Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Amanda was not distracted by this. She was still smiling sadly at me. “Yes,” she says, “you are at fault, Jack, and you don’t even understand why. It’s not that you didn’t answer my letter. It’s your reason for not doing so: vanity.”

  By golly, it hit me hard to get put in my place by a woman more than a dozen years my junior, than who I naturally assumed I knowed more of the basic principles of life. But what hit me harder was that she was right.

  I stared down at the toes of my boots. “I guess you got me there, Amanda. I was ashamed of how ignorant I am, so I never sent that information you needed and you couldn’t write your book. Now I see it that way, I don’t know how I can face you.”

  “Jack,” Amanda said, “look at me.” I did so, for there was nothing I had rather do. “Your help would have been important, but it would not have been indispensable. And your failure to answer those questions is not why I gave up.”

  “Oh.” Funny, that took me down another peg. Far from being glad I was off the hook, I guess it was on account of my vanity again that deep down I was disappointed not to have had more effect on her, even if damaging. I was learning more about my character at this moment than I had in all the years before, a pity it wasn’t more admirable. “Amanda, them ostriches is bothering me,” I says at that point. “Can’t we go someplace where we can talk in peace? Up in the Captive Balloon maybe, or on the Ferris wheel? No, they’re too crowded, I guess. I tell you, I can’t think straight, I’m so surprised to see you.” I swallowed hard, and come out with it. “My God, but you are beautiful.”

  She must of been getting close to what was considered middle age in them days, say forty, but she hadn’t failed to improve in every particular through the fifteen years since we first met, her skin and features without a sign of wear, her hair and eyes no less than perfection, her form all willowy grace.

  As to the comment I had just blurted out, I think I more or less expected she would be offended, but I couldn’t help saying it regardless of the consequences.

  In fact what Amanda done was look at me in a way I never seen her do before, call it a mix of earnestness and wonderment and maybe, unless I was just wishing it into being, the slightest hint of affection. “Why, Jack,” she said, “that’s the first personal word you’ve ever said to me.”

  To show you how clumsy I was at this, I couldn’t come up with no better response than to gawk and say, “It is? Huh.” And then, “Maybe a ride in one of them gondolas over on the lagoon? I’ve rode the real thing, you know, in the town of Venice in Italy, where the streets is paved with water. Imagine our Sioux seeing something like that. You can’t say B.B.W.W. ain’t broadened their knowledge of the world.” Finally my embarrassment had passed to the degree that I could get back to what I really wanted to say. “Mind telling me,” I asked, “how you happen to be here?”

  After my complaint about them ostriches, we had started to stroll away from them. At the main street running through the Midway, Amanda turned west. “Let’s get away from this wretched place,” she said, “and walk in the park.”

  Washington Park was across from the entrance to the Midway, so we went over there and walked amongst the trees on a summer day that was fair but not as hot as some can get in Chicago. Looking at Amanda in the pattern of sunlight that come through the trees I was reminded of some paintings a French person showed me in Paris one time of ladies outdoors. The closer you got to the picture, though, the vaguer it was, coming together only when you backed up. That was not the case with Amanda, who was always in my focus.

  “What am I doing here?” she said now. “I couldn’t believe it when I read that the cabin had been brought to the Midway Plaisance. I felt like blowing it up.”

  “Well,” I says, “that’s likely why that fat fellow thought you was an anarchist. He didn’t know it was a figure of speech.”

  She suddenly put an arm through mine and squeezed it against her. “Dear Jack,” she said.

  It would of been easy for me to be overwhelmed, but I remembered my place and was proud just to have the other strollers-by see such a fine woman grasping me of her own will.

  “I know how you feel,” I says, “after what happened on the Grand River. I keep thinking I should of done something to help Sitting Bull, but who could know his own people would do him in—well, he knew, he predicted it himself, but—”

  Amanda squeezed my arm again. “You couldn’t have affected the outcome, Jack. You did what you could when the time came: you saved my life.”

  I have related the facts of that day, with me and her cowering in the frozen mud under the lead flying above. I didn’t think of it as saving her life so much as saving my own while she just happened to be there at the same time. It seemed natural to huddle together. I didn’t make this point now, however, enjoying her commendation as I did.

  She went on. “I have thought of that morning many times since. In fact, it became an obsession. I couldn’t write my book. Sitting Bull’s murder kept intervening. But when I decided to confine the subject to that event alone, putting the women’s issues aside until I had at least exorcised those awful images, I couldn’t manage that, either. I’m afraid I failed at still another of my pathetic attempts to accomplish something worthwhile.”

  I stopped walking and made so bold as to take her hand in mine, hers being gloved in a slippery material, silk I guess, and real thin so I could feel the warmth of her fingers. “Aw, Amanda, don’t you feel that way for one minute! You done a lot of good everywhere you been. Take Sitting Bull, he thought the world of you.” You’re not much of a person if you can’t stretch the truth for someone you care about.

  “He thought I was a fool,” said she.

  “Well, if that was the case, it wasn’t you? I told her. “He just never saw eye to eye with whites.”

