The People

by Bernard Malamud

“When you refer to ‘ancestors,’” said the Commissioner, “do you refer to American Indians or to Hebrews?”

  Yozip considered the question slowly. “I mean any kind ancestors that they lived before us and believed in the Great Spirit Chief in the sky.”

  “Considering all things,” said the Commissioner, “I will tell you we would be happy to assist your tribe if we possibly can. However, you must understand that the United States of America is an expanding nation. We grow in great haste because our opportunities are manifold. We would like to set aside this valley you have so much affection for, but we must ask you to understand that our country’s foremost need, far into the future, will be land. And more land. We are a great nation with an important future. Therefore, we have to ask you not to make requests we can’t possibly fulfill, and which ultimately embarrass us.”

  “We do not wish to embarrass anybody,” said Yozip. “We wish you to consider what is our need. We wish to live in peace with you.”

  “What did you say your name was?” the Commissioner asked, playing with an ivory letter opener on his desk.

  “Yozip Bloom.”

  The Commissioner laughed as he removed and thoroughly cleaned his pince-nez. “That’s what I thought. Still another Joseph to deal with. I’m sure you know your chief is called Joseph?”

  Yozip blushed. “Now I know,” he admitted. “He is also Tuk-Eka-Kas.”

  “In any case, I must advise you and your fellow ‘tribesmen’ not to interfere in the legitimate aims and aspirations of the United States government. The Commissioner stood up.”I regret I am pressed for time and therefore must conclude this interview.”

  Yozip rose, anguished. “Please, Mr. Indian Commissioner, don’t say to the Indians no. The United States of America is a very big country that it takes a week to go anyplace. We are a small tribe. Please give me a letter to take back to my chief which will make him be happy. He is an old man. This is my request to you.”

  The Commissioner rang a melodious little silver bell on his desk.

  “Mr. Cluett,” he told the young man with wavy hair who entered, “will you kindly tell this half-ass Hebrew Indian that the quicker he leaves these premises, the better it will be for him and his fellow tribesmen.”

  The door opened and the young redheaded woman Yozip had seen in the hall stepped up to the desk and presented the recently initiated Indian with a shasta daisy.

  “Foh,” said the Commissioner to his daughter. “Lucinda, why the hell don’t you stay out of government business?”

  Yozip and his white daisy chugged back to the West on the iron horse.

  He had meant to stop in Chicago to have a look at his citizenship papers at his cousin Plotnick’s, but he forgot.

  SIX

  Chief of the Tribe

  THE KEROSENE LAMP on the locomotive cab flickered on the rails. The train, clackity-clacking, rattled into the space across the wide prairies. Yozip, unable to sleep with eyes shut, slept with his eyes open. He slept staring at the tribe’s documents he had left behind in the Commissioner’s office. They were scattered everywhere. He ran after them in dreams to retrieve the papers, but they were forever flying out of sight. Yozip had lost the documents Chief Joseph had entrusted to him and asked him to return. The ex-peddler woke to punish himself whenever he momentarily slept.

  “The first time they send me on a job I come back without papers and without any luck. Everybody in the tribe will be ashamed and disgusted.”

  At Helena, the train slowed and Yozip considered jumping off and disappearing into the night. But as the locomotive drew to a slow stop dawn was beginning and the new Indian, with a cry of surprise, recognized Bessie herself waiting for him untied at a hitching rail. He looked for Indian Head and some of the other braves and saw none. The horse alone had come for him. Bessie let out a motherly whinny. Either she had been sent to get him or had remembered where to find him, and had gone there by herself. Or perhaps she had waited for him, foraging what she could until his return. Dear Bessie.

  Yozip kissed his horse on the head, mounted her with his meager bundle of clothes, and rode off in the direction of the valley. From time to time he pulled at the mare’s halter, trying to turn her and go elsewhere, in another direction; but the animal insisted on carrying him toward the long valley. Yozip in anger slapped Bessie with his hand. The horse froze and refused to budge. Yozip gave up and let her bring him back to the tribal grounds. Neither apologized to the other.

