The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  The wagon crawled slowly up to the big building and came to a sticky stop. Amanda steps down into the mud and sweeps her white hand towards the grounds. “It’s still raw,” she said. “One of the projects the boys are working on is getting a lawn to grow from seed, but as you know that takes a long time and Indians are impatient.”

  I agreed, though knowing nothing about domestic grasses, and added, “When it comes to plants they pick what grows by itself.”

  Amanda was frowning, an expression she wore a lot. “We have our work cut out for us.” She nodded her smooth steep forehead at the building before us. “This is the dormitory: boys’ side to the left, girls’ to the right.”

  As I found out later, there were two distinct entrances and though it was a single structure, a partition divided the interior. From one side you couldn’t get to the other without going outside to the other door, either in front or back.

  Amanda told me now I would be shown to my personal quarters later, but it was suppertime at the moment and though we was already quite late we shouldn’t be no later, and she hikes off in the mud, besliming her shoes and the lower hem of her dress, so I had to do so too, regardless of a fairly new set of boots, and we reached the one-story building that turned out to house the dining hall and kitchen.

  Not a soul but us had been seen till now, but there the whole school was at long tables inside the big bare-board room, all the swarthy-faced, black-haired young Indians, which given my experience was not in itself an unusual sight were it not that I had never seen so many members of that race arranged in alignment, seated on chairs and not the ground. But there was an even more unusual feature: they was all dressed alike, according to sex, the girls in blue-figured gingham dresses, the boys in blue-gray uniforms like soldiers’, with short tunics buttoning to the neck and navy stripes up the pants. In addition, all of them, boys and girls, had their hair cut short.

  As if this wasn’t enough, there didn’t seem to be no talking amongst them, and Indians was not naturally a quiet folk when with their own kind, all the less so when eating, which they did fairly enthusiastically. Given the relative rarity that they could count on having enough food, they tended to chew and swallow wolf- or bear-style when nourishment was before them. But these lads and girls looked more like they was in a class than at a meal, with rigid spines against the chair backs and no expressions of face.

  At the head of each of the tables, which was either for all boys or all girls, was a white person of the staff, and at one side of the hall, at right angles to the others, was a shorter table at which sat a whiskered, bald gent in, I’d say, his late fifties. He didn’t grow no hair on his scalp but had a bushy gray beard which concealed whatever kind of collar and tie he wore. He showed a stern look when no other was called for, so on first meeting up with him you might of thought he would necessarily be disagreeable, but he could be real pleasant, as now when Amanda Teasdale brung me to him, and he stood up smiling politely while she apologized for being late to supper but says she is happy to be able to deliver the sum of money collected by her church in Dodge, where she also found that translator of the Cheyenne language they had been looking for.

  “Major,” she says, surprising me for he wasn’t in no uniform and I took him for a preacher, “this is Jack Crabb.”

  He works my hand like a pump handle, but just twice. “Mr. Crabb,” says he. “We are pleased to see you here. Won’t you sit down?” He did so himself. When me and Amanda did the same, I noticed there wasn’t no plate nor eating tools before him as yet, which relieved me some, for I was right hungry by then. “It might seem paradoxical to you at the outset,” he goes on, “when I say that the purpose of your fluency in Cheyenne for us is to discourage the students from speaking that language.” He smiled as if what he meant was self-evident.

  “Major,” says I, “I was wondering if you could make sense of that for me.”

  He raised his still dark eyebrows in apparent wonderment, but said, in a paternal way, “It’s simple when explained—as I always told my boys in the Tenth Cavalry.” His eyes twinkled. “They were Negroes.” He makes a solemn gesture with his beard. “Our purpose here being to exterminate the wretched savage”—he waited a little, smiling ever broader, to let the provocation of that comment settle in—“and replace him with a fine man, we must begin with the fundamentals, of which language is primary, I hope you agree.” He never waited till I answered, which was just as well, for I didn’t have no idea whatever of where he was aiming. “What seems paradoxical is that to teach a man to quit his old language and adopt a new one, he must first be addressed in his original tongue, else he will never grasp the idea.” The Major blinked his eyes. “I know: we tried that. But we are learning. Hence you are here.”

