The People

by Bernard Malamud

  Indian Head was waiting for him on his pony. He let out a shout. “Great God, what has happened to your face? Who beat your head like that?”

  “I made a mistake,” said Jozip, “which I will not make the same mistake again.”

  One Blossom was disturbed by his face but said nothing.

  “Now we must find those braves that they killed the settler,” Jozip said.

  “We know those who killed the settler in the woods,” said Indian Head.

  “Aha,” said Jozip. “Did they confess to you?”

  “Nobody confessed but we know who they are.”

  “I will tulk to them,” said Jozip.

  Windy Voice, Foxglove, and Small Horse assembled with Indian Head in Jozip’s tepee. They stared in surprise at his black-eyed, beaten face but said nothing. Two were young men. Only Foxglove was as old as thirty.

  Jozip shook his finger in their faces. “Why did you kill a white man for nothing, which we have never done such a bad thing before?”

  Small Horse said they had drunk firewater before going into the woods. “The old man had another bottle with him and we drank it and gave him ours. It was a fair exchange.”

  “Except that he is now scolped and dead, and you are all alive. Who took his scolp off?”

  The braves said nothing.

  “Are you sorry you did this terrible crime? If you don’t answer me, then I got to ask you to leave this tribe. Now is not a time for more trouble than we already got. Now is the time to stay together because they want to take away from us our land.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for that drunk bastard,” said Foxglove.

  “I will apologize,” Small Horse said, “because it was the wrong time.”

  “That goes for me too,” said Windy Voice after a minute.

  “I will not apologize,” Foxglove said. “The whites are spying on our tribe. They are trying to force us off the land. I have no love to waste on them.”

  “This is not a question of love, this is a question of justice.”

  “How much justice have they given to the Indians?” Small Horse asked.

  “I fuck them all,” said Foxglove.

  “Who took his scolp off?” Jozip said.

  No one spoke.

  Jozip studied them.

  He told Small Horse he could stay. He told Windy Voice to watch himself or he would be in grave trouble. He told Foxglove he was expelled from the tribe.

  Foxglove spat on the ground. “Does he know what he’s doing?” he asked Indian Head.

  “He knows.”

  “I am doing what Chief Joseph also would tell me to do.”

  “Don’t look at me with those bad-luck eyes,” said Foxglove. “I don’t want your bad luck on my head.”

  “My luck is good,” said Jozip. “I asked the Great Spirit what I must do and He told me to do what was right. The medicine man said it would be wrong to exile Foxglove alone, but when I look in your eyes I see who murdered the settler. And I have to send you out of the tribe.”

  “I will leave with hatred for you,” Foxglove said to Jozip.

  Jozip did not reply.

  Foxglove went for his horse and left the tribe without clearing his lodge.

  Within ten minutes Colonel Gunther came galloping up to Jozip’s tepee accompanied by fifty armed cavalry men.

  “Hear me,” he commanded, as he tried to control his pawing horse. “I have come to tell you that the U. S. government has already informed you that your tribe must leave this land in three weeks of time. Those words are out of the mouth of the Great White Father, U. S. Grant, President of these United States of America.”

  Jozip, thinking what he must look like to this man, and ashamed of his broken-faced appearance before his tribe, said slowly, “Mr. Cohnel, you said last time that we had a month to leave this valley.”

  “That was before you began to murder our settlers,” said the colonel.

  “But where will we go, where?” Jozip said. “How can you take away overnight where we live and also our property? We are human beings, not animals.”

  “I intend to refer this matter for additional adjudication by the proper authorities in the War Department. They will inform you where your tribe will have to go. I will telegraph Washington and at the same time put this tribe on strict notice that it must prepare itself for a major move of departure out of this valley forever.”

  “This is a long time,” Jozip sighed.

  The colonel wheeled his horse and with his fifty troops galloped over a hill and disappeared beyond it.

  TEN

  When We Go Where Shall We Go?

