English Essay

English 112

Professor: Fernando Benavidez

Essay 1: Critical Response to the Short Story

DUE: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH on CANVAS before 11:59pm

Stories to consider:

Some elements to consider:

“Mericans”

Plot

“The Things They Carried”

Characters

“This is What it Means to Say Phoenix Arizona”
Setting

“Greasy Lake”

Style and Tone

“Battle Royal”

Point of View

“Blue Winds Dancing”

Symbol

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”
Theme

“Young Goodman Brown”

Use ONE of the following options to produce a 2-3 page (500-750 words) thesis-based essay that demonstrates both your critical understanding of the elements of fiction. In addition, this assignment should demonstrate your ability to write a grammatically correct and interestingly original and focused essay. Remember, DO NOT RETELL the story; you should be able to summarize any of these stories in a few sentences. It is critical that you state an effective and arguable thesis as it will determine the direction and development of your essay. Your goal should be to present a unique, but informed, analysis of one or more of the stories. Use examples from the stories, including those in the form of direct quotes of text if those quotes aid in the development of your point. Again, be sure that you interpret the meaning of the story/ies when you answer ONE of the questions.

Your thesis should tell the reader these FOUR things: 1. what you are writing about; 2. which elements you will analyze; 3. why they are important to the meaning of the story; and 4. what you think the author(s) is/are trying to say about the human condition. DO NOT SPEND THE ENTIRE ESSAY JUST RETELLING THE STORY.

Think about the meaningfulness of these stories to help guide your analysis. Remember, these stories are symbolic and are meant to “represent” or symbolize something about the human condition. Your job is to analyze what the meaning is in your essay.

Use at least 1-2 secondary sources to help support your thesis. At least one source should be an academic source (from the library databases). Proper MLA citation and effective integration of quotes from the secondary sources and the story are required. Write authoritatively in the third person; avoid editorializing and using terms such as “I think” and “I believe.” And, do not tell me what you “will do” in the paper. Just analyze the text.

According to DCCC policy, any plagiarized assignment will earn a grade of zero. No exceptions. Be sure that you check grammar and spelling before you submit the essay, too. There should be no fragments, run-ons, or comma splices in your essays, too. Finally, you should always use the Writing Center and “Smarthinking” during your drafting/writing process. View the English Rubric under “Materials” for a general guide for good writing.

OPTIONS:

1. Some of these stories have a male character that is prominent and some stories have a female character that is prominent. Write an essay in which you compare the depiction of males in 2 stories
OR
(not “AND”) compare the depiction of females in 2 of these stories. Use the methods of characterization in your discussion of how readers view the male or female character traits in the story. And, discuss how the gender of the characters shapes the story. Also, be sure to critically analyze what you think the authors are trying to say about gender and/or culture or anything else about the human condition that you think is relevant in the story. Remember, a thesis can be more than one sentence. And, don’t just randomly choose two stories without thinking how your thesis can make them relevant to each other in an interesting way. You may also include discussions of other elements that you deem important.

2. The center of any plot is conflict. There are three different kinds of conflict: between two people, between a person and his/her environment, and within the character him/herself. Using ONE of the following stories, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix Arizona,” “The Things They Carried,”
OR
(Not “AND”) “The Battle Royal,” write an analysis of conflict as it operates in the story you choose. That is, use details from the story to develop a thesis about how the conflict(s) shape the meaning of the story and why the conflict(s) are significant to the meaning of the story. Be sure to critically analyze what you think the author is trying to say about the human condition that you think is relevant in the story. You may also include discussions of other elements that you deem important.

3. Using “Greasy Lake” and one other story from the list above, write an extensive analysis of setting in both stories. How does setting determine the actions and behavior of the characters? Why do the actions of the story take place in the particular setting? Is the setting symbolic in any way? How does the setting of the two stories create meaning in the story? Also, be sure to critically analyze what you think the author is trying to say about the human condition (through the settings) that you think is relevant in the story. And, don’t just randomly choose two stories without thinking how your thesis can make them relevant to each other in an interesting way. You may also include discussions of other elements that you deem important to expand on the analysis of setting.

