by Kurt Caswell
Coming up the dirt road from the interstate, after passing the Pink T0mahawk bar at the Prewitt junction, where a collection of lost and broken-down men, always men, congregate beneath the little junipers in the shade to sleep off their drunken melancholia, and after passing the great coal-fired power plant and its dirty smokestack beshitting the air but keeping the lights on, the only mark of habitation distinguishing Borrego from the surrounding desert is the water tower, a great white bulb on top of great white pillars that looms over the little school like a huge spider. For a lot of people living out here, running water at home is not an option, and this tower is the closest clean water source. The school officials keep an open-door policy, mostly, for most people who need it, as long as it isn’t abused, and so people routinely pull up and fill up, and motor on home. The school itself is almost invisible against the great mesa that backs it. A fairly modern, stucco building in the shape of an L, it’s the color of desert sand, with a black and red angular pattern painted on the outside of the high wall that is the gymnasium. A few small deciduous trees planted in front of the school are the only shade, except for the building itself. Inside the angle of this L is a paved parking lot where the buses pull up to load and unload the kids, and beyond that a wide and level dirt playground with some swings and monkey bars, and a few portable buildings that masquerade as classrooms.
In contrast to many reservation schools in the U.S., the Navajo Nation runs things at Borrego Pass. The school has a two-part life story, the first half under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the second as a federally funded grant school managed by a local Navajo school board. The BIA targeted Borrego Pass School for closure in 1965, which would have been a great loss for the surrounding communities. The people of Casamero Lake, Littlewater, and Borrego Pass rallied in support of it. They held a meeting to decide what to do. Perhaps they could establish a grant school under the Indian Self-Determination Act. They set to it. In 1972, the school was incorporated by the state of New Mexico. Construction of the current school facilities was completed in 1985. Full conversion to an elementary and secondary education grant school was finalized in the latter part of 1990. Funding is determined by the number of students who enroll and the number of students who qualify for special help under programs like Chapter One, Gifted and Talented Education (GATE), and Special Education.
The surrounding campus of employee homes carries the feeling of a decommissioned army base, solemn, alone, and all one color. From Borrego Pass Road marching back toward the mesa is a row of cinder block duplexes, backed by a row of dilapidated trailers, and up on the rise a cul-de-sac of modern stucco houses, most of the windows closed off by drab curtains. When I moved in, the whole place looked deserted, as if everyone had packed up and gone away. No trucks or cars in the parking lot in front of the school. No laundry hanging out to dry. No light music from an open window. Even the school, which had been so full of life when I interviewed, stood empty and silent like the great sandstone mesa behind it, the front doors locked tight. There seemed to be nothing growing, nothing green, nothing alive.
A mile north of the school, the Borrego Pass Trading Post offers a modest selection of groceries, basic hardware, and the work of local Navajo artists. Gas is available too, but who wants to pay those prices? The Navajo community of Crownpoint is ten miles beyond that, out a roughshod dirt road headed north and west. The town offers a full-sized grocery store, a laundry or two, a couple gas stations, and maybe a restaurant depending on whether or not you get to town before someone’s dream goes out of business, again. For any other needs, you have to go east to Grants or west to Gallup, about a one-hour drive on I-40 in either direction. But it isn’t these distances that isolate Borrego, it’s that all roads leading in and out are dirt. When it rains or snows in this high desert, the roads become nearly impassable.
My first mistake as a teacher at Borrego was the hard eye I fired at Caleb Benally, who sat in the back of the classroom tipped back on his chair. I had not started teaching yet. I was still a guest, sitting in on classes to get a good look at things, but Caleb stirred something inside me, something aggressive, something possibly violent that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe not ever.
After breakfast, Linda Bitsy, the Navajo language and culture teacher, led me to the science room and my seventh-grade class. I learned then that the school didn’t have enough classrooms to go around. I would be sharing space with the science teacher. I also learned that first morning that I would be the seventh-grade homeroom teacher and class sponsor. My primary duty in this role would be to help the class earn money throughout the year and then organize and lead a field trip. I had missed the first week of school because I was hired at the last minute, and Linda had been teaching my classes as well as her own. When I arrived that Monday morning, she was very happy to see me. I would have a two-day grace period while she introduced me to my students and showed me what they had been doing. Then I was on my own.
Linda was a heavy, jovial woman. She wore glasses, and her hair was cut shoulder-length and curled under. She wore a short orange dress that settled softly over her wide, powerful shoulders and substantial hips. She smiled warmly at me and shook my hand, not the tight-gripped, competitive handshake I was used to, but a soft, welcoming handshake. In fact it didn’t feel like a handshake at all, but as if she were holding my hand to comfort me, her thumb and index finger wrapped loosely but confidently around mine. I liked her right away.
Linda sat at the head of the room behind the teacher’s desk while the seventh-grade class worked busily in their notebooks. A few of the students stopped writing to get a look at me. I heard them whispering in Navajo.
“Keep writing in your journals,” Linda barked at them.
