Children of Crisis

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Children of Crisis Page 81

by Robert Coles


  “He’ll say yes and no; we were conquered, that’s right, but we can still fight for ourselves, and the best way to fight is to stay away from the white man’s habits. Once you start counting time like him, and miles like him, and coins like him, then you’ve been trapped, you’re beaten. At least we can live according to our own beliefs on the reservations. The white man has cornered us but not trapped us. There’s a big difference, he says. Even my father agrees — and he will defend the white man sometimes. I’ll be driving with my father, and he’ll want to know what time it is, or how many miles to Santa Fe, and I smile, and then he does too because he knows that I’m thinking of my grandfather and what he would say, and suddenly my father is thinking of his father too.”

  Sam says that he knows one thing for sure: he will never live to be as old as his grandfather, nor will he be as strong as his grandfather — physically or mentally. Any effort to cast doubt on that conviction is regarded as meaningless and ignorant reassurance. Hasn’t Sam’s father said essentially the same thing — about himself, of all people: that he is soft, that he has been “corrupted” by the white man? Sam remembers those words, “soft” and “corrupted,” as he draws his grandfather’s face: strong features, lines and more lines, large and knowing eyes. As for the arms, so strikingly stretched, the boy offers an explanation: “He loves to call the land ours; he says it is ours, and no one will take it away, not while he is alive. If white men come from Albuquerque to invade us, he will walk in front of their cars or trucks. They will have to kill him. When I try to say that I’m sure no white man wants to touch our reservation, he says that may be true today, but tomorrow might bring different news. Then he will laugh and say that I am the wise old one and he is the small child; he says that every time we talk about the white man. No, I try to tell him, but he shows me why. He holds his arms out wide and says the land is ours, and the white man can’t take it away from us, even if he drives up and down every road, with his trucks, and even if he sends his planes to cover us like a big cloud, and even if he hoists his flag over every building on the reservation. I’m right, he tells me: there is nothing to be afraid of. He bends over and picks up some of the soil, and says that it’s inside him, not just there, beneath us. And soon he expects to die, and then he’ll watch over the reservation, and no white man will dare try to bother us.”

  It is hard to argue with that line of reasoning. The boy has been told that he is right, but he isn’t sure that he is being considered right for the right reason. The boy puts aside the drawing — puts aside his grandfather, it seems. The boy even admits that upon occasion he has thought of joining the white man’s army and traveling all over the world. He would, as a matter of fact, prefer the navy or the air force. He has watched old movies and followed serials on television, and taken a liking to the planes and boats used in World War II. Might there be some of them left? Might he get to travel on an old destroyer across an ocean, or fly across America on an air force plane? As for the new jets, to be a pilot and fly them, one requires a college education, he has been told. He will never get that far in school, never be a pilot. There may be other air force jobs available, but he doubts he would be found suitable for them. As for the navy, why should it accept someone like him — an Indian who knows nothing about the water?

  He wonders out loud about other Indians. Have any of them been in the navy, the air force? If so, as pilots, as members of a submarine crew, or in less interesting and attractive positions? Suddenly he turns on his own train of thought; it is foolish for him to think of going into the air force or the army, and for precisely the reasons his grandfather would suggest: “My grandfather knows many Pueblo Indians who have left the reservation and gone into the city to live. He knows men who have gone into the army, and men who have even tried to leave the country, and live in Canada — anyplace to leave here and try to get work and make some money. But they come back. They are not happy away from home. If a place is your home, you never will stop missing it. Our ancestors, they call for us, wherever we go. My uncle says he can feel the pull; he will wake up, and he will be thinking of his mother or his father, and he gets out of bed because his mother always wanted him to get up as soon as he’s awake, and he checks on the horse and the dog and cat, because his father always said: Animals before people! When we’re walking, he passes a tree or a shed, or the store, and he lowers his head, and I’ll think he’s talking to himself, but he isn’t. He says it’s the spirit of his mother or his father — inside him.

  “My father and mother are a little like my grandfather. They talk to people who have died. My father gets angry with himself; he says that he has made a lot of mistakes, and he is sorry, and when I see no one nearby, I know it’s his mother he’s talking to, and his mother’s brother. The teachers tell us we’ve got to forget a lot of the beliefs our people have, but we don’t agree. We keep quiet. We say yes, but cross our fingers — that way we are really saying no. I don’t think I could stay away from my people for too long. I don’t talk to my ancestors, but my grandfather’s voice — I do hear it a lot of the time, when I’m wondering what to do. He taught me how to ride his horse, and he taught me how to care for the chickens, and build a shelter for our dog, so the sun doesn’t beat on him all the time. They used to have horses in the army, but no longer. I guess an Indian belongs on land, not the sea or the air, if he’s going to be in the military. There are Indians at the air force base in Albuquerque, I believe. They are janitors.”