4. Use any 2 of the short stories listed above to discuss the development of theme and the use of symbols in the stories. Your explanation should include both a discussion of symbols (which symbols symbolize what) and a discussion of the stories’ overall themes. How do the symbols reinforce the themes of these stories? Also, be sure to critically analyze what you think the authors are trying to say about whatever the themes are and the human condition. Remember, just naming the themes and listing the symbols that appear in the stories is not analysis. And, don’t just randomly choose two stories without thinking how your thesis can make them relevant to each other in an interesting way. You may also include discussions of other elements that you deem important.

*Again, I DO NOT want to know what happens in the story/ies. I obviously already know this. Instead, I want to know what you think the author is trying to say about gender, or identity, or war, or race, or culture, or being young, or religious, or naïve, or in love, etc. and the human condition.

*Consult the “English Rubric” posted in the “Materials” tab for a good idea of what constitutes an “Excellent” essay. And, Read the “First Draft Revision Checklist.”

http://www.wicknet.org/english/bfreeman/Anthology/battle_royal.htm

Battle Royal
Ralph Ellison

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and

everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were

often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking

everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much

painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been

born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

And yet I am no freak of nature, nor of history. I was in the cards, other things having been equal

(or unequal) eighty-five years ago. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am

only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed. About eighty-five years ago they were told

they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in

everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand. And they believed it. They exulted in it. They

stayed in their place, worked hard, and brought up my father to do the same. But my grandfather is the

one. He was an odd old guy, my grandfather, and I am told I take after him. It was he who caused the

trouble. On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up

the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in

the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the

lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and

destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” They thought the old man had gone out

of his mind. He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the

shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it sputtered on the wick like the old man’s

breathing. “Learn it to the younguns,” he whispered fiercely; then he died.

But my folks were more alarmed over his last words than over his dying. It was as though he had

not died at all, his words caused so much anxiety. I was warned emphatically to forget what he had said

and, indeed, this is the first time it has been mentioned outside the family circle. It had a tremendous

effect upon me, however. I could never be sure of what he meant. Grandfather had been a quiet old man

who never made any trouble, yet on his deathbed he had called himself a traitor and a spy, and he had

spoken of his meekness as a dangerous activity. It became a constant puzzle which lay unanswered in the

back of my mind. And whenever things went well for me I remembered my grandfather and felt guilty

and uncomfortable. It was as though I was carrying out his advice in spite of myself. And to make it

http://www.wicknet.org/english/bfreeman/Anthology/battle_royal.htm

worse, everyone loved me for it. I was praised by the most lily-white men in town. I was considered an

example of desirable con- duct-just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old

man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was

doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they

would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that

really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to

act as I did. It made me afraid that some day they would look upon me as a traitor and I would be lost.

Still I was more afraid to act any other way because they didn’t like that at all. The old man’s words were

like a curse. On my graduation day I delivered an oration in which I showed that humility was the secret,

indeed, the very essence of progress. (Not that I believed this-how could I, remembering my

grandfather?—I only believed that it worked.) It was a great success. Everyone praised me and I was

invited to give the speech at a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens. It was a triumph for the

whole community.

It was in the main ballroom of the leading hotel. When I got there I discovered that it was on the

occasion of a smoker, and I was told that since I was to be there anyway I might as well take part in the

battle royal to be fought by some of my schoolmates as part of the entertainment. The battle royal came

first.

All of the town’s big shots were there in their tuxedoes, wolfing down the buffet foods, drinking

beer and whiskey and smoking black cigars. It was a large room with a high ceiling. Chairs were arranged

in neat rows around three sides of a portable boxing ring. The fourth side was clear, revealing a gleaming

space of polished floor. I had some misgivings over the battle royal, by the way. Not from a distaste for

fighting but because I didn’t care too much for the other fellows who were to take part. They were tough

guys who seemed to have no grandfather’s curse worrying their minds. No one could mistake their

toughness. And besides, I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my

speech. In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington. But the other

fellows didn’t care too much for me either, and there were nine of them. I felt superior to them in my way,

and I didn’t like the manner in which we were all crowded together in the servants’ elevator. Nor did they

like my being there. In fact, as the warmly lighted floors flashed past the elevator we had words over the

fact that I, by taking part in the fight, had knocked one of their friends out of a night’s work.