  “He respected Buffalo Bill, you told me, and he obviously had a high regard for you. Could it be he placed a lesser value on white women?” She took her hand back, but not in an unfriendly way, just slipped it from my grasp.

  There was a bench yonder, so I steered towards it and we sat down. “Well now,” I says, “you might not be wrong in one way, but, you know, you was there at his camp for a while, Indian women don’t go to college, don’t get jobs outside their family and move someplace else, and so on. They stay home and do female chores, which seems normal to them. That’s what they like.”

  “But how does anyone know? Have they been asked?”

  “I never thought of that,” I says, truthfully. “I guess that’s the kind of thing you could of dealt with in your book. All I know is, they ain’t shy about complaining and have real sharp tongues, but about particular matters, like if their man don’t provide enough food, not concerning the basic arrangement you seem to be against.”

  “I’m not necessarily against it,” Amanda said in her positive style. “I’d just like to understand it, but I came to the conclusion that I never would, and I simply gave up. There’s too great a gulf between us.”

  I knowed she meant her and the Indians, not me and her, though the latter was probably as true as the former, so somewhat down in the mouth, I asked, “Then how did it happen you was over there just now at Sitting Bull’s cabin?”

  She sniffed. “You’re right. I was being foolish, as usual. So far as I could tell from speaking to the Indians there, they saw nothing wrong.”

  “They come to Chicago to make some money and eat popcorn,” I said, “have a good time on the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel, if they’re like our bunch. Old Rain in the Face, the limping one, he was one of Sitting Bull’s best friends.”

  She looked at me, in the personal manner again. “But, Jack, do you think it’s right to have such an exhibit? The bulletholes can still be seen in the walls.”

  “No, I don’t,” I says. “But here’s the funny thing: that’s the white side of me, though the people that brought it here was white. Whereas while an Indian wouldn’t ever think of putting the cabin on exhibit, if somebody els
e does, it’s all right with him, if he gets rewarded.”

  She shook her golden head. “Is that not another example of how we have corrupted that people?”

  It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. “I don’t know. It just seems natural in anything alive, white or red or whatnot.”

  “But shouldn’t we aim higher?”

  Now it was a question, it seemed to me, and as I was being included in the “we,” I was real flattered. But I says, “No doubt about it, if you settle for standing up for your own principles and ain’t ruined by the opposition of others.”

  “Or the indifference,” Amanda says, “which is worse.”

  Maybe that was true from her point of view, but I tell you if you have seen as many people killed as me, you’d have to say it was usually due to real malice and not because nobody cared.

  I didn’t say this, though, for what I prized most in Amanda was her highmindedness combined with what you really had to call a practicality, for her life hadn’t been one of dreaming up ideals inside some library without ever going outside and trying them on for size with reality. It took a lot of guts for a girl like her to go to the Grand River and try to accommodate herself to Indian ways, and when violence come she hadn’t panicked. And way before that, you recall that incident back during the time of the Major’s Indian school, when the wanted criminal Elmo Cullen jumped us, she put a knife in his leg before young Wolf Coming Out cut his throat. Once she even worked as a piano player in a Dodge saloon and sporting house. She was a durable woman. Yet she never lost that class she had from the first, which I’m proud I recognized right away without having much for comparison beyond my foster mother Mrs. Pendrake way back when, but by now I had met not only Libbie Custer but Queen Victoria, as high up as you could go, and Amanda didn’t suffer alongside them.

  I wish I could of told her as much, but didn’t know how to do so in a way that wouldn’t seem humorous, always a problem of mine, so instead I asked her how she come to be in Chicago.

  “I was en route back to Kansas,” she said. “When in doubt, head for home, I suppose. Though I haven’t had an actual home there for a long time, I didn’t seem to belong anywhere else. A friend of mine from college lives in Chicago, and I had to change trains here, so I decided to accept her longstanding invitation to visit. Well, it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made. My friend is Jane Addams.”

  She said this with the kind of expectation of voice and eyebrow that goes with a familiar name, but I didn’t recognize it, so she goes on, but not with any disapproval of my ignorance, of which she had had plenty of evidence in the past. “Jane Addams and her associate Ellen Starr founded Hull House four years ago. It’s a settlement house in the worst of the West Side slums.”

  I was still so dumb I wondered what these ladies was doing in a part of town like that if they had went to college and could do better, but I was smart enough not to ask, for it shortly turned out that, as I should of suspected if it had attracted Amanda, Hull House was a place where folks who was down and out through no fault of their own could come and get trained for various vocations and trades, get fed if they was hungry and a bath when needed; board there safe and respectable if they was working girls away from home; put their kids if they was mothers while they went to jobs; belong to social clubs; use the gym to get healthy; and study any number of subjects which if you kept them up would be pretty near as good an education as a university had to offer. Amanda for example taught music, for which she was well qualified from her own college days and also that experience at the piano, though I doubt whether she spelled out the nature of where it had been acquired.

  Now most of the people helped was women and children, as most of the staff was female, but Miss Addams was also interested in getting better conditions for workingmen in a time when the work week averaged sixty hours and the unskilled might not earn as much as a dollar per day, so she and her women did a good deal of politicking and had only lately got the state legislature to raise the minimum age for full-time employment all the way up to fourteen.