  He went, after a while, to the chief’s tall blue tepee, stopping outside a minute to revive his wits. He whistled to himself and waited. Yozip then poked his head into the tepee and saw that One Blossom wasn’t there. Entering, he found the old chief lying on his back on the frozen ground.

  The new tribesman moaned. “So are you all right?” he asked the old chief.

  The chief muttered that he was not far from death.

  “So stay alive, Chief Joseph,” Yozip said. “What will we do without you? If you go away where will we go? What will the tribe do?”

  “Ah, you have called me by my father’s name,” said the old chief. “He was a wise man who taught me in few words the depth of his experience.”

  “In Washington,” Yozip said, “I told them what you said I should tell them, but I didn’t do a first-class job. Nobody wished to tulk to me there. Also I lost the papers of the tribe. I was stupid to let the assistant man take them away even for five minutes. I feel now to cry like a child because I did not protect the property of the People. I was not a first-class manager.”

  “Crying is for children,” said Joseph hoarsely. “And it is not useful, because I had these papers copied by a scribe after I had signed the first treaty for this valley. I did not trust the whites.”

  “That made me a heartache because I thought I had lost them.”

  “We may know where evil begins, but not where it ends.”

  Yozip asked the old chief what he could do for him now. “Should I call maybe the medicine man with the purple feathers that he sometimes makes you laugh?”

  “Keep him away from me. He smells of goat turd.” The old man’s laugh racked him. He coughed brutally. Yozip wished he knew how to help him. It struck him again how ignorant he was.

  He sat on the ground warming Joseph’s head with his hands.

  The chief was dying, his voice was thickly hoarse.

  “Where is One Blossom?” Yozip asked. “Where is also Indian Head?”

  The chief smiled as though to himself. “They speak their words of love.”

  “Now? When you are so sick?”

  “What better time to love? For myself I have no fear. The Great Spirit touches me with his finger. I am warm.”

  Yozip said he would look for them.

  “There will be time for that. Now I want to talk to you. There is something to do for us. Yozip, the council of sub-chiefs agrees with me at least to ask you to become chief of our people. I know your qualities. You must help us to go on living our lives. You must protect us from the evil the white men lay on us. We cannot live without air. We love this valley. It is our place of freedom. You must help our people to live as the Great Spirit says we must.”

  He coughed gratingly, holding his fingers against his head.

  Yozip gazed at the withered, whispering man.

  “Who wants me here? I come also from Quodish, but what can I do for the People. What do I know?”

  “I trust you to learn what you must know. I want you to become Chief Joseph. I have chosen you in my place. I believe you will make a fine leader.”

  “Why? How? What can I bring to the tribe?”

  “You are a protector. Those who can must protect those who cannot protect themselves. These are the words of the Great Spirit in the open sky.”

  “But why me? Indian Head would be better.”

  “Indian Head speaks twelve words when there are six to say. You must teach him to protect himself. And you must help One Blossom, who does not always help herself. She is
not as serene or wise as her gentle mother.”

  “Indian Head will take care of her. He is her lover. What can I tell her if her lover says no?”

  “You must look after my child as well as her lover.”

  Yozip told the old man he would protect his children as best as he could. “I will try, but I don’t think they will like it if a stranger says he will protect them.”

  “Keep them together,” whispered the dying man. “Teach them to be disciplined. Tell them to respect our leader, and whom to respect. And they must honor their ancestors. My father lived his life in love of peace.”

  “I will mention to them your father, also I will mention my father that he died in Zbrish.”

  “Now I must begin my journey into the sky.”

  Two red tears rolled down his cheeks of parchment.

  Chief Joseph coughed harshly once and breathed quietly. He then stopped breathing.

  Yozip wept for the old chief.

  Indian Head and One Blossom entered the tepee and she began wailing over the dead chief as she tenderly arranged his feathers.

  “Now I know what solitude means,” said Indian Head.