I surveyed the room, noticing some of the students happily following Linda’s order, some not doing anything at all. That’s when I caught Caleb Benally’s eye. He looked straight at me, and I looked straight back at him. His eyes were of the darkest black. He had a handsome, strong jaw and smooth, perfect skin. His shoulders were wide and muscled, not bulky, but sinewy, flexible. Even sitting down I could see that he was a natural at something with a ball, or at running, or possibly fighting. Probably fighting. He didn’t look away from me like the other kids in the room, and so I surmised that he was in charge of the seventh grade. I thought that his physical beauty was also his power over the other boys, with adults too, probably with women. He was just a boy, but I sensed he was capable of a man’s actions. Caleb looked filled with promise too, but promise for what, I didn’t know.
Part of a teacher’s job is to evoke such promise in students and channel it toward the goals of the course in the short term, and the goals of each individual’s life in the long term. I didn’t know it then, but in this charge, I was already remiss. Instead of redirecting Caleb’s powerful energy, his gaze, in a constructive way, I tried to seize it and throw it back at him. I didn’t just make eye contact with him that first morning; I returned his gaze, pushed hard at him with my eyes, tested him, challenged him. The more I did, the more penetrating and aggressive his eyes became, until we seemed to acknowledge a stalemate.
I knew very little about Navajo culture. At first this may have worked to my advantage. When the school board questioned me on this point during my interview, they learned that I was no junior anthropologist looking for a research topic and no white shaman looking for a religious experience. I was simply an English teacher. A foreigner, yes, an outsider, but also a guest. On this morning what I didn’t know worked against me. I did not know, for example, that Navajos have an intractable fear of strangers. Many of them fear almost everyone who is not related to them and believe that whenever they venture into a crowd it is best to carry protection against witchcraft. I did not know the most basic social etiquette. I did not know that looking someone directly in the eye can be an insult, even an act of aggression. Upon meeting someone for the first time, Navajo people generally look slightly down or just beyond th
e person, rarely directly at them, at least not for more than a moment. What appears to be shyness or submission is really a gesture of respect. But I heard later, too, that many Navajos reject these ideas—that their culture is no more wary of strangers than any other culture, and they do not avoid looking people in the eye. I didn’t know what to believe, but I was certain Caleb’s aggressive stare was not a friendly hello.
Later I happened across the Navajo story of the eye killers, monsters from Navajo mythology that can paralyze and kill by simply staring at their victims. They were born of a chief’s daughter who masturbated with a sour cactus. They had no limbs or heads, but were roundish creatures with one end that came to a point. At the topmost part of them were two depressions, great eyes from which lightning flashed into their victims. They lived at the base of Mount Taylor near Grants, one of the four sacred Navajo mountains, and the one closest to Borrego. The Hero Twins, who in the myth-time rid the world of most of its monsters, slew all but two of the eye killers by throwing salt into them and then destroying them with flint clubs. The two that survived became owls: elf owl, who warns listeners of approaching enemies; and screech owl, who helps make the earth beautiful. Another account has the two eye killers becoming poorwills or nighthawks that sleep during the day and come out at night to beautify the world. Both accounts sounded like happy endings to me, but Navajos regard owls as couriers of bad luck and death.
Caleb probably did not have these stories in mind when he stared me down, but this business with the eyes, the gravity of aggressive staring, seemed to run deep in the Navajo culture. Caleb knew what he was doing anyway, sizing me up, challenging me. His gaze was hostile from the start, but it was only later that I understood how hostile my response had been. And it was only later that I realized my response would not be readily forgotten. In this initial meeting, I had helped determine the terms of our relationship: we would be enemies. And because many of the other students, boys especially, took their cues from Caleb, in the first minutes of meeting them, I had set myself against my entire seventh-grade homeroom. I didn’t know it then, but I would spend the entire year trying to sort this out.
“Who is he?” Caleb said out loud. He didn’t address his question to anyone, but sent the words out into the room as if he and Linda were the only two people in it.
She looked up at him. For a moment it seemed that she planned not to answer. Then she said, “This is Mr. Caswell. He’s your new language arts teacher.”
“New teacher,” Caleb said. “We don’t need no new teacher. You can teach us.” He wasn’t offering Linda a compliment, but rather issuing her a command.
“Well, you got one,” Linda said. “I got my own classes. Mr. Caswell will be taking over this class tomorrow.”
Everyone groaned.
Tomorrow? I thought I was to enjoy a few more days of observation.
“We don’t need no new teacher,” Caleb said again. “Especially him. You can teach us.”
“Yeah,” said Clemson, who I would later learn was Caleb’s cousin. “You can teach us.”
A few other boys nodded their heads in agreement. The girls did not seem to be interested in taking a side, or even acknowledging the conversation. A few looked up briefly to see what was happening, or to see what was going to happen, but most of them kept on writing.
“Well, Linda,” Caleb said. “You gonna teach us or what?”
A long silence settled over the room. We were all waiting for Linda to respond. I was waiting for her to defend me somehow. To reintroduce me in some way that would reassure the class. She didn’t. She reached into her bag and pulled out her needlepoint. She went to work on it. Some pattern of reds and browns and a little yellow, but I couldn’t make it out. “Get back to work in your journals!” she said, without looking up.