  That observation stops him short. He stares out the window — up at the sky. It is a clear, sunny day in April, not too warm, a bit breezy. He has never been out of the state of New Mexico, and only rarely has he ventured to cities like Santa Fe or Albuquerque. His father is a janitor, not at an air force base, but another property of the federal government, a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. And his father considers himself lucky indeed to have that job, any job. Sam has five uncles, two on his father’s side and three on his mother’s, who are without work and have been for several years. Sam breaks his silence by making reference to one of his uncles, his father’s younger brother; he wanted to join the air force, dreamed of being a pilot, or a navigator, watched any television program that had to do with aircraft, got as far as a recruiting station and a medical examination, was told he had tuberculosis, spent two years in a sanatorium, almost died, managed to recover, has never been able to find any permanent job, drinks excessively, tells his nephew Sam that he ought to go to Denver or California, and try to find work and lose himself among white people, but has also told the boy it is impossible to do that, and so he may one day be in the same predicament as his uncles are and will be for “all the years to come.”

  The boy repeats the phrase when talking about the sky he has been silently gazing at: “Up there it is always the same. For all the years to come there will be the sky. When it gets very cloudy, I wonder how deep the clouds are, and I think that maybe they have won their battle with the sun and will keep it from us every day. But soon there is only the blue, and the sun and the moon and the stars. My mother is sure that the stars talk to each other. When they flicker and twinkle, she says they are gossiping. My father says no, we will never know the secrets of the heavens. I told them what we learn in school; and when the white men went up to the moon, I told them that one day there would be landings on other places up there, but my mother said that the white men landed here, in New Mexico, too, but they didn’t really know what to look for. My father said that some white people are good, and they mean well, but they don’t live in the same world we do; they go driving through their world, and we’re walking through our world on tiptoe! That’s what his father told him when he saw the first automobile come to our reservation. His father knew that a million more would follow (that was the number he predicted) because the white man does everything big.”

  He has averted his eyes from the sky toward the road, but now he again stops talking and again regards the big sky. He decides to draw a picture of that sky
(Figure 49). He works carefully and without feeling the need to say anything. Soon he has covered a large piece of paper with blue. He uses his yellow crayon cautiously, subtly. He will have no part of conventional yellow circles with radiating spokes — the white man’s sun his schoolteachers have portrayed and handed out in their illustrated storybooks. He infiltrates the blue with the yellow, manages to give the light he has evoked a somewhat vague, ill-defined appearance. He is offering an impression, a suggestion of what he senses going on above him. A child who has never heard of French Impressionist painters, or their predecessor, the Englishman J. M. W. Turner, struggles hard, and knowingly, to escape the tyranny of form. As he turns to a black crayon, holds it poised, he decides to clarify his intentions: “I wish I could see a cloud when it is born. We used to watch chickens being born, and my uncle would say that trees are born and clouds, too, and once, a long time ago, the sun and the earth, they were born; but we can’t just go out and see things like that happening. My grandfather used to tell my father that everything has a life; the sun will die, and when that happens there will be other suns being born. Everything comes and everything goes. The years to come are the only things that stay; they aren’t the white man’s years, though; they are just light and dark in the world.”

  He acknowledges his deep sense of awe at the mysteries of being — of time and space, of beginning and end, of life in its various manifestations. He approaches the paper with the black crayon; it has been suspended from its task for a while. Just before the crayon touches the paper the boy tightens his hold, moves his hand in a circular fashion over the drawing — as if wielding an instrument. Suddenly he stops his hand, he moves the crayon from a slanted to an upright position and lets it touch the paper gently, then firmly: a black dot. He makes another, another. He talks freely about what he has in mind to create: “I’d like to show the start of some clouds. A cloud must be very small in the beginning. There must be a place in the sky where (if you could only be near there) you could watch clouds begin to form. They told us in school that clouds are moisture; but my mother said that clouds are clouds, not moisture. There is moisture in clouds, I guess you can say that. The reason I’d like to go up in a plane someday is that I’d like to see the clouds from the other side, and I’d like to see rain falling from them, and I’d like to see how they bump into each other, and become bigger or smaller or disappear.”

  He is done. His last gesture is a determined, brisk move of the palm of his drawing hand over the picture — as if to insist that he wants things blurred rather than precise. Then a new drawing (Figure 50); possessed of a new surge of energy and enthusiasm, he decides to take on the night.

  Sam is a great one for the evening. His mother loves that time — after supper. She asks her children to go outside and sit with her. She asks them to be quiet. She asks them to look at a particular segment of the sky. There is no apparent method in her nightly inclination to scan the stars. She simply follows her whim — one night that spot over there, the next night another spot somewhere else. The moon comes first though — at night, as well as in the drawing. The mother and her children smile at it, or lament its absence — in which case, however, they always remind themselves of the near future: a full moon will come sooner or later. The mother often tells her children what she calls “sun-moon stories,” which she heard from her mother and grandmother.

