The Indian in Fiction
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
THE INDIAN IN FICTION BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS I have just reread two interesting novels about American Indians, one recent, the other more than two decades old. You'll hear about them in a moment,...
...This night, however, I have run into a traffic problem: An old rattletrap, minus both headlights and taillights, jounces slowly ahead of me, lurching from side to side in ways that discourage my passing...
...Nobody suffers very long or very deeply as a result of Joe's shenanigans, because that's all they are-shenanigans...
...But first I walk to the other, car and stand near the driver's open window...
...he and the others have been drinking all week...
...Now for the two novels-Dan Cushman's Stay Away, Joe, first published in 1953 and still selling briskly to schools, Elks Clubs, and Indians...
...The car is packed with passengers...
...Home from his village carouse, our benumbed hero learns that his Cree girl friend has run off, taking his gun and his electric razor, which she will doubtless trade for drinks...
...It doesn't matter," he says...
...Now I hear the grinding of an old car...
...Both works concern Indians living on a Montana reservation...
...Unlike whites, Indians "really know how to live...
...But she didn't really count...
...It was the laughter of one who understands a moment in his life, of one who has been let in on the secret through luck and circumstance...
...We know that in actual life Big Joe would either be in jail or dead-a victim of murder or suicide or an auto accident or a diseased liver or any of the other plagues that visit Indians more frequently than they do the rest of us...
...Cushman does not generalize...
...I skid to a stop and jump out...
...Oh Lord, a baby...
...Next time I'd do it right...
...James Welch begins his brief, moving tale with a diagnosis of the Indian reality by the nameless narrator, who is trudging homeward from yet another drunken weekend in town: "Coming home to a mother and an old lady who was my grandmother...
...On the reservation, few infants survive the toss...
...Viking, the original publisher, sold 15,000 copies...
...Again I see myself holding a baby beneath the Rosebud moon, and later peering squeamishly into the heavy, brimming Indian darkness...
...he gets drunk and picks a fight with his sister's white fiance...
...He steals his father's cows...
...I count nine heads by the beam of my lights...
...Maybe it does...
...Francis holding in my arms a sleeping Sioux infant...
...Washte," says a male voice...
...No wonder the book was an instant commercial success...
...That is why he threw the baby out the window...
...I tell her I will take her and the baby to a priest in St...
...And Joe himself remains alive and well in Indianland...
...Toward the end of the book the narrator's grandmother dies, and soon afterward he happens to visit an ancient Indian who lives in a shack across the creek...
...Mainly, I suspect, for the same reason we can laugh at certain kinds of "sitcom" miseries on television: They have no real consequences...
...like the baby tossed on the highway, he emerges without a scratch...
...Still, Cushman's Indian readers may be too eager to see themselves as happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-wells...
...no one meant anything to me...
...Francis...
...At its best it is comic without being condescending...
...I give her the baby...
...But Welch has another agenda...
...That is good...
...Apparently they have thrown a dirty yellow blanket out the window-maybe to frighten me, I speculate absurdly...
...I stoop to pick up the blanket...
...Welch, an Indian, writes like the early Camus: sad, gutsy, freighted with identity riddles...
...For that matter none of them counted...
...Please," she says, "my baby...
...He is a Korean War veteran, an occasional rodeo performer, an incurable braggart, and a liar...
...The road is so straight, flat and unfrequented that pilots of small aircraft regularly use it as a landing strip...
...yet the implication of his novel is that Indians are good-natured lazybones who in some earthy way have solved the problems of existence...
...She explains that her husband is very drunk...
...he smashes his new, unpaid-for Buick...
...And the girl who was thought to be my wife...
...I peer inside and feel the same intimations of heaviness that I get when I enter an Indian bar: Many hunched men in dark, bulky coats, sweating, boozing, muttering mysteries...
...he seduces another man's wife...
...I am driving a rented Mustang to a meeting in St...
...Francis a few miles south of Rosebud, South Dakota, where the Brule Sioux have their tribal headquarters...
...In 1964, Cushman bought all the rights and began selling his book through his own company in Great Falls, Montana, Stay Away Joe Publishers...
...There, as the two share a bottle of whiskey, he learns that this old man is his grandfather, the protector and lover of his grandmother many years ago when the Blackfeet were still fighting the white soldiers...
...I'm taking her and the baby to Father Fagan," I say into the darkness...
...at its worst it is slickly sentimental...
...Suddenly, as I watch, a hand comes out of a back window and tosses a dark object onto the road, directly in my path...
...I still get a lot of orders from Indians," he told me in a recent telephone interview...
...But most people seem to like him...
...At the center of this raucous bunch squats Big Joe, the older son...
...and James Welch's Winter in the Blood, issued late last year...
...Why is all this funny...
...It is an ideal theme for a white audience: We need not feel guilty about them because they are happy...
...So the young man shrugs through his meager days, unfeeling if not entirely uncaring...
...Francis at which I have been asked to speak...
...Did it move just then...
...She stretches out her arms...
...Stay Away, Joe recounts the misadventures of one Indian family and its friends, a generally endearing assortment of knaves, thieves, drunks, and mountebanks...
...And that is where a lesser writer might have left him, lurching in aimless debauch like that car on the road to St...
...Welch seems to be drawing a delicate connection between one's knowledge of the past and one's sense of the future-a gossamer tie between the old and the new, history and hope...
...Francis...
...It is the rattletrap again, backing toward me in a series of wide, drunken parabolas...
...It is not much of a plan but it may be the first one that has ever crossed his mind...
...then the Book-of-the-Month Club sold an additional 250,000...
...Welch's story has cast a little light on that troubling scene, and I am grateful...
...I am standing beneath a cold Dakota moon on the road to St...
...He was not referring simply to the distance of the Montana landscape: ".the distance I felt came from within me...
...They say the book speaks the truth about them...
...I don't want to go with them," she says, "They will get us all killed...
...Washte...
...It was years ago, when I occasionally visited Indian reservations as a housing consultant, but the memory is strong...
...It was clearly an advanced case of winter in the blood, the spiritual legacy of colonialism...
...Two subsequent paperback editions accounted for another 1 million sales...
...I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon...
...Before it has quite stopped a woman climbs out and runs toward me...
...That is all we are told of the incident-except that later it moves him to think about going after the Cree girl...
...Not a scratch on him (her...
...The news has an astonishing effect: "I began to laugh, at first quietly, with neither bitterness nor humor...
...Cushman, a white man, is more like Steinbeck-poker-faced and parsimonious-and his book does for the Indian peasantry what Tortilla Flat does for the Chicanos...
...I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years...
...Big Joe is forever causing trouble...
...Buy her a couple of cremes de menthe, maybe offer to marry her on the spot...
...You'll hear about them in a moment, after I've told you what happened one night on the road to St...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 11