I felt Caleb’s eyes on me, but I didn’t look at him again. I just sat there stupidly in front of the class until the clock ticked down the hour. Caleb got up and started toward the door as Linda said, “Okay. Time’s up. Go to your next class.” Then everyone did.
By the end of my first day, I already felt like a failure. Not a feeling of dark, self-loathing brought about by too little confidence. Rather, sitting in on classes with Linda had confirmed my greatest fear: I had no idea what these kids needed, or how to offer it to them. I had no idea what I was going to do when the classes were turned over to me in the morning. It was different when I considered this point before I arrived at Borrego, because teaching middle school on the Navajo Reservation was still merely an idea of adventure, a thought that passed in and out of my mind. Now I had real people in front of me, real students, real human beings with aspirations and dreams, talents and weaknesses, needs and fears. They each had a name. I would have to get to know those names and get to know them. For the rest of the year, I was charged with caring for these kids, for the improvement of their reading and writing skills, for influencing the way they came to regard the world around them. I needed to care about them and their lives. I needed to care about their future. And upon meeting them for the first time, I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything for them except an uncomfortable antagonism. What was I thinking when I accepted this charge? I was not prepared or qualified to take on this kind of responsibility.
I had a few free hours at the end of the day before the buses loaded up the children. I didn’t have a classroom, so I took a seat in the library to work on lesson plans. If I was going to be on my own in the morning, I had to be ready. I wrote out all my ideas, several pages of notes, most of which I then threw out (they all seemed either too complex or too simple). Remembering how I structured my lesson plans in Japan, I decided to break the seventy-five-minute class period into five- and ten-minute mini-lectures accompanied by exercises. Shorter is usually better. I would only be able to keep their attention for short bursts of time, so the lesson had to push this cadence, not be pushed by it. Before they got bored, we’d move on to something else.
“So sorry not to have been here to welcome you,” Principal Bob King said as he walked into the library and shook my hand. “I was away at a board meeting all day.”
“Hello,” I said. “I was wondering when I’d see you.” He asked if I had a few free minutes, and together we walked down to his office.
Bob King’s belly was round and firm and pushed out over his wide leather belt. He stood at least six foot two and was handsome in a cowboy way, clean-faced and well groomed. His eyes were startlingly blue. He kept his brown curly hair cut short, and he wore crisp jeans and polished cowboy boots. His face was always ruddy, as if bitten by the desert wind. Everyone always referred to him as “Bob King,” never simply “Bob” or “King.” He loved to hunt, he told me, and this was one of the two reasons he lived at Borrego, to be at the center of so much open space. The other was that he had married a young Navajo woman. Like me, Bob King had landed a teaching job at Borrego early in his career. He taught science, and during his interview, he told me, one of the members of the all-Navajo school board asked him what his goals were. He looked the man in the eye and said, “I want your job.” He must have said it so that it sounded like youthful ambition instead of a threat, because he got the teaching job, and a few years later the board made him principal. Still, as a white principal in a Navajo school, his command stretched only as far as his service to the board. He was temporary; they were forever.
The story of Bob King’s courtship and marriage I heard around campus and accepted as a collage of rumor and truth, depending on who was doing the talking. This is the story, as I pieced it together: Bob King fell in love with one of his eighth-grade students. She could have been as old as seventeen when they met, as Borrego students were notorious for skipping a semester here and there, even skipping a year or two, then returning without warning. Or they might not begin going to school until very late. She could also have been as young as thirteen, the age of most eighth graders in the U.S. Some people said one thing, others said another. Everyone who told me the story affirmed
that the young woman Bob King married was the daughter of one of the school board members. Wouldn’t it be interesting if she was the daughter of that same school board member who asked Bob King about his goals? I heard that she was. I also heard that she was not. When she went on to the ninth grade at another school, Bob King invited her to live with him. She moved in. At first, the community was outraged. Perhaps it was the difference in their ages, or that Bob King had been her teacher, or that Bob King was white. Whatever, things eventually settled out, and Bob King married her. Shortly after that, he was made principal. With his new bride, he moved into the best house on campus.
During my time at Borrego, Bob King’s wife was mostly invisible, hidden up there in the house behind drawn curtains. She rarely came down to the school, at least not when I was working, and I never saw her at a school event. It wasn’t something to ask about, I guessed, and Bob King didn’t volunteer anything. For me, she was formless and faceless, a wraith that floated just outside our lives at Borrego. Yet there is this one detail: she drove a white sports car, of what make and model I don’t know, with a blue stripe down the center and impossibly low clearance. It must have been precious to her because she took it out only on the finest days and only after the road had been newly graded. I caught sight of her one afternoon getting into her white car, and her hair, black as jet, fell all the way to her knees. As she opened the car door, her hair spread over her shoulder like a cloak, reflecting light like lightning directly into my eyes. Not so many years from now, after she and Bob King eventually split up, she would be dead, murdered in her home in Santa Fe by her new boyfriend.