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INTRODUCTION

The endless, rolling prairie of the Nebraska Sandhills seems just like the kind of place to escape to, a place where life is simple and unsullied, untouched by technology and noise and the complications that other people bring. The Weight of Dreams lays bare the realities of life on America's last frontier—a life that even at the end of the twentieth century can be difficult and lonely but that can also be beautiful and redemptive.

The Nebraska Sandhills cover nearly 22,000 square miles of grassy sand dunes and include the largest and least populated county in the nation. Each cattle ranch averages 8,000 acres and while the sandhills remain a beautiful and sometimes unspoiled land, only a few hearty individuals—like Ty Bonte and Dakota—can survive here. And, as one would expect in a region where life is based on a single industry—ranching—there is an ongoing economic crisis. As a result, the gorgeous landscapes of the Sandhills are interrupted by dreary prefab houses, fast food stops, and empty storefronts cropping up in places like Babylon, Ty's hometown. There isn't much reason for young people to stick around, and it is difficult for ranchers like Rider Bonte to pass their land on to subsequent generations. People like Ty and Dakota are the exception; ranching as a way of life is just too hard for most of us.

In a place where you measure the distance between you and your neighbor in miles, not yards, community can seems like an abstract concept. Yet the acres of empty land that separate the inhabitants of the Sandhills also encourage its inhabitants to huddle close to one another, like cattle bracing themselves against a prairie blizzard. And Ty, after returning to his family's Sandhills ranch to face up to his checkered past, feels the weight of his neighbors' judgment on his back. The townspeople are also a heavy presence, bringing out the worst in him, leading him back to the behavior that drove him away from Babylon in the first place. On the Rosebud Reservation, with its trash-strewn lawns, decrepit houses, and the alcohol treatment center, he is considered a murderer, just one more reason for the red and white communities to mistrust and fear each other.

Through her portraits of Ty and Ryder Bonte, Dakota Carlysle and Harney Rivers, Cody Kidwell and Latta Jaboy, Joseph Starr and Jimmy Short Knife, Jonis Agee shows us that the Nebraska Sandhills are experiencing the same social crisis as the culture at large. And with their lives dictated by weather, nature, and the land, their existence is tenuous, perhaps more tenuous than life in a crowded city or a sprawling suburb. Indeed, The Weight of Dreams illustrates that life on frontier is far from simple. But for the people who do choose to live there, the Sandhills offers both solitude and freedom.

ABOUT JONIS AGEE

Jonis Agee is the author of several works of fiction, including South of Resurrection and the New York Times Notable Book Sweet Eyes. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including the NEA and Loft-McKnight Award. She teaches at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she lives.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JONIS AGEE

The Nebraska Sandhills figure largely in this and other novels you have written. What is it about the landscape and its people that inspires you? What was it like for you to live there? How have the Sandhills changed over the years and where is this region headed?

One of the real pleasures of Sandhills driving is to top one of the hills, having not passed another car in an hour, and encountering one of the marshes or lakes thick with swans, pelicans, ducks, and geese in the spring or fall. Not only is there a raw, unspoiled beauty in the land, there is a tough individualism bred in both the white ranchers and the Native Americans of the region. Two reservations, Pine Ridge and Rosebud, sit just across the Nebraska-South Dakota border and there is a long history of racial conflict in the region. Both peoples experience on a daily basis what it means to live physically close to the land, to rely on it for spiritual, communal, economic, and social survival. These are the most basic elements of human existence and the most important issues of our lives spring from them. For a fiction writer this is a perfect place.

You write of heartbreaking cruelty inflicted on horses by trainers, riders, and dealers. Is this treatment common in the horse business? How did you do your research for this aspect of the novel?

The minute an animal such as a horse becomes the means to convey wealth, power, and prestige, a few ruthless individuals will be attracted to the business. Cruelty to horses is not common among the amateur owner/rider, but it does exist in all areas at the professional level where the reputations of trainers are based on their ability to win prizes for their clients. In the mid-nineties, there were a number of news stories about the scams perpetrated by some very wealthy and unscrupulous owners and trainers in which valuable show and race horses were murdered for the insurance money. Sometimes the horses, bought at over inflated prices to begin with, failed to perform to the expected level and needed to be discarded. Sometimes the horse had been injured, and thus was no longer able to win in the show ring, and thus an "accident" would be arranged so the owner could purchase another animal with the insurance money. I have been involved with horses most of my life and in recent years showed dressage and hunter. For this novel, I interviewed stable owners, veterinarians, trainers, grooms, owners, riders, judges, and stewards in many divisions of the show world. They told me stories of other kinds of unscrupulous behavior: severing the tail nerves of quarter horses so they will lie still during competitions where steadiness is valued; using ginger and hot peppers in the anus of Saddlebred horses to make them more excited and brilliant in the showring; growing the hooves to twice their normal length on Morgans, Saddlebreds, Arabians, and any horses shown in park classes to create higher action, even though horses live in thier stalls as a result; bleeding horses to quiet them before classes where they are judged on manners. Part of my intention in including this material in the novel is to suggest that the ruthlessness that we accept as part of sports and economic life exacts a terrible toll.