  There still hadn’t been a sound throughout the dining hall that I heard and nobody was showing up with food. I had caught a faint smell on entering, but that had diminished. As I figured the meal might be waiting on this conversation, I was quick to respond in a way you do when a point’s been well made. “Kee-rect.”

  “Mr. Crabb,” said the Major, “having served as an Army officer for a number of years before becoming a minister of the Gospel, I am accustomed to being addressed as ‘sir.’ As all my other staff observe this practice, it would be awkward if you did not. This is not a military institution, true. But you are my subordinate.”

  Actually he said this in a real nice way. I don’t want to give the impression that the Major was a bad fellow, though you might call him a fool.

  “I don’t mind, sir,” I says. “And I take it you prefer to be called Major over Reverend.”

  He waves a finger at me. “You are quite right, Mr. Crabb! It is simply explained: were I only a parson, with a Sunday sermon to deliver each week and visits to the sick and infirm in between, ‘Reverend’ would of course be more appropriate. But directing this school has more in common with an Army command. Also, in the realm of language ‘Major’ has more dynamic connotations than does the other term.”

  Now Amanda was sitting right next to me, taking all this in and, despite her opinionated nature judging from her attitude towards me, she is saying nothing. Partly to needle her, and partly because it seemed polite, I included her in what I said next. “Sir, I was wondering if we might get a bite to eat. Me and Miss Teasdale just had a railroad ride all day without any food.” Amanda wasn’t the kind of woman who provides or even thinks about meals, and the train, which, in them days before dining cars, used to stop at a town and let the passengers off to feed at mealtimes, hadn’t done so on this trip, having to make up for a delay up the line.

  “Aha,” the Major says, as if at a revelation, “but you see we finished our meal a few minutes ago.” He swept his coat back and went into a vest pocket and brung out a big silver turnip of a watch, which he studied. “Six and a half, to be exact. The tables were then cleared. Were it not for your appearance, the benediction would have been offered by now and the students would have filed out. I’m afraid you must wait for tomorrow’s breakfast, Mr. Crabb. We dine here precisely on time and do no eating between meals. If this seems stern, there is a reason. The Indian is a shiftless soul in his natural state, knowing no order, no direction, no principles. He lives as the wind blows—namely, at random—eating when he has food, abstaining when he has none, like an animal and not a human being. But he is not an animal, Mr. Crabb. He is a man, and as precious in the eyes of God as any other. To despise him is sinful. To help him realize himself as God’s creation is our duty as Christians.”

  I should say right here that the Major was real sincere in his beliefs, and his interest in the red man was honestly based on his religious faith. He weren’t putting contributions to the school into his own pocket, he never had carnal connections with the female students or them on the staff like at some other institutions of the kind (nor was he a heemaneh), and he didn’t show any ambition to move on to a higher post in either education in general or his church in particular.

 
But I didn’t take kindly to the idea of going without food all day and all night, in the support of opinions not my own, and I might of quit then and there had I not been in country unfamiliar to me, without weapons or transport.

  The Major now gets to his feet, followed by the rest of the assemblage—damn if it were not a strange sight to see Indians do anything in unison!—and gives a loud, clear, but real boring prayer that went on forever, after which the students line up in military order, table by table. Now Indians was normally quite curious about what went on around them: you got to be if you’re living off the land. But these young people didn’t pay no attention to one another or their surroundings, and from their expressions or lack thereof, they didn’t seem preoccupied by anything else either. They seemed in a kind of spell, which in fact was not in itself an unusual state for a redskin, who in the sun dance for example would get into a trance in which he didn’t feel it when he tied thongs to his chest skin that subsequently got ripped out.

