It had certainly made a change in him: Jimmy could see it for himself. And no wonder. For although it may have come out accidentally, the revelation that he was an Indian found him already prepared to be one. He knew all there was to know about Indians. All his reading, ever since he learned to read, had been about the Indians, and in the accounts of the wars between them and the white settlers he had always taken their side. Now at last he knew why. They had been calling to him, blood calling to blood.
The things about himself that Jimmy had not understood before were explained now. His outbursts of temper, his touchy pride, his moods of contrariness, his impulses of cruelty, the stubborn streak that so irritated his mother: his Indian blood not only accounted for all these, it absolved him from blame for them. If he behaved sometimes like a little savage it was because he was a little savage. It was not his fault. He was what he was. He felt a burden of guilt lifted from him. He was through forevermore with apologizing for himself. It was not his fault that he was part Indian. He could not change that. He could not have done anything about it even if he had wanted to.
Being an Indian was not going to be all fun then. It never had been: this Jimmy knew from his reading; to be one in his day and time was harder than ever, it seemed. Situated where he was, cut off from his people, not even knowing yet who his people were, he was alone, surrounded by the enemy. He would need to be very crafty, very cunning, very wary. He would need to tread softly. He would have to sleep always with one eye open. He would need to grow up very fast. At his age an Indian boy was already training to be a brave.
He no longer joined in childish games. It did not befit his new dignity. To be an Indian was a serious responsibility. He seldom smiled, never laughed anymore. He comported himself with the gravity of a sachem, spoke with the sententiousness of one of Fenimore Cooper’s sagamores. He exulted inwardly to see that his new disdainful silence was more exasperating to his parents and his schoolteachers than open defiance had ever been. When stung by one of his mother’s slurs upon his Indian blood, he betrayed none of his resentment; he stored these up with Indian patience, all to be repaid with interest one day.
Meanwhile the more he brooded upon it the more he resented never being told that he was what he was. And who knew how much longer he might have been kept in ignorance? Had she not lost her temper that day and let it slip, his mother might never have told him. The prospect of this appalled Jimmy. When thought of that way it was not just the pleasure and the pride of being part Indian that he would have been deprived of: that would have been never really to know what he was.
It had come out despite them. Blood, they said, would out, and Indian blood, more powerful than any, would out though it were only a drop. There was an unseen power at work here. The spirits of his long-denied red forefathers had spoken to him at last (ironically enough, through his mother’s own mouth) and claimed him as one of their own. Only who, exactly, were they? What was he? Indian, but what kind? Heir to what renown?
There was just one person who might be able to tell Jimmy the answers to his questions.
III
That his Grandfather Hawkins was half Indian, or more, was plain for all to see, yet Jimmy saw it for the first time when next the family went for a visit out to the farm. He who had been looking all his life for an Indian to adore!
But how were you to recognize the Indian in a man who dressed always in baggy, patched old denim overalls and a tattered denim jumper out at the elbows? Who, as Jimmy had seen, let his old wife cut his hair using an oatmeal bowl as a form instead of wearing it down to his shoulders in braids? Who when he came into town came not riding bareback on a horse but in a creaky old farmwagon drawn by a team of plodding gray mules? Sixty-five years of plowing, hoeing, picking cotton had taken all the noble savage out of the man.
“Grandfather,” Jimmy said, “I’ve just been told that I am part Indian, and that I get it from you.”
“Who told you?”
“My mother.”
“Did, did she? Well, sonnyboy, our side of the family is ever bit as good as yore mother’s, and you can tell her I said so. She’s got a lot to brag about, now ain’t she? Them Tylers. What did e’er a one of them ever amount to? Old Dub Tyler, jake-legged from all the bootleg corn liquor he’s drank, in debt to everbody in town: he’s something to be proud of, I reckon? That’s yore other grand-daddy. So any time yore mother’s in the mood to trade compliments about—”
“What I want to know is, why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this before?”
“I’d of told you if you’d ever of ast me. Whether yore mother liked it or not. Think I wouldn’t? Tell anybody. Not that it’s anybody else’s business but my own. Son, what a man is born don’t matter a hill of beans. It’s what you make of yoreself that counts.”
“If you’re not what you are then what are you?” said Jimmy. “You’re not anything. Tell me now about myself.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell about your father. My great-grandfather. The Indian.”
“Why, what do you want to know about him?”
“Everything! I want to know all there is to know.”
“Well, he was not what you would call a big man. Neither was he a little man. More what you would call middling-sized. Bothered with stomach trouble all his life, though what killed him was not that but something else. Died of—”
“What kind of Indian was he?”
“What do you mean, what kind of Indin was he?”
“I mean like Comanche, or Cheyenne, or Apache. You know. What tribe?”
“Oh. Well, I wouldn’t know nothing about that. Indin, that’s all I can tell you, boy.”
“What was his name?”
“His name? Mr. George P. Hawkins, same as mine.”