  MANY SCHEMES tempted Jozip but nothing could he seriously propose. Where could a whole tribe of Indians go? Flight, if it came to that, had to be prepared for. It was impossible without a strategy, a way of holding together, renewed commitment to their way of life.

  It is my responsibility, Jozip thought, but without a careful plan, a hasty move—the wrong move—might mean the end of the People. This thought frightened the new chief.

  Jozip then called a tribal council, reluctantly seeing himself addressing his tribe in a tongue he was still trying to master. Was there a word for chutzpah in their language?

  Jozip, after whitening his black eyes with paint, opened the council of sub-chiefs in his tepee. The council of ten men sat in a circle on the ground with the medicine man, Last Days, and around them sat many other braves. Some smoked pipes whose odor all but nauseated their chief. If he remained with the tribe he must introduce the cultivation of a mild tobacco; buffalo manure was too much for his nerves.

  At last he spoke some reluctant words, squirming at all he had to say in a new tongue, but going on with greater ease as the words came to him.

  “My brothers,” Jozip said, “you know the contempt the whites have for us, as if they were the firstborn of the Everlasting Power. Our reservation in this valley is one in which our tribe has lived for fifteen years, and it was promised to us to live in forever. Chief Joseph told me this before he left us to walk in the Everlasting Fields. He spoke these words in the presence of One Blossom, who still mourns for the father who is not now with us. Now the paleskins want us to give up our land and go somewhere to a place that they have not yet told us the name, and which we do not want to go to, though we are not cowards. Nobody asked us where we would like to go or whether we are willing to live somewhere else. Also, nobody gave us a date of departure, though they must know it in their own minds. We were told three weeks from now but first we were told four. They count in bad numbers. They warn us of our fate but they do not ask if we will accept it. They will let it fall on our heads like rotten fruit.

  “Now is the time to speak from my heart,” he said. “I will call on our sub-chiefs and ask Wilderness Man, Split Jug, Fast Turtle, One-Leg-Is-Bad, and Indian Head to speak good words to us which course of action we ought to take. What shall we do now? I am your chosen chief. Give me your best words so I can weigh them before we act.”

  Wilderness Man wore his hair long and tightly braided. His voice was deep and his speech unhurried. He spoke, saying that each treaty they had signed in the recent past until they gave up signing treaties had deceived them as to its true intent, until they realized that the intent always was to expel them from the valley they thought they had been given to live in forever. The word of the white man was never more than the yapping of dogs. “We should have nothing more to do with them. They are men of broken words. They break them with their teeth and spit them on the ground.” Wilderness Man spat on the ground. The Indians of the inner circle grunted in approval.

  Then Split Jug, a lanky man with a black feather in his headband, struck his chest and spoke. He was a congenial bent-nosed man, who liked to challenge Jozip in games of arm wrestling. Jozip had won a handful of wampum from him in two trials.

  “My brothers,” said Split Jug in a high voice, “let us fool our childish enemies who are born with ghostly faces and stupid thoughts. Seven days ago I saw a
miner on our land fouling our fresh water as he stood in a stream tapping his hammer on a dirty rock he held in his hand; and when the rock crumbled and fell apart, the glow of the metal lit his face. If his companion had not grabbed him by the seat of his pants he would have drowned in a foot of water.

  “I say let us get rid of enemies by seeking out an unknown private place in this great land, where we will be able to go without asking permission or pardon from the whiteskins. When in our long history have our people needed men of bleached skin to tell us where and how to live? In some corner of this vast territory there must be at least some hidden valley full of elk and buffalo, and where the salmon leap out of the streams to greet our fishermen. Let us now depart this valley they have spoiled for us by taking away our sacred rights, and seek new hunting grounds where the whites won’t be able to find us.” Split Jug grunted as he resumed smoking his pipe. His brothers also grunted.