  One Blossom, the youthful daughter of an aged father, kissed his eyes and wept in silence.

  Now the warrior chiefs and the medicine man drifted into the tepee and stared at their dead chief.

  The purple-flowered medicine man gave out a cry and, addressing the Great Spirit through the sunny opening at the top of the tepee, lamented the chief’s death.

  The braves looked on silently.

  Indian Head spoke to them, saying that their chief was dead, their new chief was Jozip, who had been initiated into the tribe according to their ancient customs.

  Some of the Indians in the tepee uttered a noise of protest, and Yozip shrank to the wall of buffalo hide; but Indian Head addressed them eloquently, and soon each of the braves and warriors approached the new chief and touched his head with warm and cold fingers. Yozip memorized the faces of those whose fingers were cold.

  “Your name also Joseph,” Broken Ear said, and again they welcomed him into the tribe.

  “Jozip,” said the new chief.

  SEVEN

  The Burial

  JOZIP MOVED among the mourners of the old chief at his burial as though he were a close relative. Lately he had become more facile in the language of the People, saying his words without excessive grunting. It was an easier language to acquire, he thought, than Russian, a difficult language, yet he had spoken Russian well.

  “One day you will be a smart chief,” said Foolish Eyes.

  “How can somebody who is not smart be smart?”

  “You will find out.”

  “I have too much to find out,” said Jozip.

  For a time the body of old Chief Joseph, dressed in ancient garments and decorated with bone necklaces, lay under the open sky by the pine trees. The medicine man with the purple headdress had painted his face white with pink stripes, according to an ancient rule of the tribe. One Blossom, in torn garments, hacked off her braids with a knife and threw them into a fire that burned near where the old chief lay. When Indian Head saw her hair burning he bit his lips. Nor could Jozip bear to look at the burning braids of the beautiful young woman. She had changed; her figure was firmer, no longer plump. She lived in a world without a father. Indian Head told Jozip that she made his life joyous. Yet her eyes saddened as though she had looked at something she did not care to see.

  After two days, Tuk-Eka-Kas, wrapped in deerskin by the women of the tribe, was lifted up by the braves and laid on six long poles. His woven bier was raised on the shoulders of four warriors, Jozip permitted among them, and it was carried to the grave site that four braves and Indian Head had dug in the earth. A dozen women followed the bier, tearing their hair, mourning, sobbing. One Blossom was among them.

  The warriors, with Jozip’s assistance, holding hemp ropes, lowered the corpse into the newly dug grave, the chief’s head turned to the east. Amen, thought Jozip; they walk to the west with their heads turned east.

  The medicine man then spoke a mournful mouthful about the old chief who now lay in his new grave. The shaman called him a noble man. Once he had confronted a mother bear hunting for a lost cub. She approached Joseph, smoking his pipe in the woods, with a roar that fluttered his eardrums; but he had frightened the bear away by blowing a mouthful of the buffalo-dung smoke into her eyes. She had galloped away, stopping only to roar at the brave chief.

  And once Chief Joseph, hunting bear in the forest, had come upon another hunter who had been struck by a fallen tree and was pinned under it. Straining to lift the huge tree and hold it off the warrior, the good chief gave the wounded man, whose head was bloody, a moment to crawl forth, and then carried him in his arms to be treated by the medicine man, who snapped his bones into place and massaged his wounded back. In a week the hunter had recovered. Thus had Joseph rescued his brother in the tribe.

  When the shaman had completed his eulogy, One Blossom tossed six of her most treasured trinkets into her father’s grave. Indian Head had contributed a long bow and six sharp arrows. He bowed to the east.

  Then several braves filled the grave, scooping up handfuls of earth, and the squaws and unmarried women wailed for the dead chief.

  Afterward an old brown dog of the tribe—he belonged to no one and used to go along with the other dogs to hunt buffalo—lay on the chief’s grave as the dead man was growing used to death. The shaman screamed at the dog but Jozip asked him to stop lest he disturb the sleep of the old chief. “The Great Spirit has sent the animal here out of love for the good Chief Joseph. He will not take away his dog.”