“If he was an Indian, where did he ever get a name like that—Mr. George P. Hawkins? That’s not an Indian name. Indians are named names like Rain-in-the-Face or Crazy Horse, or something like that. I expect he just never told you his true name.”
“Must of been a Hawkins in the woodpile back somewheres along the line, just where and when I can’t tell you, ’cause I wasn’t there myself. I can tell you one thing though: I’m grateful I haven’t had to go through life named George P. Crazy Horse. Yes, sir, I’m sure grateful I haven’t had to go through—”
“How about your grandfather? Tell me about him.”
“Never knowed the man. Dead ’fore ever I was born.”
“Didn’t your father ever tell you about him when you were a boy?”
“When I was a boy I never had no time to waste setting around talking about my granddaddy. And I ain’t got none for it now. Maybe he was the Hawkins.”
Another renegade. It ran in the family. Jimmy felt he had much to atone for.
IV
Before the coming of the white man, the northeastern part of Texas where Jimmy Hawkins lived with his father and mother was the domain of the Caddo Indians. The local tribe was one which, although he was born and raised there, and notwithstanding all his Indian lore, Jimmy had never heard of until he began delving into his pedigree.
To learn that he belonged to such an obscure tribe was a surprise, and for a moment something of a disappointment. He had rather set his heart on being a Comanche. However, he liked the name Caddo. He knew he was one: he felt a thrill of recognition the first time he read the word.
Specimens preserved in various museums, he read in the small guide book in the small town library, proved the Caddoes to have been the most talented potters of all the Indians of North America.
But who were their famous chiefs? Who were the Caddo Pontiac, the Caddo Sitting Bull, the Caddo Geronimo? Who were their most renowned warriors? Where were their great battles fought?
The Caddoes it was, he read, who had reared the numerous large burial mounds still to be found in that part of the state and adjacent Louisiana (in the one on his grandfather’s farm did his own forefathers lie sleeping?), which, along with the name of nea
rby Caddo Lake, were at this late date (the book had been published in 1907) the only reminders left of this once large and powerful tribe.
Where had all the Caddoes gone?
Like the Mohicans, the Caddoes were no more. Their numbers depleted by their war against the white settlers, and by the diseases which the settlers brought with them, their last surviving remnant had been forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1854 and resettled on government reservations, where, through intermarriage with and adoption into other tribes, the Caddoes had lost their separate identity.
The little book told no more; none other told as much.
He had been orphaned of his entire nation. He was the last of the Caddoes.
V
What Jimmy Hawkins had always known was now confirmed: he was meant for no common fate. He had been born with a horror of the ordinary, and had always known he was not what he seemed to the world to be. He had often wondered who he really was, and had felt that like the changeling prince in the fairy tale he had been cheated of his birthright and brought up in a meaner station of life than fate and his gifts had intended him for. The reason, as he now knew, was that he was the last of the Caddoes: rightful heir to all that he surveyed, with blood in his veins that cried out for vengeance: a dangerous person, a permanent threat to those who had wronged him. So they must have been warned by the bad fairy (herself Indian) who was not invited to his christening but who appeared at it all the same. “You may bleach him whiter than the snow, give him a white man’s name, and bring him up in ignorance of his people,” she had pronounced in a raspy voice, shaking a bony brown finger at them, “he is what he is. What will be will be.” So Jimmy had always known he was ordained, marked out, chosen to perform some bold feat; now he knew it would be something to vindicate his dispossessed, destroyed, and all but forgotten race. He awaited the revelation of what it would be. Once he knew the name of his tribe he felt the constant presence of his red forebears molding him, training him, preserving him until such time as he should be ready and his mission be revealed to him.
They taught him to see what before he had overlooked, what others, outsiders, still overlooked: the relics everywhere of their immemorial stay in the land from which they had been driven out. In plowed fields they showed him arrowheads that generations of plowmen, though their eyes were seldom lifted from the ground, had not seen. In stones that the unknowing took to be just stones he recognized the mortars in which his people had ground their maize and the pestles with which they had pounded it, the flint knives with which they had skinned their game, the tomahawks with which they had brained their foes.
He felt them most powerfully in the woods. In the green stillness he could see their spirits flitting among the trees and in the whispering together of the branches could hear their voices. He knew no fear, for they were with him. They were the lords of the forest and he their only son, their sole survivor, the last arrow from the once-full quiver of their wrath. And when at home or at school he was whipped for his disobedience, they lent him fortitude. With them at his side he could endure without flinching whatever any white man could mete out. Not a whimper could they draw from him; he sneered in the faces of his tormentors. The last of the Caddoes brought no stain of dishonor upon the spirits of his proud dead.
If to be an Indian was a career in itself, to be the last of one’s tribe was a calling. To be the sole repository of a nation’s history, its traditions, its laws, its beliefs, and its rituals, and to know nothing of that history, those traditions, laws, beliefs, and rituals, and to be just twelve years old, was to carry an almost crushing weight of responsibility. No wonder Jimmy was aged and sober beyond his years. That with all this on his mind he should have no time for friends, for games, or for schoolbooks.