We were led out of the elevator through a rococo hall into an anteroom and told to get into our

fighting togs. Each of us was issued a pair of boxing gloves and ushered out into the big mirrored hall,

which we entered looking cautiously about us and whispering, lest we might accidentally be heard above

the noise of the room. It was foggy with cigar smoke. And already the whiskey was taking effect. I was

shocked to see some of the most important men of the town quite tipsy. They were all there-bankers,

lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants. Even one of the more fashionable pastors.

Something we could not see was going on up front. A clarinet was vibrating sensuously and the men were

standing up and moving eagerly forward. We were a small tight group, clustered together, our bare upper

bodies touching and shining with anticipatory sweat: while up front the big shots were becoming

increasingly excited over something we still could not see. Suddenly I heard the school superintendent,

who had told me to come, yell, “Bring up the shines, gentlemen! Bring up the little shines!”

We were rushed up to the front of the ballroom, where it smelled even more strongly of tobacco

and whiskey. Then we were pushed into place. I almost wet my pants. A sea of faces, some hostile, some

amused, ringed around us, and in the center, facing us, stood a magnificent blonde—stark naked. There

was dead silence. I felt a blast of cold air chill me. I tried to back away, but they were behind me and

around me. Some of the boys stood with lowered heads, trembling. I felt a wave of irrational guilt and

fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked. Yet I was strongly attracted

and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. The hair

was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an

abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt. I felt a desire to spit

upon her as my eyes brushed slowly over her body. Her breasts were firm and round as the domes of East

Indian temples, and I stood so close as to see the fine skin texture and beads of pearly perspiration

glistening like dew around the pink and erected buds of her nipples. I wanted at one and the same time to

run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the

others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and to murder her, to

hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs

formed a capital V. I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes.

And then she began to dance, a slow sensuous movement; the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging

to her like the thinnest of veils. She seemed like a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the

angry surface of some gray and threatening sea. I was transported. Then I became aware of the clarinet

playing and the big shots yelling at us. Some threatened us if we looked and others if we did not. On my

right I saw one boy faint. And now a man grabbed a silver pitcher from a table and stepped close as he

dashed ice water upon him and stood him up and forced two of us to support him as his head hung and

moans issued from his thick bluish lips. Another boy began to plead to go home. He was the largest of the

group, wearing dark red fighting trunks much too small to conceal the erection which projected from him

as though in answer to the insinuating low-registered moaning of the clarinet. He tried to hide himself

with his

boxing gloves.

And all the while the blonde continued dancing, smiling faintly at the big shots who watched her

with fascination, and faintly smiling at our fear. I noticed a certain merchant who followed her hungrily,

his lips loose and drooling. He was a large man who wore diamond studs in a shirtfront which swelled

with the ample paunch underneath, and each time the blonde swayed her undulating hips he ran his hand

through the thin hair of his bald head and, with his arms upheld, his posture clumsy like that of an

intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind. This creature was completely hypnotized.

The music had quickened. As the dancer flung herself about with a detached expression on her face, the

men began reaching out to touch her. I could see their beefy fingers sink into her soft flesh. Some of the

others tried to stop them and she began to move around the floor in graceful circles, as they gave chase,

slipping and sliding over the polished floor. It was mad. Chairs went crashing, drinks were spilt, as they

ran laughing and howling after her. They caught her just as she reached a door, raised her from the floor,

and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing, and above her red, fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror

and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys. As I

watched, they tossed her twice and her soft breasts seemed to flatten against the air and her legs flung

wildly as she spun. Some of the more sober ones helped her to escape. And I started off the floor, heading

for the anteroom with the rest of the boys.

Some were still crying and in hysteria. But as we tried to leave we were stopped and ordered to get

into the ring. There was nothing to do but what we were told. All ten of us climbed under the ropes and

allowed ourselves to be blindfolded with broad bands of white cloth. One of the men seemed to feel a bit

sympathetic and tried to cheer us up as we stood with our backs against the ropes. Some of us tried to

grin. “See that boy over there?” one of the men said. “I want you to run across at the bell and give it to

him right in the belly. If you don’t get him, I’m going to get you. I don’t like his looks.” Each of us was

told the same. The blindfolds were put on. Yet even then I had been going over my speech. In my mind

each word was as bright as a flame. I felt the cloth pressed into place, and frowned so that it would be

loosened when I relaxed.

