NORTHWEST
BOOKS

REGIONAL WRITERS
IN REVIEW




"Indian on the edge of
the 21st century" Blues

reviewed by Kent Chadwick


Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995
306 pages, $21 Hardcover


At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future."
That is the terrible epiphany in Sherman Alexie's short story "A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result," a realization that comes to Samuel Builds-the-Fire on the first night he ever drank, on the day he was fired from his job as a maid in a Spokane motel. That tragedy, with its Anna Karenina ending, was one of the haunting stories in Alexie's award-winning collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Samuel doesnUt survive that desperation, and it engulfs his grandson, Thomas, as a matter of course in Alexie's first novel, Reservation Blues. What does a young Indian with strength and passion and talent do when faced with a murdered past and a blank future? Sing the blues. That's the brilliant answer Alexie has Thomas discover, when blues legend Robert Johnson, still running, still seeking a way out of his bad deal with the devil, arrives in Wellpinit on the Spokane Reservation, a town that doesn't exist on most maps of Washington state, in the kick start to this audacious comedy.
Reservation Blues is hilarious and troubling, anguishing and redeeming. Comedy is the hardest thing to write well and Alexie has the touch, from broad slapstick to dissecting satire. Comic book characters Betty and Veronica appear as groupies chasing the Indian blues band that Robert Johnson's perfectly cursed guitar has willed Thomas into forming, yet they evolve into vivid women. Everyone gets good lines, even the villains; everyone has her say. Alexie cuts to the bone, almost always fairly, certainly universally. A lot of people are going to be offended at some point in this story: from Alexie's own Spokane and Coeur d'Alene tribes to New Age cultural shoplifters, Catholics, Protestants, Tribal Council members, Indian men, whites, mixed bloods, the City of Spokane, Limbaugh dittoheads, Doors fans, the U.S. cavalry, and record producers.
Thomas is a storyteller. The guitar's blues helps him remember and sing and draw his nemeses Junior and Victor into a squabbling but wild band. Thomas wants to name the band Coyote Springs. "'That's too damn Indian,' Junior said. 'It's always Coyote this, Coyote that. I'm sick of Coyote.'" But lightning fell and a fire burned at the uranium mine, and Coyote stole Junior's work truck and lost him his job, so Victor and Junior agree to the name, and Alexie wins Coyote back from folklorists into a howling 1990s Indian blues. Coyote Springs dreams and pushes through the novel to open a space for Indian participation in popular American culture on Indian terms; for awhile there's hope, before treaties get broken and something else is stolen.
They go on the road. They land a gig on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, and coax two strong, young Indian women there, Chess and Checkers Warm Water, into singing with them. Alexie spins out the pasts of each band member, running like parallel tracks of pain down each and every reservation. The sisters see and hate the "warrior desperation and the need to be superhuman in the poverty of a reservation" that afflict Junior and Victor, that afflicted their father, and that are present even in Pepsi-drinking Thomas's eyes-"I'm Super Indian Man .... Able to leap tall HUD houses in a single bound. Faster than a BIA pickup. Stronger than a block of commodity cheese."
Other historical characters appear with less to offer and more to answer for than Robert Johnson. Colonel George Wright, 9th Infantry, who captured and shot almost 800 of the Spokane tribe's ponies on September 8, 1858, arrives in a Cadillac with his buddy, General Phil Sheridan, to talk record deals with Coyote Springs, and the screams of history punctuate the story. When the horses cry out it's one part Young Frankenstein, three parts Edvard Munch.
Reservation Blues will be labeled up and down, from Magical Realist to Tom Robbinist (hey it jokes about God and the Northwest!), and there are satisfying parallels. But it is Alexie's own, and he doesn't need the validation of other labels. He is creating something new. He is drawing the map that Samuel Builds-the-Fire didn't have in breathing and bleeding stories of failure and meaning.
Reservation Blues is multi-textured, rich with comic surrealism and the wealth of dreams. With Jim Boyd, Alexie has written his own blues lyrics for Coyote Springs, a song for each of the ten chapters, with titles like "Falling Down and Falling Apart," "My God Has Dark Skin," and "Wake." The songs are unlike his poetry (see his excellent collections The Business of Fancydancing, Old Shirts & New Skins, and First Indian on the Moon) but informed by the same skill with which the poems were crafted. They will certainly be recorded and sung someday soon.
At its center, Reservation Blues is a paean to Indian women. Big Mom, the guardian spirit of the tribe, the music teacher of rock 'n' roll greats, who told the toughest Spokane, "'You need to take care of your people. Smashing your guitar over the head of a white man is just violence. And the white man has always been better at violence anyway,'" heals Robert Johnson, performs a fry bread miracle, and continues to hold all of the fallen of the tribe inside her. The sisters, Chess and Checkers, come to know the inevitability of suffering, the certainty of song, the possibility of forgiveness, and the hope of survivors. They bring Thomas along.