  Sam tells his favorite story of the evening while he wields his crayons: “Once it was a very cloudy day, and my mother saw the sun trying to break through, but it never succeeded. Then it rained. Then it stopped raining, but still no sun. Finally evening came, and no moon, either. Early the next morning everyone woke up, because there was much thunder, lightning. It was one of the worst hailstorms we’d ever had: large stones all over the Valley and up the Sandia Mountains. By the time my mother got out of bed, my grandmother had made cereal, and was singing away. My mother asked her why she was singing so much. She didn’t like the question at all. She said she always sings in the morning. But my grandfather said that some mornings she hardly sings, or doesn’t sing. And he said she’d never sung as much as that morning! My grandmother smiled and said she wasn’t going to argue. ‘You are the listeners,’ she said, ‘and so you must be right.’ Then she said that she’d jumped out of the bed, with the first strike of thunder and lightning, and that she’d been watching the rain and later the hail fall, and that all of a sudden the sky cleared, just before sunrise — and there was the moon. And a few minutes later the first light came over the sky, beyond the mesa: the sun slowly rising.

  “She said the hailstones sparkled in the early morning sun, and she went out and picked them up and looked at them in her hand. Then she noticed the shadow of the full moon, and she decided that she would ask the moon and the sun what had happened. She made herself coffee, and she brought a chair outside, and put it right in front of the house, and she sat and drank her coffee and looked up at the sky. That’s when she decided the sun and moon had been fighting, and they’d been chasing each other, and finally they stopped, and threw stones at each other; but only for a while. The sun decided to stop, and the moon said yes, it was time to stop, and they made up, and the next thing everyone knew, the sky was as clear as it could be, and the sun was warming the earth up, and the moon could hardly wait for the evening, when it would come out a full moon, and all around it would be the stars. That evening the moon was low, and there were more stars than anyone had ever seen, and even the white men, the Anglos, stopped on the road, at the high point to the north of the reservation, and got out of their cars and looked at the sky. My mother thinks the hail might have been small stars that fell. The moon and the sun used the stars to fight each other. When they made up, the stars celebrated; they were brighter than they’d been before.”

  He has no memory of the actual evening, for he was a baby of two or three. When he asks his mother whether he ought to remember the event, she says he does. She tells him that once in school they showed the children a picture of a microscope, whereupon he came home and said that he wished he could put a hailstone under the microscope because thereby he would be learning more about the fights that go on up in the sky. Sam doesn’t remember that either; he does, however, remember quite well the various times, more recently, that his mother and father have sat down with him and his brothers and sisters and talked about the sun and the moon, the clouds and the rain, the hailstones and thunder and lightning — and about the mesa, toward which they look so often and about which they think and wonder and talk. The boy wants to finish his drawing of the sky. He works intently. He falls silent. His moon is very much like his sun, indistinct yet luminous. His stars are glowing, anything but remote from the viewer. His sky is dark yet inviting, intriguing. He takes the unusual step of mixing paints and crayons — a splash of white paint to give a phosphorescent quality to the evening clouds, which (he patiently explains) have caught a moonbeam, hence their virtual sparkle in the night sky. A splash of blue to lighten the darkness — a promise, maybe, of the coming morning. He acknowledges that he is glad to be finishing this particular drawing. It is not easy to do an evening sky; he is sure he gets too easily and too much distracted by his family’s strong and continuing interest in what happens (and what might be happening) in the world above them.

  But that difficulty, that “problem,” is nothing, he is quite willing to assert, compared to the challenge of drawing the mesa. For Sam, and for other Indian children who live near him, this mesa is both nothing and everything. It is a mere elevation of land — as his teachers have time and again reminded the boys and girls in their classrooms. It is no rarity; mesas are a fairly constant feature of the southwestern landscape. It is also, however, a distant place that one might reach, given the energy and will, but which one is by no means anxious simply to use or enjoy (for games and rest). The mesa, actually, is something to see; it is also something that literally enables vision — and most broadly, a certain perspective.

  Sam struggles
hard to say what he wants to say, no more and no less. He is anxious to indicate where physical appearance ends, psychological significance begins. He is anxious to indicate the challenge that the mesa as an artistic object presents to him and to his crayons and paints. And as he speaks, he makes clear, also, his conviction that those crayons and those paints are not inert. “I remember my father took us to the mesa. He said he didn’t want us to go there all the time, but he wanted to show us that we could go there. So we did. When we got halfway there I told my father that it wasn’t the same mesa we’d been looking at; and he said that was true. And when we got all the way there, it wasn’t a mesa at all. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t. When we were on the mesa, we looked at our reservation. It seemed different — almost as if we were in the sky, looking down at the earth. You start thinking when you are on the mesa. You don’t talk. You look. I was glad to be there, but I was glad to leave. I was glad to get back home; then I looked out, and there it was, the same mesa we’d always had. My grandfather used to talk to the mesa; he’d say that when he woke up and he didn’t feel too good, he’d sit down and keep looking out toward the mesa, and he’d ask it for some of its strength, and after a while he’d begin to feel better.

  “I hope the crayons know that they’re doing an important job; and the paints, too. They can be a help; sometimes I feel they do all the work! In school, my little sister says she doesn’t like to draw at all. But at home it’s different. She says that when the crayons are here in the house, they’re our crayons, and they do the right thing. But in school you’re doing something for the white man, and the crayons are his. My grandfather used to tell us not to bring home a lot of rocks from the mesa. That’s a white man’s trick, he kept reminding us — to take things and move them around and dig up everything and change the whole world around, and soon nothing is the way it was meant to be.”

 

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