But now I felt a sudden fit of blind terror. I was unused to darkness, it was as though I had

suddenly found myself in a dark room filled with poisonous cottonmouths. I could hear the bleary voices

yelling insistently for the battle royal to

begin.

“Get going in there!”

“Let me at that big nigger!”

I strained to pick up the school superintendent’s voice, as though to squeeze some security out of

that slightly more familiar sound.

“Let me at those black sonsabitches!” someone yelled.

“No, Jackson, no!” another voice yelled. “Here, somebody, help me hold Jack.”

“I want to get at that ginger-colored nigger. Tear him limb from limb,” the

first voice yelled.

I stood against the ropes trembling. For in those days I was what they called ginger-colored, and

he sounded as though he might crunch me between his teeth like a crisp ginger cookie.

Quite a struggle was going on. Chairs were being kicked about and I could hear voices grunting as

with terrific effort. I wanted to see, to see more desperately than ever before. But the blindfold was as

tight as a thick skin, puckering scab and when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a

voice yelled, “Oh, no you don’t, black bastard! Leave that alone!”

“Ring the bell before Jackson kills him a coon!” someone boomed in the sudden silence. And I

heard the bell clang and the sound of the feet scuffling forward.

A glove smacked against my head. I pivoted, striking out stiffly as someone went past, and felt the

jar ripple along the length of my arm to my shoulder. Then it seemed as though all nine of the boys had

turned upon me at once. Blows pounded me from all sides while I struck out as best I could. So many

blows landed upon me that I wondered if I were not the only blindfolded fighter in the ring, or if the man

called Jackson hadn’t succeeded in getting me after all.

Blindfolded, I could no longer control my motions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby

or a drunken man. The smoke had become thicker and with each new blow it seemed to sear and further

restrict my lungs. My saliva became like hot bitter glue. A glove connected with my head, filling my

mouth with warm blood. It was everywhere. I could not tell if the moisture I felt upon my body was sweat

or blood. A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the

floor. Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold. I lay prone, pretending that I was

knocked out, but felt myself seized by hands and yanked to my feet. “Get going, black boy! Mix it up!”

My arms were like lead, my head smarting from blows. I managed to feel my way to the ropes and held

on, trying to catch my breath. A glove landed in my midsection and I went over again, feeling as though

the smoke had be- come a knife jabbed into my guts. Pushed this way and that by the legs milling around

me, I finally pulled erect and discovered that I could see the black, sweat- washed forms weaving in the

smoky, blue atmosphere like drunken dancers weaving to the rapid drum-like thuds of blows.

Everyone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else. No

group fought together for long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to fight each other, were

themselves attacked. Blows landed below the belt and in the kidney, with the gloves open as well as

closed, and with my eye partly opened now there was not so much terror. I moved carefully, avoiding

blows, although not too many to attract attention, fighting group to group. The boys groped about like

blind, cautious crabs crouching to protect their midsections, their heads pulled in short against their

shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smoke-filled air like the

knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails. In one comer I glimpsed a boy violently punching the air and

heard him scream in pain as he smashed his hand against a ring post. For a second I saw him bent over

holding his hand, then going down as a blow caught his unprotected head. I played one group against the

other, slip- ping in and throwing a punch then stepping out of range while pushing the others into the

melee to take the blows blindly aimed at me. The smoke was agonizing and there were no rounds, no bells

at three minute intervals to relieve our exhaustion. The room spun round me, a swirl of lights, smoke,

sweating bodies surrounded by tense white faces. I bled from both nose and mouth, the blood spattering

upon my chest.

The men kept yelling, “Slug him, black boy! Knock his guts out!”

“Uppercut him! Kill him! Kill that big boy!”

Taking a fake fall, I saw a boy going down heavily beside me as though we were felled by a single

blow, saw a sneaker-clad foot shoot into his groin as the two who had knocked him down stumbled upon

him. I rolled out of range, feeling a twinge of nausea.