  But to keep the ghost of the dead man from bringing madness to those who were still alive, the tepee of Joseph was moved fifty feet to the west. The medicine man then blew smoke from his pipe across every corner of it to remove the ghost-spirit before Jozip began to live alone in his new tepee.

  A moon passed, then One Blossom and Indian Head held a feast in the old chief’s honor, at which a pair of his worn buckskin trousers and other personal belongings were given away to five of the assembled guests.

  One Blossom gave the new chief a leather shirt that she had once made for her father, and Indian Head gave him a swift silver arrow to hunt buffalo when meat was scarce.

  After the burial ceremonies, at Indian Head’s whispered suggestion, Yozip, who now openly called himself “Jozip,” although he thought of himself still as Yozip, gathered the braves together for a long ride over the Montana mountains to hunt the fat buffalo and store smoked and jerked meat for the long winter.

  So now I am a real Indian, Jozip sadly, yet not unhappily, thought. So what can I do for my people?

  EIGHT

  The New Jozip

  JOZIP OFTEN THOUGHT of himself as Yozip and experienced days of wonderment and doubt. He questioned his abilities, yet felt he had taken up a cause he increasingly cared about, that of the People. Many of his Indian brothers were still unknown to him, but he thought of them as his Indians and had begun to feel responsible for their welfare, as though there was a gap in their experience he might fill. “Don’t ask me why,” he said to himself. “Ask the Great Spirit who looks at us from the sky.” But the cause he had taken up helped him understand what he had lacked in his former, lonely life.

  “If I am a man like me, what should I do next?” he asked Indian Head.

  “First we must settle the land question with the whites, but before that we must prepare for the long winter. We will hunt buffalo in the mountains and in the snow. The animals will not know which way to run when we appear before them with drawn bows. They will stampede and thunder away as our braves shoot their bellies full of arrows.”

  “This I don’t like to do,” said Jozip.

  “You will get used to it.”

  After ascending the western pass for two weeks of hunting on the cold plains in Montana, Jozip, when the meat was plentiful and the hides many, called a halt and
the hunters descended toward their long valley accompanied by a dozen shaggy huge beasts, lassoed and led by squaws who had traveled with the hunters.

  The buffalo, Jozip observed, was not a very intelligent animal, yet if treated humanely it would go where it was led. The hunt had gone well: they had not encountered any rival tribes and this was a year of plentiful beef. Jozip had been told that large numbers of buffalo were crossing the railroad tracks and interfering with the movement of trains. Conductors distributing rifles, and passengers potshooting from windows, were energetically slaughtering droves of animals before the trains could plow free of them and chug forward on the bloody tracks.

  Jozip, from youth a vegetarian at heart, disliked this useless destruction of innocent animals, but now he was an Indian and lived as they lived. Yet he was also the grandson of a shochet, a religious slaughterer in the Old Country, who killed devoutly, gently, aware of the sin of taking a living life even though he blessed the beast as he slit its throat. Maybe it was in partial revulsion to his grandfather’s holy profession that the grandson avoided eating animal flesh and had ultimately become a vegetarian. Night after night, as the braves gorged themselves on meat, the new chief devoured buckwheat groats and fresh vegetables when available. Though some braves snickered at Jozip’s ways, still for a novice he was a decent chief—organized in his head, and sensibly aware of the needs of the braves and of the pride of warriors and sub-chiefs.

  “Passable anyway,” grunted the warrior known as Hard Head.

  The Indian hunters climbed down the Idaho foothills and moved toward their green land, where they at once encountered bad news that caused them quickly to forget the pleasures of the hunt. When they returned to the tribal grounds they were at once surrounded by women, children, and older men, who informed them that there had been a visitation of settlers, and one of the young women describing the incident angrily cried out, “Rape!”

  “So who made a rape?” Jozip asked indignantly. “Who did such a terrible thing?”

  One cheery woman with wild hair spoke up: “I was raped by a disgusting fiend.”