Motheater by Linda H Codega - thoughts

A coworker alerted me to the release of Linda H. Codega’s debut novel Motheater a few months before its January release, and shortly before hurricane Helene. I was immediately excited about the concept of a queer novel about a witch fighting a mining company in the mountains of western Virginia, but my coworker’s lukewarm response once it did release, combined with the fatigue of Helene and fascism, kept me from picking it up until now. It’s probably good that I waited, since the novel’s depictions of environmental disaster are raw enough that it had me ruminating on the devastation of Helene as I read it.

I have many kind things to say about Motheater. I genuinely love its prose, its use of dialect, its sense of place, and the complexity of its central conflicts. But it is flawed in ways my rosy subjectivity won’t make clear. The protagonist is Black, and even I as a white guy in a very white county could pretty quickly tell that Codega was not writing from experience whenever they tried to talk about Bennie’s Blackness. The specific qualities of Bennie’s hair are a pretty constant tell, but the details in a fairly long scene in which she interacts with a police officer and then goes to the sheriff’s office are especially egregious. For me, these mostly came off as clumsy flaws in an otherwise enjoyable work, but they’ll be dealbreakers for some people, and I don’t blame them for that.

After being fired from her job as a safety inspector for a coal mine in the small town of Kiron, off Kire Mountain, protagonist Benethea “Bennie” Mattox is combing a slough creek for corpses to build a case for whistleblowing when she discovers a barely alive woman instead. This woman introduces herself as Motheater and claims to be a powerful Appalachian witch from the late 19th century, missing most of her memories. As it becomes clear that Motheater is indeed capable of casting powerful magic, and that she had fought the advent of similar mining practices in her own time, Bennie decides to use this mysterious woman to help her make it safer to mine in Kire. What Bennie finds, though, is that Motheater’s goals don’t necessarily align with her own, forcing her to choose, on multiple occasions, whether to push for more radical changes or part ways with the witch. Alternate chapters tell the story of Esther, the 19th century witch who would become Motheater, as she uses all the resources at her disposal to try to run the mining company Halberd off of her mountain, to predictably tragic results.

Before I get into theming, I have to say that I adore the depictions of magic in this book. Motheater makes sacrifices to the natural world to get favors in return, which is often unsettling but inarguably powerful. Her connections to the mountain range and the flora and fauna living on it allow her to help people around her but require that she pay something in return. People who she helps often don’t recognize that cost, meaning that they resent her when the cost for something they want would be a bridge too far. By taking the balance between industry and nature entirely upon herself, Esther inadvertently denies her community a full understanding of what that balance is and why it should be maintained. Esther gets the moniker Motheater because the souls of people who die anywhere along the mountain range flock to her to tell her their final thoughts before passing on, which gives her an intimate connection to her community that the living don’t really see or understand.

In every version of this book as I had pictured it in my head, the conflict was a pretty straightforward one: a town is suffering because of coal mining and a witch is trying to run the company out so the town won’t suffer anymore. That conflict feels good and is to an extent reflective of the real world. On a broad scale, coal mining means a net negative for the mountain range, the people who live on that mountain range, the world, and the people who live in the world. But the conflict as it is presented in the novel is much more nuanced than just…old world witch good, new world corporation bad.

Rural residents of Appalachia did work as miners, and miners who came to the area to work are now locals. Coal companies did horrendous things to their workers and the environment, but it’s hard to argue that their presence wasn’t encouraged by people living in the mountains who needed money and better living standards. It’s similarly hard to ignore that living standards along the range are better than they were before coal moved in as a result of that influx of industry. In the 19th century, Motheater attracted the ire of her townsfolk by opposing the mining industry, and in the 21st century, Motheater sees that there is an argument to be made that they were right to be angry with her. She would have blocked the avenue by which the people of Kiron got Air Conditioning, phones, pizza. Motheater acted on behalf of the interests of the mountain, Kire, in part because for much of her life, those interests aligned with the interests of the community she served, Kiron. But while she sees those interests begin to deviate in the 19th century, by the 21st century they’re almost entirely at odds. What’s best for the mountain will hurt or kill the people of the community, and what’s best for the people will continue to degrade the mountain.

I’ve been thinking a lot since Helene about the ways that what we view as degradation are nature behaving normally at too fast a rate to control with our level of resources.

I’m not sure whether that sentence makes sense. Let me try again. My county has always maintained solid upkeep of its roads, but since the hurricane, they’ve struggled to rebuild as each new instance of extreme weather - be it snow, high winds, or strong rains - brings with it more potholes, more fallen trees, more landslides, more sinkholes. Roads I’ve never had any difficulty traversing have fallen into disrepair as each patch job is immediately replaced by a new pothole. Trees leaning precariously over major roads have been put on the backburner as the money and labor we have goes into removing the trees that have already fallen. Helene has laid bare the extent to which we can’t simply build a settlement where there once was a forest and be done. The continued existence of a settlement necessitates a perpetual war of attrition against the nature around and under that settlement, and environmental disasters like Helene require so many resources to rebuild that we simply start slowly losing that war.

This was probably more obvious to people living in other parts of Appalachia. My mountains don’t have coal, and my county and state usually allocate tax revenue in ways that prioritize infrastructure. Helene’s impact on my town were probably already comparable to pre-Helene conditions for anyone who lives near mountaintop removal sites and/or doesn’t get a lot of infrastructure support. Motheater released just after Helene, but as I mentioned at the top, publicity started for the book just before. And Codega says in the author notes that they had worked on the book for four years. What I see as similar to my own new normal has been a lot of folks’ normal for a long time, and I’m sure they’ve been in a much worse spot too.

Some readers accuse Motheater of being too slow, meandering, or repetitive, but I think a lot of that impression can be chalked up to the fairly realistic way the characters come to understand this conflict. Bennie wants to save people, then comes to understand that the people are in danger because of the violence they have done to the mountain. A holistic solution is impossible here because at this point keeping people safe is detrimental to nature, and acting entirely in the interest of nature will kill people. But people don’t deserve to die because their only means of survival fed into a bad system, and even a witch doesn’t have the power to dismantle global capital. Sometimes there are no clean choices, and we have to choose anyway. A century and a half ago, a lot of struggling people bought into the only system they felt was available to them at the time, and in doing so inadvertently doomed a lot of struggling people in the present to continue to buy into that system.

I think many people want a queer Appalachian witch book to feel good. Appalachia is pretty, rural southerners are quaint, witches are seeing a rise in popularity as representative of power to members of oppressed groups, and queer fiction is more often than not light and uncomplicated because queer reality sure is anything but. Motheater doesn’t feel good the way people might expect - the way I expected - but I enjoyed Motheater. I enjoyed sitting with the themes of Motheater each time I put it down. I enjoyed talking to people about the complicated conflicts at the center of Motheater. I was glad to have passages from Motheater to ruminate on while driving around potholes, past landslides, and under falling branches. And I like the cover. It’s a pretty cover.