The Red and the Black
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE RED AND THE BLACK BY PEARL K. BELL Although the tragic encounter of Indian and white has been a primordial fact of the American experience from its earliest beginnings, only...
...One day the stars speak to his son, Captain Rex, saying: ". . . go out from your people to the ones who have tamed the wild beasts...
...he is the "rabbit boss," a killer paid to keep a large ranch free of rabbits...
...It traces the inexorable decline of four generations of Washo, an Indian tribe of Northern California and Nevada, whose nuclear lands spread out from Lake Tahoe...
...Leon Forrest's There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (Random House, 163 pp., $5.95) is also a cry from the heart of oppression-of the blacks, in this case-but it is as compressed and oblique as Rabbit Boss is overinclusive and sprawling...
...Melville's Tashtego is portrayed in the context of the sea rather than on his native ground...
...Yet for all Sanchez' passionate immersion in and intimacy with Washo history and lore, for all the beauty of the prose he lavishes on the poignant defeat of once brave and honorable men, this intensely felt book is seriously flawed by a simplistic view of good and evil...
...Rabbits...
...From the moment that Gayabuc beholds this bloody episode-his first sight of the white man-he becomes obsessed, useless as husband and hunter...
...Inevitably, in our time of militant radicalism, the Indians have at last come into their own as a fictional subject, and a young Californian, Thomas Sanchez, has now made an ambitious effort to deal with this rich lode of natural reality neglected by generations of writers...
...In serious American fiction the Indian has played a remarkably small role...
...When he breaks loose from his misguided weakness for mythi-fication, however, Sanchez becomes a brilliantly dramatic writer-scenes of rape and slaughter, of unspeakable cruelty and bigotry, lash the mind with awesome force...
...His agent of faith is not the church, though, it is peyote, the powerful drug of hallucination and false strength that only leads the Indian further into the shame of degradation...
...Joe acquires a genuinely tragic stature: The rancher is replacing him with machines, severing his ancestral blood connection with the Washo lands forever, and even the small acreage Joe inherited from his preacher father will soon be incorporated into a mobile-homes development...
...You have power to charm Antelope but the land is cut from you by their fences of metal thorns...
...Faulkner's Mississippi Indians (particularly in "The Bear") and John Hunt's Oklahoma Indian in Generations of Men are brooding wise men sharing their atavistic understanding with those whites who are able to respond...
...During the early years of the present century, Hallelujah Bob, the surviving son of Captain Rex, finds another shoddy defense against the tribal grief of decay...
...To eat the flesh of others...
...For this reason I feel Ralph Ellison, in his introduction, is talking about a' different book than the one I read when he says: "Forrest has given his considerable energies and talents to the discovery of the literary means and angles of vision necessary to reduce this confounding, pluralistic society of ours to eloquent form...
...Though the large events of Indian history in the last century undoubtedly bear out the justice of Sanchez' fierce and sorrowful indignation, his ethical lines are rudimentary, and his characters, despite his knowledge, seem deficient in human complexity...
...in fact, it is a long prose poem drawn from black life in slum America, a fiery sermon about the black man's vision of God, and God's inscrutable idea of blackness...
...But form and shape elude him, as plausibility finally eludes Sanchez...
...A red paint," and so on at intolerable length...
...Mark Twain's Injun Joe is more a bogey in the minds of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer than a realized character...
...His people now live in shabby tents near the garbage dump, where they must pick over the white man's leavings for themselves...
...Go into their shelters and learn their tongue or you will be shot through the heart...
...Only Hallelujah Bob, deranged and God-intoxicated, can truly understand what has been happening to his people, and the novel ends with his long and immensely moving indictment of the white man's most deeply wicked offense against the Washo: "They have locked us off the land...
...For his pains, he is scorned by his people and brutalized by the whites, who try to lynch him...
...Almost every white in Rabbit Boss is brutal, greedy and insensitive, and every Indian is sadly vulnerable and defenseless...
...By the 1950s, the preacher's son, Joe Birdsong, is immovably chained to a life of despair...
...But the stars have lied...
...You will become them...
...To the ones who have built shelters from tall trees...