Do you think Ty Bonte's experience of growing up and working on a ranch and of feeling isolated from the town and its people typical of other Sandhills adolescents?

Yes, except that with the advent of satellite television and radio, adolescents are finally experiencing a much vaster communal culture and fleeing the hills as soon as they're able. The kids who move to town for the school year to live with their mothers, another relative or family friend, of course, have the advantage of some socializing process, but the disadvantage of being part of a broken family, essentially fatherless.

Is Harney Rivers's character a good representation of the kind of people who are encroaching on the American west?

Harney Rivers is the type of ruthless entrepreneur we have seen in this country since the first white man traded some worthless junk to a Native American for a chunk of land that wasn't owned to begin with. I don't think we've necessarily seen an exponential growth of greed and rapaciousness in this country; we've just grown more aware and we're finally beginning to examine the cost of what our national ethos has created. Is Harney the new Westerner? In some sense, perhaps, but I prefer to think of him as the American businessman with a bit of sadism thrown in. He's just getting around to exploiting places like the Sandhills—now that he's run out of other places.

This novel shares a number of characters from your second novel, Strange Angels. How are the two connected? What led you to return to this earlier work now?

I returned to the characters and setting from my first Sandhills novel, Strange Angels, in part because I am now planning a trilogy of books set in the region. It was actually exciting to go back to the Sandhills in the new novel, to pick up the lives of characters I'd grown so found of, to see how far they had progressed along the road. When Cody and Latta, the main characters of Strange Angels, started having marital troubles, I was not surprised since they'd had such a rocky time to begin with. However, I began to worry that Cody might become one of those middle-aged philandering men so I now have to go back and take a look at him again in another novel. Also, I wanted to see how Joseph Starr's work in Native medicine was going, along with his emerging relationship with Cody's half-sister, Kya. It's almost like going to a family reunion every five or ten years to revisit one's characters, and I discovered that I've missed them. One of my plans is to continue to bring in characters and places from the first three novels into the next ones as a means of building a real sense of life in the Midwest, which cannot be looked at through one place alone. Contrary to popular belief, the Midwest is a very diverse region fraught with complex landscapes, populations, and issues, comparable to the South. In my next novel, I am weaving in characters from the first and third novels. I want to move the novel away from the idea of a work of fiction being isolated in time and place.

You write often of families and their emotional legacies. Is the family dying in the American West?

No, actually in areas where people are dependent on one another for physical, economic, and social survival, the family remains intact to some degree. Nonetheless, now that the Sandhills and the remote areas of the West have been invaded with popular culture, these places now share in the current divorce rate, etc. Also, the necessity of dividing the family for the children's education places great stresses on the family, as I suggested in the novel, and the fact that the children often leave these areas as soon as possible continues to fracture the extended family.

How does the idea of family—its importance and prevalence—differ between the Native Americans and their Anglo neighbors?

During the nineteenth century, white political leaders instituted policies that prohibited traditional religious worship, destroying the core of Indian life. If a person was caught practicing any Native devotional rituals, the entire family was deprived of food allotments for a month. Furthermore, Indian children were routinely taken from their families and educated in special boarding schools where they were forbidden their language, religion, and culture. Every effort was made to exterminate the basics of Indian family life. The real miracle is that any family and communal life could survive at all on the reservations, especially today as poverty, alcoholism, and drug use take their toll. Comparing the two groups' dedication to family, one could only say that all human peoples have children, loved ones, at the heart of their community life, and that white culture has yet to be tested to the extreme degree that Indian culture has been.

Describe the process you underwent in creating the Native American characters in both The Weight of Dreams and Strange Angels.

As a white writer I worried about how to create Native American characters and cultures. The tendency is to idealize "the other" or to make the other exotic—either one being untrue. What I did was to concentrate on the qualities that all human beings share, and to portray the essential dreams of people as individuals. I tried to create an actual history, not downplaying the social ills or problems, yet not creating stereotypes based on those either. Ultimately, I chose to construct the Indian characters in the same manner as the white: as complex individuals with successes and failures, dreams and desires, good and bad memories, etc. It's never an either/or proposition with characters, for me. I have to know their little crimes as well as their great hearts, their darkest dreams as well as their shining ones. And I see everyone as a composite, in differing proportions, of such qualities. All of us engage in a lifetime war within the self to combat the urges toward doing wrong, toward being utterly self-interested, and that's what intrigues me.