The harder we fought the more threatening the men became. And yet, I had begun to worry about

my speech again. How would it go? Would they recognize my ability? What would they give me?

I was fighting automatically when suddenly I noticed that one after another of the boys was

leaving the ring. I was surprised, filled with panic, as though I had been left alone with an unknown

danger. Then I understood. The boys had arranged it among themselves. It was the custom for the two

men left in the ring to slug it out for the winner’s prize. I discovered this too late. When the bell sounded

two men in tuxedoes leaped into the ring and removed the blindfold. I found myself facing Tatlock, the

biggest of the gang. I felt sick at my stomach. Hardly had the bell stopped ringing in my ears than it

clanged again and I saw him moving swiftly toward me. Thinking of nothing else to do I hit him smash on

the nose. He kept coming, bringing the rank sharp violence of stale sweat. His face was a black blank of a

face, only his eyes alive-with hate of me and aglow with a feverish terror from what had happened to us

all. I became anxious. I wanted to deliver my speech and he came at me as though he meant to beat it out

of me. I smashed him again and again, taking his blows as they came. Then on a sudden impulse I struck

him lightly and we clinched. I whispered, “Fake like I knocked you out, you can have the prize.”

“I’ll break your behind,” he whispered hoarsely.

“For them?”

“For me, sonafabitch!”

They were yelling for us to break it up and Tatlock spun me half around with a blow, and as a

joggled camera sweeps in a reeling scene, I saw the howling red faces crouching tense beneath the cloud

of blue-gray smoke. For a moment the world wavered, unraveled, flowed, then my head cleared and

Tatlock bounced before me. That fluttering shadow before my eyes was his jabbing left hand. Then falling

forward, my head against his damp shoulder, I whispered.

“I’ll make it five dollars more.”

“Go to hell!”

But his muscles relaxed a trifle beneath my pressure and I breathed, “Seven?”

“Give it to your ma,” he said, ripping me beneath the heart.

And while I still held him I butted him and moved away. I felt myself bombarded with punches. I

fought back with hopeless desperation. I wanted to de- liver my speech more than anything else in the

world, because I felt that only these men could judge truly my ability, and now this stupid clown was

ruining my chances. I began fighting carefully now, moving in to punch him and out again with my

greater speed. A lucky blow to his chin and I had him going too—until I heard a loud voice yell, “I got my

money on the big boy.”

Hearing this, I almost dropped my guard. I was confused: Should I try to win against the voice out

there? Would not this go against my speech, and was not this a moment for humility, for nonresistance? A

blow to my head as I danced about sent my right eye popping like a jack-in-the-box and settled my

dilemma. The room went red as I fell. It was a dream fall, my body languid and fastidious as to where to

land, until the floor became impatient and smashed up to meet me. A moment later I came to. An hypnotic

voice said FIVE emphatically. And I lay there, hazily watching a dark red spot of my own blood shaping

itself into a butterfly, glistening and soaking into the soiled gray world of the canvas.

When the voice drawled TEN I was lifted up and dragged to a chair. I sat dazed. My eye pained

and swelled with each throb of my pounding heart and I wondered if now I would be allowed to speak. I

was wringing wet, my mouth still bleeding. We were grouped along the wall now. The other boys ignored

me as they congratulated Tatlock and speculated as to how much they would be paid. One boy whimpered

over his smashed hand. Looking up front, I saw attendants in white jackets rolling the Portable ring away

and placing a small square rug in the vacant space surrounded by chain. Perhaps, I thought, I will stand on

the mg to deliver my speech.

Then the M.C. called to us. “Come on up here boys and get your money.”

We ran forward to where the men laughed and talked in their chairs,

waiting. Everyone seemed friendly now.

“There it is on the rug,” the man said. I saw the mg covered with coins of all dimensions and a few

crumpled bills. But what excited me, scattered here and there, were the gold pieces.

“Boys, it’s all yours,” the man said. “You get all you grab.”

“That’s right, Sambo,” a blond man said, winking at me confidentially.

I trembled with excitement, forgetting my pain. I would get the gold and the bills. I thought. I

would use both hands. I would throw my body against the boys nearest me to block them from the gold.