  Each group or troop was led by the white person who had sat at the head of their table, and now I noticed most of the latter was women, even if their unit was boys. The Major had managed a miracle if he could put Indian males under such a spell they could be marched around by a female of any race.

  Then without another word, the Major strode out in his brisk stride, followed by the rest of the school, marching in a column of twos. I hoped I had not made a bad mistake by coming here, for I was sure out of my element, even, from the look of them, the Indians.

  I says to Amanda, “All right, where am I going to get something to eat?”

  Though being of the type of person who always has to get ahead of you, she would respond to genuine indignation. “I’ll take you to the kitchen,” she says without additional comment, and does so, at the other end of the building.

  Now what had happened before we showed up, as I found on getting into the schedule next day, was that the students on marching in to eat went directly through a mess line at the end of the kitchen, took their trays to the dining-room tables, and after eating, which was timed for seventeen minutes, they marched back again, in units, to leave the trays off in that area of the kitchen where some big tubs was for washing up, went back into the dining room, and sat down again until the Major was ready to stand them up for the prayer.

  Me and Amanda now passed them steaming tubs, where a number of young Indian girls was washing the trays and utensils while others was doing the drying with empty flour sacks, and went back to the big brick oven built into the far wall, where a substantial-sized woman of the colored race, hair covered with a blue bandanna, was about to heft one of the big wood paddles used by bakers, loaded with loaves of risen dough, and fill the racks above the glowing hearth, which was so hot you could feel it on your face from ten foot away.

  When she sees us coming the woman scowls and says, “I got to git this braid a-bakin’.”

  I says, using a familiar turn of speech in them days, “Auntie, I’m real hungry. I was wondering if—”

  “I ain’t you aunt, little man,” says she, real peevish, pronouncing it “awnt,” like she was English, “and I’ll thank you not to call me out of my name.” She’s still holding the laden paddle, which took more strength than I would of had, but then she were a head taller than me and twice as wide.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I says quickly. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I’ll use your proper name when I know it.”

  Amanda give me a dirty look. “It’s Mrs. Stevenson.”

  “I apologize, Mrs. Stevenson. I’m a coarse man, been living with no-counts and lowlifes.”

  The big cook studies me briefly, then she says, “Give you some nice hot braid if you kin wait.”

  “Why, that will be just fine, Mrs. Stevenson.”

  “You don’t have to say the name ever’ time,” she tells me and finally shoves that paddleful of loaves into the oven.

  As it happened I never learned her first name even though I met her husband on various occasions, for he too called her Mrs. Stevenson. The Major had hired her for the job on account of her husband had formerly served under him in the Tenth Cavalry. The Stevensons lived not far from the school in a town that, like the enlisted men of the Tenth, was all Negro. There was more than one of these towns, the best known of which was called Nicodemus, which had been created by freed slaves what had come north to make a life for themselves and figured they were likely to do it better if they made common cause. Hezekiah Stevenson was one of the more prosperous citizens with his Army pension, a nice little grain-and-feed business, and he was also the local postmaster.

  This husband of hers was about the only person Mrs. Stevenson admired. Most everybody else she considered a fool, but she had a soft spot in her heart for me because I greatly favored the food she would of cooked for them all had anybody else, beginning with the Major, cared for it, but they did not, especially them students, all of who just had a taste for what was simply boiled till it fell apart, and that included even the fresh vegetables they growed in the school garden, for that’s the only way the Indians of them days knowed how to cook, so that’s what their children liked. Though Indians might at times eat flesh that was utterly raw, like the liver cut out of a game animal at the time he was brought down, the only alternative was boiling for hours, with maybe some fried dough, which they had learned to make from the whites and consisted of just a hunk of flour-and-water paste in a greased skillet.