His confirmation time was fast approaching. He would turn thirteen that summer, would enter upon his manhood, and as soon as school was out Jimmy obeyed the call he had heard to make a pilgrimage to his ancestral shrine: the Caddo burial mound on his grandfather’s farm. He was to spend the summer in the country. His parents were relieved to see him go, glad of a rest. The prospect of having him always about the house, of a whole long summer of wrangling, was more than his mother could face. It was his own idea; she need not accuse herself of getting rid of him. After a few months’ separation maybe they would get along a little better. Hopefully, a summer in the open, swimming, going fishing, exploring the farm, would make a happier boy of him, a better pupil when school reopened in the fall.
VI
“He don’t do a thing but dig in that damn dirt pile,” his grandfather reported when Jimmy’s parents drove out to celebrate his birthday. “He’s at it all day long every day and Sunday. Can’t even get him to stop long enough to eat his dinner. If you all weren’t here he’d be out there right now. Wouldn’t you?” Over his shoulder the old man flung a scowl at the great mound of earth that rose like a single gigantic grave out of the field below the house.
“Well, I must say it seems to have done him good. He’s so changed I wouldn’t have known him. Would you, Mother?” said Jimmy’s father, and turning to his wife, received a look that blazed with exasperation.
For no, she would not have known Jimmy, he was so changed, and she was in torment while his father beamed. It was not her boy but a stranger she found awaiting her, a stranger whom she had brought into the world with her pain on this day of the year. He had grown like a weed, had in just these few weeks away from her shot up half a head taller. The last of the baby fat had thinned from his cheeks, which now showed their bones, and his baby fairness was gone: he was as brown as a penny. No longer was he the soft round ungendered little sausage she remembered; his shoulders had wedged out, his little pot been trimmed away neat and flat and hard. The change in his chemistry had coarsened his skin, his hair, thickened his muscles, deepened his voice. Yet though his mother ached to be proud of his new manliness, she could not. She was no part of it. She was a little afraid of him. She felt the misgiving every mother feels when suddenly one day her son comes to present her with his bill for the many slights and indignities of his boyhood.
His manner confused and disarmed her. She had expected on his birthday to find him cocky and impertinent, and had come prepared to overlook it for the occasion. Her forbearance would not be wanted, thank you. Instead she found him subdued, withdrawn, grave. This gravity grated her as no amount of impudence would have done. How dared he treat her with such cool courtesy, as though there were no history of any troubles between them! To learn now that he had spent his time digging so fanatically in that old Indian mound instead of in the harmless pastimes she had imagined made her feel she had been betrayed and mocked.
“Must think he’s going to find some buried treasure. Well, you’re in for a big letdown if you do,” said Jimmy’s grandfather. “The Indins, why, they were all so piss-pore they never hardly had enough to eat, much less any silver or gold. What have you found? Just what I told you you’d find. Nothing but skeltons and a lot of old broken crocks.”
Jimmy was used to his grandfather’s disapproval of his project. The burial mound sat square in the middle of his grandfather’s cotton patch. While Jimmy dug on top of the mound his grandfather chopped the cotton in the field below. Whenever the old man’s progress down the row brought him parallel with the mound he would stop and rest and watch Jimmy dig. He refused ever to face the mound, he would only lour at it over his shoulder, leaning on his hoe handle with one foot crossed over the other and his behind stuck out. But if the sight of his grandson’s foolishness disgusted him, the sight of his grandfather’s degradation filled Jimmy with shame and despair. Commanded by the voice of his people to know himself through knowing them, Jimmy had bared the buried history of the Caddoes, delving backwards in time from their end to their beginning. He had measured the antiquity of his lineage in countless shovelfuls of earth. The handiwork of his tribe had shown him the strangeness of his heritage, his own difference. From the mound’s topmost layer, where the bodies, u
nceremoniously interred, had been so closely packed (“their numbers depleted by their war against the white settlers”) that the bones were inseparably mixed, and where the little bones of children were numerous (“and by the diseases which the settlers brought with them”), he had dug down to the splendid rotting cerements, the broken, once-magnificent urns, the weapons of flint and obsidian worthy to accompany a great chief to the happy hunting grounds, of the days of their greatness: from desolation down to grandeur that made the desolation all the keener. Then to look down and see his grandfather, the man with more of the blood of the Caddoes in his veins than any other living man, hoeing his way down the rows of scraggly cotton: it was a constant reminder of how art the mighty fallen.
“I remember digging in there myself when I was a boy,” said Jimmy’s father. “I never found anything worth keeping.”
“Maybe you didn’t dig deep enough,” said Jimmy.
“Why, what all have you found?”
“Oh, things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Oh, just things.”
“Well, some people collect old Indian things. Mr. Will Etheridge in town, for instance. He’ll pay a dime apiece for flint arrowheads. Whole ones, that is, of course. I’ll speak to him about you next time I see him. You can take and show him what you’ve found, see if he’ll offer you something for it.”
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 39