
'No. There's a story about these six boys that wouldn't do their work. Wouldn't work in their corn, wouldn't fix their mothers' roofs, wouldn't do the ceremony chores - there's always stuff to be done at the ceremonial grounds, getting firewood and repairing shelters and things like that. They weren't what you'd call civic-minded.'
'And they got turned into pigs.'
'Now wait, don't jump ahead. It's their fault, they turned themselves into pigs. See, all they wanted to do, ever, was play ball and have fun. All day long. So their mothers got fed up. They got together one day and gathered up all the boys' sgwalesdi balls. It's a little leather ball about like this.' Annawake holds up a green apricot. 'With hair inside. Animal hair, human, whatever. And they put all the balls in the stewpot. They cooked them.'
'Yum, yum,' says Jax.
She throws the apricot, carefully aiming at nothing. 'Okay. So the boys come home for lunch after playing around all morning, and their mothers say, 'Here's your soup!' They plop those soggy old cooked balls down on their plates. So the boys get mad. They say, 'Forget it, only a pig would eat this,' and they rush down to the ceremonial grounds and start running around and around the ball court, asking the spirits to listen, yelling that their mothers are treating them like pigs. And the spirits listened, I guess. They figured, 'Well, a mother knows best,' and they turned the boys into pigs. They ran faster and faster till they were just a blur. Their little hooves left the ground and they rose up into the sky, and there they are.'
...
'The Pigs, and also Uktena, this big snake with horns - those are the Cherokee bogeymen.'
...
'So that's your guiding myth. Do right by your people or you'll be a pig in heaven.'
'Yes. ... "Do right by your people".'

And slowly it dawned on me that what this scene is all about (there's much more, obviously) is that the Cherokee believe in doing right by their people; white Americans, usually, in doing right by themselves. Much food for thought as in all Kingsolver's novels. But she's such a skilled storyteller that her stories teach without feeling like teaching at all.