  Fact is, I was fond of the fried dough and boiled flesh I ate with the Cheyenne, but being born hungry I liked most of what else was handed me to chew on, my life long, though you’d never know it to look at me, for no matter how much I ate I never gained a pound. I guess I was a challenge to Mrs. Stevenson, whose husband and five kids was also heavyweights. What I would do is take only a small amount on my tray at mealtimes, at which I was obliged as a staff member, one of the few males around, to sit at the head of a boys’ table. Then after I marched my bunch out, I would go back to the kitchen and get something special that Mrs. S. had cooked up for herself but was happy to share with me, the cheese biscuits, country ham with redeye gravy, roast chicken, spoonbread, spicy greens, also all kinds of creamed vegetables made with the products from the little dairy herd maintained by the school.

  Mrs. Stevenson was helped out in the kitchen by them Indian student girls, as part of their studies in what was called domestic science, and I guess she was supposed to teach them to cook the white way (which in her case was actually black, but then the Indian name for Negro was Black White Man), but according to what she told me, she gave up the attempt after a while on account of they was hopeless at it, being too stupid to learn anything of civilization. Mrs. Stevenson was a fine person who treated me like a mother, but she had in her a good deal of what nowadays in the 1950s they call racial prejudice, but in the 1870s was just the way most people not themselves Indian, and not having had a special experience with them like me, looked at the red man and woman. And of course her husband as a veteran of the U.S. Cavalry was unlikely to be an Indian-lover, especially after the Custer fight.

  Now, where I was quartered was in a private room on the top floor of the boys’ side of the big building Amanda showed me first, at the end of a big dormitory full of metal-framed cots, at the foot of each of which was a little trunk of the type the Army called foot lockers, and back of each cot, against the wall, was a rack for hanging clothes.

  My own room was better than the one in that hotel I had lived in during my time in Dodge City, with a cot like the ones used by the boys and an upended wood crate for a washstand, with bowl and pitcher that was, like the mirror over it, uncracked though the thunder mug under the cot was not, and a beat-up chest of drawers.

  Amanda was prohibited from stepping into the male side of the building, so I had been taken there by one of the teachers, a man named Charlevoix, ending in an x, which I would of pronounced had I first seen it written, but having only heard it instead, I believed he was named Charlie Vaw, and I po
litely called him Mr. Vaw a couple times till he put me straight as to the French origin of the name. He claimed descent from one of the French trapper-explorers who had been throughout much of the West before any English set foot in the region and usually got on well with the natives, even taking wives amongst the tribes they encountered, and he allowed as how he might of had a great-grandma who was of the red race, and maybe so, but he himself come from back East and never knew a word of any Indian language and had fairish hair and light-colored eyes, so I don’t know. He come West for his health, having weak lungs or the like.

  Charlevoix told me that while I had a climb to my top-floor room, it would be made up for by having fewer boys to manage than he had on the floor below.

  “Oh,” says I, thinking he had mistook me, “I ain’t no teacher. I was hired as an interpreter.”

  “That’s right,” says he. “At least you will be able to talk to them and understand what they say in return.”

  It took more explanation for me to finally get the idea that I was expected to control the boys lodged on my floor, see they obeyed the school rules as to personal appearance and conduct, which included keeping the place neat and clean, and didn’t make noise or act disorderly such as young male persons of any race take their greatest pleasure in doing, especially in the years just before they officially become men.

  I tell you I hadn’t been at this school for more than a couple hours when I was ready to leave for the second time. I never had no experience keeping big kids in order, my own white child having been carried off by the Indians when he was two, and the baby I had with my Cheyenne wife Sunshine disappeared, with his Ma, after the Washita battle.

  The place was empty at the moment, for after supper the students had to return to the schoolrooms for a study period in which they did homework, them boys what didn’t have evening farm chores and the girls who was not occupied in the kitchen or other housekeeping duties like laundering and ironing the school linens in the washhouse. The way the Major operated the place, it was supposed to be self-sustaining, using student labor, for there was never sufficient funds to pay anybody except the staff, and in fact none of us ever got paid in full and on time. I don’t think the Major himself took any wage.