Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Rose speaks of the uncle with a certain awe: “He has been around. He knows the state of New Mexico like I know the front and back of our house, like I know the lines on my palms. That is what he tells us; he shows us the lines on his palms, and says he knows the roads just as well! When we decided to ask him what he thought of the television set, we were a little worried. He might think we had no right to ask any questions of him. He might send us back to our parents. He might become angry. He can give someone a look, and he doesn’t have to say a word afterwards. Once we saw him walk away from a friend. They were talking, and suddenly our uncle turned and walked away. His friend followed, and tried to say something, but our uncle wouldn’t recognize him. He just kept on walking. He had his head fixed; he wouldn’t turn it to the right or to the left — only straight ahead. I felt sorry for the friend, but our mother said the man must have offended our uncle in some way, because he’s very polite, except when he feels you’ve bothered him with a stupid question or said something that doesn’t make any sense at all, and then he feels that you’ve insulted him, and the only thing he can do to let you know what’s happened is to walk away. According to our mother, he is trying to teach the other person to be wiser.”

  She stops to think. She wonders out loud whether the person so confronted actually learns the lesson. She has, on several occasions, brought up that question with her parents; they have answered guardedly; maybe no, in some cases, but certainly yes in others — and one must be grateful for the latter. Rose is often told that there is good news and bad news every day, that one has a choice: emphasize the one or the other. She has not by any means been told to laugh away the most obvious worries. The point is to add one’s energy to the more hopeful side of things. She recalls her mother’s advice: “Our uncle told our mother to take us outside and show us the land; part of it is without grass or bush, and the rocks are broken and crumbled; part of it is good for grazing. The sheep don’t stop when they find land that is no good for them; they keep looking until they come upon the good land, and then they eat. When our mother told us that, my brother Tom said that we aren’t sheep because we keep thinking about what has happened before. My mother told us to go tell our uncle that! We were afraid to! But she made us do it. So when he came to see us, we asked him if we could talk with him, and he said yes, and we did.

  “He told Tom that he was right, we aren’t sheep. But he said we must eat too; and if we trouble ourselves all the time with thoughts of regret, and more regret, then we won’t have time to find food for ourselves. And then he said it; he said that the white people think sheep are dumb, all animals are dumb, and even a lot of people are dumb — the people they have conquered. But sheep know how to find food, and they do the best they can. At least they leave the land alone that doesn’t offer them food; and they leave other animals alone. The white man won’t leave anyone alone, and he’ll take land that is no good, and before he’s through with it, there’s even more trouble. The white man could learn from a sheep because he thinks he’s made things better, and they’re actually worse, while at least the sheep doesn’t add to the world’s troubles, and doesn’t pretend he’s better or smarter than he is.”

  She is not quite sure of the value of her uncle’s, her mother’s comparison. Her father and her mother and her uncle stress the hypocrisy white people are capable of, but she and her brother Tom, who is thirteen, have seen their own people deceive or exploit one another — and have heard their parents or uncle call attention to that fact. Moreover, sheep can be willful and destructive as well as innocent. Rose calls upon her brother’s observations: “Once Tom and I went to see our uncle, and he was very angry at white people. He said they have hurt us Indians a lot. Then he said they don’t think for themselves. They are like sheep. Tom was going to remind our uncle that he once said sheep are better than white people. But we were both afraid to speak. On our way home Tom said that when he is bigger, he will argue with our uncle, even if it means trouble, and even if our mother and father are upset.

  “Tom likes the teacher he has this year. The teacher tells Tom he is smart, and he should stay in school, and he should go to college later on. Tom says Indians can be unfair to white people; Tom says some of them even lie to each other, and steal from each other. And didn’t they do that before the white man ever came here! The Navahos and the Pueblos fought hard all the time. The Hopis and the Navahos also fought hard, and they still do. The white man didn’t bring us all our troubles. Tom says we should be fair. He tells our mother a little of what he thinks, but she says he should keep his ideas to himself, or else he’ll get into trouble with our father and our uncle, and the spirits of our grandfathers, both of them, will be made restless, and they will come to visit Tom.

  “Our mother says that she knows when she has said or done something wrong; she gets upset, and she walks up and down, and she can’t stop walking, for an hour she can’t, and that’s because the spirit of her mother or her father has heard what she said or found out what she did, and is unhappy with her, and she can feel the unhappy spirit inside, and she has to walk and say to herself that she will not repeat her mistake if she can help it. Then the spirits leave her, and she can go back to cooking, or something else she was doing. Tom wouldn’t say it to our mother, but he told me that he’s never had any spirit visit him, and he doesn’t think any spirit ever will visit him. When you die, you say good-bye. The teachers say there aren’t any spirits. If you know you’ve done wrong, then you try to say to yourself that it won’t happen again, if you can help it. That’s what the teachers tell us in school — to try to learn from the mistakes you make and not worry about spirits.”