...He becomes an evangelical preacher, proclaiming the wonders of the white savior Jesus who, in Hallelujah Bob's inflamed mind, is strangely like the Indian messiah, Wovoka...
...In the end, knowing he is defeated, Joe points angrily at a heap of dead rabbits: "You see that...
...Rabbit Boss too often reads like a tract from Wounded Knee...
...Moreover, Cooper's noble savages are romantic fantasies...
...in the process, they shoot off his thumbs for target practice...
...To lose touch with the land is to lose touch with the heart...
...Throughout Rabbit Boss, Sanchez tells his grim story by alternating episodes from each generation...
...Sanchez begins his account of the doomed Washo tribe with the young hunter Gayabuc, son of the great Rabbit Chief...
...My dreams are a red paint...
...We're worth nothing alive and five nickels dead...
...When Joe stubbornly refuses to sell his plot of land, they warn him: "Mister Birdsong, you cannot prove you are your father's son, you see, there is no birth certificate for your father, your father is legally a nonperson...
...That's what we are...
...The land is the heart...
...Forrest's extraordinary language-he is something of a black Dylan Thomas-Is the heart of this curious, sometimes moving, yet frequently indecipherable book: a stormy torrent of dazzling, outrageous, opaque, extravagant, funny, self-indulgent images that one cannot help admiring for their richly inventive bravado, and that one cannot penetrate without the meticulous attention that poetry demands...
...And Captain Rex is a despised servant of the Central Pacific railroad, a "peacemaker" with a phony silver star, paid to make sure the Washos will not hinder the steady westward push of the Iron Road...
...Joe Birdsong, unlike his great-grandfathers, no longer hunts for himself but for others-for them, as the white man is always italically written in Sanchez' book-and not to feed but only to destroy the nature that has been taken from him...
...One of the very few novelists who has written out of a direct, unpatronizing knowledge of the actuality of Indian life is Oliver LaFarge, and his New Mexican Pueblos are light-years removed in custom and history from the Plains warriors...
...In the barren winter of 1846, roaming far from home, Gayabuc stumbles onto the hunger-crazed survivors of the Dormer Party, ravenously tearing at the bodies of their dead...
...After one cites James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Melville, Faulkner, John Hunt, and Oliver LaFarge, there is little to add to the roster of important writers whose imaginations have been stirred by the tangential presence of the redman in white and black America...
...A green plant...
...My heart is a green plant...
...Writers & Writing THE RED AND THE BLACK BY PEARL K. BELL Although the tragic encounter of Indian and white has been a primordial fact of the American experience from its earliest beginnings, only in such popular forms of culture as Western novels and movies has the subject been treated as significant...
...All that he retains of the old ways is his ability, when drunk, to sing like the Tahoe birds...
...True, Forrest's bouquets of words are astounding...
...Oppression, it would seem, is a most treacherous subject for fiction, and neither Sanchez nor Forrest has" met the challenge skillfully enough to win...
...Rabbit Boss (Knopf, 468 pp., $7.95) is the hugely talented Sanchez' first novel...
...Perhaps this is why Sanchez' attempts to record the cadences of Indian rhetoric seem dismally contrived-and uncomfortably reminiscent of Hemingway's bogus Spanish-English in For Whom the Bell Tolls...
...The myth-like speech repeatedly degenerates into tedious chains of pseudo-folk poetry such as "The dust blows through my dry body...
...The narrative moves back and forth in time, from a clean world antedating the white man, to one in which he is the conquering tyrant who has dispossessed the Indian...
...The Donner cannibals are Sanchez' symbol-he labors the meaning too pointedly and repetitiously, but the scene is harrowing nonetheless-of the white man's treatment of the Indian throughout American history: "That is what all whites want...
...At his best, he is a remarkable storyteller, and his ear for the lowdown Western idiom of ranch hands and railroad men is acute and subtle...
...Gayabuc's witness of the savage devouring sits like a curse not only on his life but on that of his descendants as well...
...As a grown man in frenzied, gold-rush California after the Civil War, Captain Rex strays far from the tribal fastness and purity of his father's ancient world...
...Forrest calls his book a novel...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 14