  Now Fast Turtle spoke swiftly and vehemently. “My brothers, we have bows and arrows and many lances. But we have not enough deadly weapons to destroy these men if the pony soldiers should attack us with all their forces. I want to fight and annihilate them, but I will not in my conscience try to persuade my brothers to begin a war against our enemies under such odds, although this thought pleases me. Since this is so I will forbear to give advice to our good Chief Joseph.”

  “Jozip,” said Jozip.

  “His name is Jozip,” said Indian Head.

  “Jozip,” Fast Turtle agreed.

  Then One-Leg-Is-Bad spoke angrily: “I would want to draw the whites into battle and destroy them as Custer of the Golden Curls was destroyed by Sitting Bull.” He turned to Jozip for a nod of approval but the chief did not want the words to inflame the braves, so he looked away. One-Leg-Is-Bad shrugged and puffed on his smelly pipe.

  Last Days, the medicine man, said he would talk.

  The medicine man of the purple headdress said he would speak plainly. He said he would prepare a formula only he knew. He would make of certain weeds tobacco with an aroma the white settlers would be unable to resist. “We will give them bad medicine weeds to smoke, and afflict them with a spicy smell they will never in their lives escape from. When they smoke this magic tobacco weed, one after another they will forget they want to force us to leave our peaceful valley. Their minds will waver and go lame.”

  Indian Head then spoke: “How will you get the settlers to smoke your magic weed? Won’t they distrust it if we give it to them and urge them to smoke the bad weed?”

  “Wherever the aroma is they will forget their purpose.”

  “But won’t we have to smoke it first to produce an aroma?”

  “We will smoke for a minute and they will forget forever.”

  The medicine man laughed, but Indian Head said he didn’t think it would work.

  Last Days disagreed with him. “Still, if you don’t trust my magic weed I can think up other things to try. It won’t take me long to think of a better plan.”

  Indian Head, speaking from where he sat, said to Jozip, “Is there nothing we can do to persuade the whites to change their minds and let us go on living where we have lived so many moons?”

  Jozip, still speaking slowly in the tribal tongue, said these words: “I often think of our old chief, One Blossom’s father. He was an enlightened man who taught himself new things every day. One reason I don’t want to leave this valley is that his grave lies here.

  “Now, if you ask me what I think we ought to do I must say, in truth, that I do not believe in any act that will lead to war with the whites, no matter how they trouble the Indians and make our lives very difficult. If they offer us nothing we will take nothing, yet defeat them in quiet ways. I do not mean by fighting a war against them. What we must do is outwit them. Let me tell you how.”

  “Yah,” said the Indians sitting in Jozip’s lodge.

  “We could surprise them by starting an action that will trick them and overturn them if the Great Spirit helps us. Do you want to know what this action might be?”

  “Yah,” said the Indians.

  “We know that the white man has betrayed us many times and will betray us until the skies turn purple in order to take away our land. So I think we must leave this country as soon as we can and move into Canada, which is moons away, but is still a friendly country where we will not have to face the American pony soldiers anymore. I give you this thought for your consideration.”

  Indian Head then said, “Canada is our grandmother’s country. Maybe it will welcome our people.”

  Split Jug spoke in his deep voice: “My brothers, I do not think that the Americans will let us just pack our goods, take our cattle and our horses, and walk out of this land. I don’t think we will be allowed to leave without engaging in an act of war. I think they will try to keep us from entering Canada. And what good is this long trek northward if we have no promise from the Canadians that we could stay there? We have heard that Sitting Bull is in Canada now, but all he is allowed to do is sit.”

  “I will tell you what I have done,” said Jozip. “I have sent messengers to Canada. The Canadians have already agreed to accept us because they know our reputation for peace through a long correspondence they had with our Great Chief Joseph. As for the American pony soldiers, they may try to make it hard for us to leave but that is a chance we will have to take. Otherwise there is no future for us here. They offer us nothing, not even charity if we ask for it. I did not know this until I thought it out, but now I am secure in my thoughts. If the Americans are as civilized as they say they are, they will step aside at our approach. We must depart from here, my brothers, before we find ourselves prisoners in some smelly reservation much unlike this that they are forcing us to leave. We can’t trust them. Shouldn’t we attempt to escape from those people who still think of us as animals? If we succeed in outwitting them the whole world will laugh.”