  Rose cannot let it go at that, however. The teachers, too, make mistakes — spirits or no spirits. And then, even more explicitly in defense of her people, she reminds herself out loud that there are crimes and crimes, that Indians have never been quite as successful at dominating others as white people have. Her brother has acknowledged that also; like her, he can go only so far as a critic of his own people. On her own, Rose has come up with a theory about the difference between white people and her own people. The former, she believes, are fast-moving, restless, all too worried about themselves and what the future has in store for them. She watches the white teachers in school, watches white people when she goes to Albuquerque, watches them when they get out of their cars near the reservation, to look around. They can’t stay still; they walk faster and talk faster than Indians, or so she believes.

  She is willing to express what she feels with crayons; she is willing to sketch a white man she knows, who works for the federal government, and an Indian she knows who does the same. They often come to the reservation together, and Rose is convinced that if she were blind, she could still identify the one as opposed to the other. She draws the white man first (Figure 47). She explains why: “If I draw the Indian first, I won’t want to draw the white man. It’s best to draw your favorite picture last. You can look forward to doing it.” She has no interest in putting the white man on the ground, or in showing a sky or the sun or clouds over him. She starts with his feet rather than his face, a rather unusual point of departure. She works her way rather rapidly up to his knees, his hips, his chest. Finally his face begins to take form. She gives him wide eyes but no ears. His arms are added at the very end, and they are quite long, simian, really. The last touch is the mouth, which she says out loud that she has forgotten. It is wide open, teeth bared.

  As for the Indian, she needs another sheet of paper for him, even though there is plenty of room on the one she has just used, and even though when she sees the two men they are almost invariably together — “inspectors,” she calls them, “from the bureau” (Figure 48). The Indian is done from top to bottom — his face first, and it is a contrast with the white man’s: hair quite slicked down, ears rather substantial, eyes mere slits, mouth firmly closed, head turned slightly down. The neck is shorter than the white man’s, the torso thinner, a touch smaller, the legs a
nd feet also thinner and also smaller. When she is through with the body, she prepares to stop drawing. She begins to gather her crayons together and puts the two drawings side by side as if to look at what she has accomplished. Suddenly she has an afterthought. She decides to put ground under the Indian. In fact, she ends up locating him on a slight incline, barren but with some desert grass nearby. No sky over him, no sun. As for the white man, she feels no inclination, it seems, to do anything further about him. The Indian is put on top of him, and the crayons on top of both of them.

  But they are not so easy to put out of one’s mind. Rose remembers the last time the two men visited the reservation: “They were curious about our water supply. They did some tests, I think. They had test tubes, like in school; they were going to send the water to a laboratory. The white man always smiles at us; he smiles too much. He likes to pat us on the head. He told the Indian that we are good children. My brother filled up a bag of water; he wanted to throw it at them. My mother said he mustn’t. An Indian can get into trouble with the government. The Anglos say it is our land, our law; but they run everything. The Indian man is the one who knocks on the door; he’s the one who asks if he can come in. But it’s the white man who carries the notebook and he drives the car. My brother said if he was older, he’d pull the Indian to the side and ask him if he knows how to drive. If he said he couldn’t, I’d tell him my father would be glad to give him lessons. Tom says the teacher told him at school that the only way that white people will ever get to look up to Indian people as equals — well, according to the teacher, the only way is for us to prove we’re equal. Tom and Sally and I will prove we’re equal when we’re older. It will be hard though. My mother says the Pueblos have to walk on a boundary line — one foot on the white man’s land and one foot on our land. You shouldn’t go too far in either direction. You can get into trouble.”

  Keeping an Eye on the White Man

  Another student of the teacher Tom quotes so often is less impressed with what he hears — and less inclined to worry about boundary lines. Sam is Tom’s second cousin; he is also Tom’s age, give or take a few months. He won’t tell Tom his birthday; or rather, he likes to move his birthday around, one day claiming to be Tom’s junior, the next his senior. He has his mother’s sanction for such evasiveness or forgetfulness; she long ago told him that she isn’t quite sure herself of his birthday and doesn’t especially want to be, either. Sam can be defiantly her champion in that regard: “I don’t care if I’m twelve or thirteen today. It’s all right to keep track of the years, but why bother with the month and the days? My grandfather says it is the white man’s madness, birthdays and wedding anniversaries and the candles on the cakes. He says he doesn’t know when he was born or how old he is and he’s tired of being asked by white people. They look at the lines on his face. They ask him his birthday. He smiles and says nothing. He tells us that once he was a child, and then he became a man, and then he became a husband, and then a father, and now he has us grandchildren, and two of his grandchildren have their children, and he is old, and he will die one day. He says it is only white people who spend most of their time calling themselves twelve, thirteen, fourteen, or sixty, seventy, eighty.