  In short, Jane Addams was a troublemaking do-gooder after Amanda’s heart, a fellow ex-college girl reared genteelly, and in Miss Addams’s case with quite a lot of money, who figured they had had it easy enough in a life that was real mean for many others, to whom it would be nice to lend a hand. You could see them as a pain in the arse, which I expect they could be, and doing what they did on account of guilt at their own good fortune instead of accepting it as coming from God, and maybe that could be so, and you could doubt what they did made much difference in the long run and instead blow up everything and start over, if you, as the saying went, regarded the right thing as a big omelet and individuals like so many eggs.

  Or you might, like me, see them as real kind folks. And if you think there can ever be too much kindness in the world, then you’ve managed to live in another one than mine. But then I admit I was prejudiced and maybe my own motives had less to do with justice than just being crazy about Amanda.

  Anyway, after telling me about Hull House, what Amanda wanted to do now instead of taking my suggestion and going back to the Midway and having pastry and coffee with whipped cream at the Vienna Cafe, was to take me for a visit over to Miss Addams’s place and see all the good that was being done there, and there wasn’t any way I could get out of that, happy as it made her to do it and worthwhile as it was. It’s just that I would first of appreciated continuing to have Amanda to myself awhile longer rather than going immediately to see how she was helping others who she didn’t even know. You see how selfish I was but maybe will forgive me in view of the circumstances.

  So we went to the West Side of town, and she had not exaggerated about the slums, which was as bad as them in Manhattan, a comparison that might of pleased Chicagoans who was always in competition with New York, and Amanda took me through Hull House, a big old formerly private mansion on South Halstead Street now used for the activities I mentioned, and I tell you it was a fine thing to see, not tiresome as I admit I expected. It wasn’t a bunch of grown men in a sham battle or little ladies shooting at glass balls or doing trick riding, but helping people further themselves in real life had a lot to recommend it.

  Of course I was under the influence of Amanda, but before I was there long, seeing them earnest young women, both them on the staff and those being trained in various skills, not to mention the children who instead of fighting with one another or fetching cans of beer for their father from the saloon was learning to play the piano and so on, well, I tell you, I begun to total up my own contribution to the human race, at the age of better than half a century, as nil, and I seen most of the individuals I had frequented as worthless in the greater scheme of things: gamblers and harlots, most of them, leaving aside the entertainers such as Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, who I guess did bring pleasure to many folks, and nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t feed the hungry or rescue poor women from sweatshops or do anything for the freed slaves come north to live worse than before Emancipation. You name the dirty deal and Jane Addams was trying to correct it while I had been looking in the opposite direction.

  So when Amanda took me to meet her, I was ready to ask Miss Addams if she had something I could do that would be of use at Hull House. This might sound remarkable for a person like me, but I was in a state of great feeling from having run into Amanda and had it go so well and keep getting better.

  Jane Addams was younger than I expected, younger in fact, I learned later, than Amanda, but looked somewhat older than she was due to being in delicate health owing to a spinal curvature she had since childhood. She couldn’t of been nicer. For all her social activism, I got the idea right away that she was more of what you could call diplomatic than Amanda, which you had to be to make a go of a cause like hers in the Chicago of that day, where they could also give New York a run for its money in political corruption.

  We had a real pleasant though brief conversation, on account of she was so busy,
and as Amanda hadn’t said nothing about my connection with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, I didn’t mention it either, and Miss Addams got the idea I was just in town to see the Fair, which she said, in her diplomatic way without either praising or condemning it Amanda-style, was quite a spectacle which she was interested in seeing even though her purse had been stole while she attended opening-day ceremonies, at the memory of which she raised her eyebrows while smiling.

  “Miss Addams,” I said, surprising Amanda, “I sure would admire working here at your settlement house in some way, but unfortunately I ain’t got any talents nor no education.”

  “Why, Jack,” Amanda says, lifting her own eyebrows, and she then says, “Jane, he knows more about Indians than any other white man could. He was raised by the Cheyennes.”

  “There you have it, Mr. Crabb,” Miss Addams says, and she forthwith suggests I give the Hull House children a class in American Indian ways and customs and crafts if I knowed any like curing leather and making moccasins and beadwork. If all idealists had her mind for the practical, and vice versa, the world soon wouldn’t have no more problems that couldn’t be handled.

  Now not only did I soon begin to give a course of the type Jane Addams suggested, but from time to time I brung over Sioux from B.B.W.W. to show them slum kids what real Indians looked like and if they was women (usually the case, for the warriors couldn’t teach much that Miss Addams would approve of), why, they might demonstrate their type of sewing, decoration with beads, and all, and show how they chewed a hide to make it soft, the way they braided hair, and so on. Most of my class was girls, for boys would of been interested only if Sioux men showed the use of weapons, something I doubt Miss Addams and her ladies understood, but then Hull House was mainly a female affair, speaking of which, after I was there awhile, I begun to get an uneasy feeling which I’ll get to later.