Kent Chadwick's Northwest Books is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in Union, WA.






Hard Times During the High Tide

reviewed by Andy Bauck


High Tide of Black Resistance
and other political & literary writings
by James Forman
Open Hand Publishing, Seattle 1994


Dr. James Forman, currently president of the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee in Washington, DC, is perhaps best known for his activities in the 60's as Executive Secretary and Director of International Affairs for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most radical of the mass-based black activist groups of that decade. SNCC was responsible for courageously continuing the Freedom Rides of 1961 after a bus was attacked and burned in Alabama, and helped bring the struggle of southern blacks for basic human rights into mainstream consciousness by organizing massive voter registration drives in the rural South. With this book, Seattle's Open Hand Publishing presents a sampling of short stories and nonfiction essays written at the epicenter of the civil rights struggle in the '50s and '60s. While much of the material has been previously published, each piece appears here with an introduction by the author, which fills us in on what was happening at the time both in the broader movement and also in his own personal life.
In the book's opening essay, "Trouble in Los Angeles (1953)," Dr. Forman reports a story of his arbitrary arrest, detainment, and torture by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). What is upsetting about his account is not the fact that it illustrates well the systematic denial of human rights to black citizens which was common 40 years ago, but that little seems to have changed. Just four years ago, the same LAPD again showed its racist core in the brutal beating of Rodney King. In Seattle as well, police harassment of African-Americans, street people, and other "undesirables" continues unabated, and has in fact been legitimized through such draconian measures as the drug loitering and no-sitting ordinances.
All of the book's five short stories have been excerpted from the unpublished novel The Thin White Line, written by Dr. Forman in 1958. A recurrent theme in these stories is interracial understanding, friendship, and love on the personal level as a paradigm for societal change. Most of the vignettes involve a group of students in Chicago, but the most moving, "The Song Festival," is about a Southern white preacher who has defied his community by attempting to spread his realization of racial equality to his parishioners. When he proposes a joint song festival with his congregation and a black church, the community becomes instantly polarized, and he begins receiving threats from the Friends of White Society. In the end, the preacher is forced to examine how it is possible to have the courage and conviction to stand up for what he believes, in the face of great adversity.
"Georgia Mae Hard Times" is a first-hand account of the repression suffered by poor, rural blacks in Fayette County, Tennessee in 1961. African-American sharecroppers who dared to register to vote were expelled from their land and denied entry to stores where they could purchase food, clothing, and medicine. The oral narrative of Georgia Mae, an elderly black woman who is living in Tent City after having been ejected from the shack she inhabited for 38 years, provides the basis of the article, and is some of the most powerful and eye-opening prose in the whole book. Her story recounts her life as a sharecropper and, like slave narratives written over 150 years ago, reveals a life of back-breaking work and subservient dependence upon the whim of the white landowners:
"I could hear the bell ring every morning at five o'clock for you to get up and go feed the mules. I'd be up cooking breakfast when that bell rang. Then they ring it a second time and you go to the fields. You better be there at that hour. Then they'd ring the bell at twelve o'clock for you to come in to dinner and ring the bell at one to go back. You didn't need nobody to ring it for you in the evening."
While technically "free," sharecroppers like Georgia Mae were enslaved through a system of permanent indebtedness, from which there was no escape because the whites were the ones keeping the books:
"After Mr. Emmett [the "benevolent" landlord] died, we fell to his brother, Harry McNamee.... But Mr. Harry said we owed him twenty-two hundred dollars."
"We went to work and worked and worked and worked on the debt. That's why we stayed there so long, I reckon, trying to pay that debt. I put one of my girls picking cotton when she was four years old. She picked thirty pounds of cotton. She tells me now I put her in the field so young, I worked her spirits down. She ain't got much spirit now to work."
That the debt was illegitimate seems obvious to the author as well as the reader, and one is left wondering how Georgia Mae was able to maintain her remarkable dignity and faith under such circumstances.
While some of the book's earlier work occasionally lapses into youthful naivete, the material from the sixties is never over-simplistic in its political analysis, and provides a unique perspective, given the author's position at the vanguard of one of the largest and most successful social movements of the twentieth century.



High Tide of Black Resistance is available at Elliott Bay Book Company, Red & Black Books, or from the publisher.



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Contents on this page were published in the June/July, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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