Can you comment on the title, The Weight of Dreams?

We take for granted that our lives are driven by dreams. In the novel, every act is the result of someone's dream, and every horror and achievement is the outcome. Also, I intended to show how we carry our lives like a weight upon our backs—and that our relationships are complicated weavings of memory, dream, and reality. To be dreamless is a terrible, devastating state, but to have dreams is a dangerous experience that requires great responsibility and strength.

Tell us a bit about your other Sandhills novel, Strange Angels.

Strange Angels looks at how the patriarch of a family forced his children's lives into shapes of his own choosing, which caused great divisiveness among them—yet they had to learn to co-exist in order to survive after their father's death. It began my exploration of the Sandhills and the historical conflicts between Native Americans and whites.

Your fiction has been likened to the work of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Tom McGuane. Do you feel that these comparisons are apt?

Yes, in the sense that I'm dealing with men and women who live closely with the land, whose livelihoods are dependent on the land, whose spiritual and social values are derived from the land, and who register a deep resistance to the erosion of traditional life founded on physical engagement with the environment.

What writers have influenced your work?

Faulkner, because of the language and because his characters are always filled with desire; Flannery O'Connor because of the metaphors and because she dared to speak of the spiritual as if it mattered; mystery writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett because they could use language in original ways while they kept a plot churning; Charles Dickens because of his narrators' voice and humanity; Eudora Welty because of her language and her excessive characters who care with passion and suffer when they don't; early Joyce Carol Oates because her characters want so much and suffer anything to have it.

As a woman writer, how do you think your evocations of the American West may be different from some of the male authors who focus on the same region?

I probably create female characters who are strong in their own right, and who are not necessarily looking for relationships with men to complete their world, even though that is something they definitely would rather have than not have. But most of my women characters are unwilling to settle for less or for having a life that is not shaped by their own hands. Although Latta, in Strange Angels, had a bad early marriage where she was something of an exotic ornament, as soon as she gets free, she makes a world very much her own. The same can be said of Dakota in this novel. While she tries to compromise, she refuses to compromise herself or her horses simply in order to have a man. She has a kind of internal moral force about her that helps Ty find his.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Compare the characters of Ty and Dakota. How do they handle their emotions? What consequences has their past had on their ability to be in a loving relationship? What do they learn from one another, and how does each change over the course of the novel?
    
2. How does Ty fit into the stereotype of the American cowboy? Do you think this stereotype is accurate?
    
3. Discuss your feelings about Ryder Bonte. Without knowing about his own childhood, how much is he to blame for Ty's unhappy adolescence? What is there to like or admire in Ryder? Do you, ultimately, forgive him for his treatment of Ty?
    
4. What do you think of Ty's mother? How is her life in town different from Ty's and Ryder's on the ranch? Do you blame her for realizing that she couldn't endure the latter? Do you think she and Ty should try harder to forge a positive relationship?
    
5. What impact has the death of Ty's younger brother, Ronnie, had on Ty's life? How does the piecemeal way Agee gives us information about the death affect our understanding of the incident, and of the kind of men Ty and Ryder have become?
    
6. We learn about Ty and Harney's assault on two Indian hitchhikers in a similar fashion—through a series of flashbacks that gradually reveal the truth. Do you like or dislike this narrative technique? How would the novel be different if the entire incident were revealed in one scene, at the beginning of the book?
    
7. Do you think Ty's ultimate sentence for his role in the crime—a nominal fee and a commitment to repairing the emotional damage to Bob's family—is sufficient? How might it be argued that Ty has already "served time" for the assault? How do you think his life might have been different if he had owned up to his part in the crime instead of running away?
    
8. Compare the scenes that take place in Minneapolis compared to those set in the Sandhills and in Kansas. How does Agee make use of the novel's settings—both out on the prairie and in the town of Babylon—to convey the novel's themes and moods?
    
9. Compare the courtroom scene that opens the novel to the courtroom scene that takes place on the Rosebud Reservation. How has Ty changed? What is significant about the fact that the first scene takes place in a U.S. court of law, and the second in a court presided over by Native Americans?
    
10. What has Agee's novel taught you about the plight of Native Americans in our country? What have you learned about life on a reservation, and about the relationships between the Indians and ranchers that inhabit Nebraska's Sandhills?