  “Once he took me on a walk, and we walked very far, out to the mesa, and then to another mesa. We talked a lot. He kept pointing out birds to me, hawks, eagles. He showed me where snakes hide. He told me about the rocks, which ones are soft and which ones are hard, and how to tell without picking them up. He remembers when the bureau came and when they built the school. He told me about his grandfather, and how they would walk together on the reservation, and how his grandfather would be with white people: he would look at them and not say anything, but if he had to talk, he would think to himself first how to say what was on his mind in the fewest words.

  “I told my grandfather that in school the teachers want you to talk a lot if you’re giving an oral composition. He smiled. He said I was right; you can’t make anyone’s life the guide for your own. He said that he knows many ways to walk to the mesa, and it’s up to both of us, when we’re walking, to decide which way is the best one. But he said one thing I must never do is stop every other minute and ask myself-how far have I gone, and how far do I have to go? All the signs on all the roads, telling you that there are twenty miles between here and there, and a few minutes later, eighteen miles — all those signs are the white man’s, and they are his way of stopping himself all the time, to ask how old he is and how far he’s gone and how much he has to go until he gets to — the next sign!”

  Sam laughs. He can recall the impatience and scorn in his grandfather’s voice as he talked about birthdays and road markers. He can recall the smile that came over the old man’s face. There are times when Sam worries that his grandfather belongs to another age — that his strong convictions are hopelessly outmoded. But there are other moments when the boy realizes that he has been brought up short by the old man — and that it is all to the good: “My grandfather is from the past; he belongs there. When he grew up there weren’t any automobiles. No one thought of traveling from home to work (over thirty miles) in a half an hour; you couldn’t move like that. Those signs just let you know how fast you’re going. But he makes you stop and think. It’s true, people aren’t like they used to be. He wishes they were. But if you’re young, you don’t have his memories. When I go see him, he tells me what happened in the First World War and the Second World War. He sounds like the teacher, when she reads from her history book. He’s talking, a lot of the time, about white people who aren’t alive. The white people today aren’t the same as the white people were fifty years ago. The Indians aren’t the same, either.

  “I’d like to have a car, and if it could go real fast, I’d really be glad. And if I was driving along, I’d want to know how many miles I’d just traveled, and how many more until I hit Albuquerque. My grandfather doesn’t drive, so he laughs at the signs. And he makes me laugh too — because when I walk with him I see what he means: it’s nice, like he says — just using our feet and not worrying about the state police or the traffic signs or lights. He walks half the day, then he rests. He worries that we don’t walk as much, his grandchildren. My father says it’s the same with birthdays — in the old days you didn’t have to worry about when you were born, the day or the year; but now it’s different because the teachers and the government people, they all have to know, and the reason is that it’s the law. The government has to know when you’re old enough to go in the army, or when you’ve reached the age you can collect money because you’re too old to work.”

  He has been quite serious, but suddenly he smiles. His grandfather has again come to mind: such a proud, strong man — and so wise, so kind. A few seconds later the boy is less relaxed. His grandfather is intransigent, irreconcilable, pointedly scornful of “progress.” He reveres the old man, indicates that his words also mean a lot to many on the reservation — but that many others are all too caught up with the white man’s world. He begins to draw a picture of his grandfather. As he draws, he tries to give voice to the old man’s, to his own, ideas about contemporary life on the Pueblo reservations of New Mexico. He was prompted, as he indicates, by his desire to do justice to an old man’s apparently frail, yet ever so lithe, strong, and certainly well-practiced legs: “I can’t do it. If I was the best artist in New Mexico I still couldn’t do it — draw his legs right. If you look at them they seem ready to fold under him, and never carry him anyplace. But he stands up and starts moving, and it’s a miracle. He talks to his legs, especially when he is getting started. He thanks them for all the carrying they’ve done. Once I asked him: For how long? He said he doesn’t know. And what difference does it make? I laughed. I said I know, I know. He joked with me. He said he didn’t know if he was seventy-five or eighty — so he couldn’t tell me how long his legs have been going! He said he has never kept track of his age.

  “My uncle’s legs have moods; one day they feel bad, and they don’t wan
t to leave the bed. The next day they are full of life. They want to keep going, even when he says no, he is ready to stop. That is when there is a war going on, between his legs and his chest. He coughs, so he wants to rest; but he can feel the itch in his feet. He sits down and holds his feet and talks to them, and then they quiet down, and he is smiling again.

  “My uncle tells me that I should learn to do what I want to do, and think what I want to think, and not be taken in by the white man. I say yes, yes; but he gives me a look, and tells me that he knows that I am young and he is old, and I don’t agree with him. When I tell him no, I do, he laughs and says I must stand up to him and say what I believe. Then I do. I try to argue. I repeat what I’ve heard others say. He listens. He says yes, yes. I think I’ve won him over. But no, he is following me, but not agreeing. He is saying yes to let me know that he sees exactly what I’m telling him. But he’s heard it all before. And he has the answers. If you give in to the white man, then you are not yourself any more — that’s his reply to me. I don’t understand; so he goes on. I’m still not convinced. Finally, I’ll say it: we have been conquered — a long time ago. Then he’ll smile some more and give me his long speech.