  “Yah, yah,” the Indians laughed.

  Two nights later six youths of the tribe shed their clothes to the breech clout and painted their bodies with red and yellow stripes. On the warpath they killed two settlers, an old man and his wife of eighty, but refrained from scalping them.

  Chief Jozip, formerly a pacifist, cursed his luck for having been made a fool of by Foxglove and a half dozen irresponsible youths.

  “This shows me that a first-class chief I am not,” Jozip muttered to himself in Yiddish. “Otherwise I would have warned these young Indians never to murder another human being. If you murder somebody, first of all you murder yourself.”

  ELEVEN

  The Long North Trek

  ONE MORNING the herald spoke these words in the People’s tongue:

  “This is the second day of our long trek to Canada, our grandmother’s country. We hastened our packing, we worked ourselves sick, in order to make a departure sooner than the whites could guess. However, we moved slowly and thought broken thoughts. After weeks of much labor we left in the dark before the black moon ascended. We had stationed two braves close to the American fort; they told us they could see no military activity and they rejoined us. We were 212 men and 438 women and children, each, whenever possible, mounted on a horse. Chief Jozip ordered me to make this count. We drove before us a thousand horses with remounts of a thousand more. We chose our animals with care, abandoning those that were lame or too wild to run free. Those we left behind will crop the grass of the greening earth until the white men discover and perhaps destroy them. They hate anything of Indian origin.

  “Chief Jozip has marked out our route to Canada over the Buffalo Mountains. We will then move west and northward on that trail along which we often hunted buffalo. Most of you know these mountains and will welcome the sight of them. Once we cross them, we shall be that much closer to our freedom. Also, we counted the children and apportioned them among our women. Each child will remain with his mother as long as there is no peril. If any mother of a child should leave us for whatever reason, her mother or sister will care for the child,
and see to it, every night, that it has a place to sleep.

  “I have more to say. We left late at night, moving in silence in the dark. At the river the water was in full flood. The crossings were difficult. We had made tight rafts from buffalo hides and the horsemen towed us across, ferrying helpless old people and their duffels. Men and women fended for themselves, yet no lives were lost. Then the range horses, hundreds of them, as they passed their old grounds, unexpectedly stampeded; we never recovered more than half of them. Yet we counted no lives lost and considered we had made a good beginning of our planned escape.

  “After we cross the mountains that lie before us, we will hunt buffalo as we move east, before we turn north. At night ten braves will guard our camp. We will hide our fires until we are three to five days ahead of those who will come to seek us.

  “The palefaces are an accomplished people who have invented wires that sing. One day they will sing out where we are, but Chief Jozip has told the sub-chiefs that he hopes he will trick and delay them by contriving false leads to keep them off our trail, and by traveling at night as often as we can while the pony soldiers are asleep in their blankets. Our chief says that he hopes our people will be out of the United States before another full moon appears, if we can keep our present pace. Tonight is the moon of late spring, our time for planting. But we can’t plant while we run. Chief Jozip has asked me to report to you each day so that you will know our daily purpose. He said this to me before we had left our valley.”

  Jozip muttered to Indian Head, “He makes it sound like a story, but without the madness of a tribe that is being forced out of its homeland.” He was mounted on Bessie, Indian Head on a gray Appaloosa. They rode together. Indian Head had collected horses and many wagons for the very small children.

  “If we can stay three days ahead of the soldiers on horses, maybe we could hold the same speed the rest of the way,” Jozip said. “Do you think this is possible?”

  “You’re the chief,” said Indian Head.