“Get down around the rug now,” the man commanded, “and don’t anyone touch it until I give the

signal.”

“This ought to be good,” I heard.

As told, we got around the square rug on our knees. Slowly the man raised his freckled hand as we

followed it upward with our eyes.

I heard, “These niggers look like they’re about to pray!”

Then, “Ready”, the man said. “Go!”

I lunged for a yellow coin lying on the blue design of the carpet, touching it and sending a

surprised shriek to join those around me. I tried frantically to remove my hand but could not let go. A hot,

violent force tore through my body, shaking me like a wet rat. The rug was electrified. The hair bristled

up on my head as I shook myself free. My muscles jumped, my nerves jangled, writhed. But I saw that

this was not stopping the other boys. Laughing in fear and embarrassment, some were holding back and

scooping up the coins knocked off by the painful contortions of others. The men roared above us as we

struggled.

“Pick it up, goddamnit, pick it up!” someone called like a bass-voiced parrot. “Go on, get it!”

I crawled rapidly around the floor, picking up the coins, trying to avoid the coppers and to get

greenbacks and the gold. Ignoring the shock by laughing, as I brushed the coins off quickly, I discovered

that I could contain the electricity—a contradiction but it works. Then the men began to push us onto the

rug. Laughing embarrassedly, we struggled out of their hands and kept after the coins. We were all wet

and slippery and hard to hold. Suddenly I saw a boy lifted into the air, glistening with sweat like a circus

seat, and dropped, his wet back landing flush upon the charged rug, heard him yell and saw him literally

dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the

flesh of a horse stung by many flies. When be finally rolled off, his face was gray and no one stopped him

when he ran from the floor amid booming laughter.

“Get the money,” the M.C. called. “That’s good hard American cash!”

And we snatched and grabbed, snatched and grabbed. I was careful not to come too close to the

rug now, and when I felt the hot whiskey breath descend upon me like a cloud of foul air I reached out

and grabbed the leg of a chair. It was occupied and I held on desperately.

“Leggo, nigger! Leggo!”

The huge face wavered down to mine as he tried to push me free. But my

body was slippery and he was too drunk. It was Mr. Colcord, who owned a chain of movie houses and

“entertainment palaces.” Each time he grabbed me I slipped out of his hands. It became a real struggle. I

feared the rug more than I did the drunk, so I held on, surprising myself for a moment by trying to topple

him upon the rug. It was such an enormous idea that I found myself actually carrying it out. I tried not to

be obvious, yet when I grabbed his leg, trying to tumble him out of the chair, he raised up roaring with

laughter, and, looking at me with soberness dead in the eye, kicked me viciously in the chest. The chair

leg flew out of my hand and I felt myself going and rolled. It was as though I had rolled through a bed of

hot coals. It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free, a century in which I was seared

through the deepest levels of my body to the fearful breath within me and the breath seared and heated to

the point of explosion. It’ll all be over in a flash, I thought as I rolled clear. It’ll all be over in a

flash.

But not yet, the men on the other side were waiting, red faces swollen as though from apoplexy as

they bent forward in their chairs. Seeing their fingers coming toward me I rolled away as a fumbled

football rolls off the receiver’s finger, tips, back into the coals. That time I luckily sent the rug sliding out

of place and heard the coins ringing against the floor and the boys scuffling to pick them up and the M.C.

calling, “All right, boys, that’s all. Go get dressed and get your money.”

I was limp as a dish rag. My back felt as though it had been beaten with wires. When we had
dressed the M.C. came in and gave us each five dollars, except Tatiock, who got ten for being the last in
the ring. Then he told us to leave. I was not to get a chance to deliver my speech, I thought. I was going
out into the dim alley in despair when I was stopped and told to go back. I returned to the ballroom, where
the men were pushing back their chairs and gathering in small groups to talk.

The M.C. knocked on a table for quiet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we almost forgot an important part

of the program. A most serious part, gentlemen. This boy was brought here to deliver a speech which he

made at his graduation yesterday . . .”

“Bravo!”

“I’m told that he is the smartest boy we’ve got out there in Greenwood. I’m

told that he knows more big words than a pocket-sized dictionary.”

Much applause and laughter.

“So now, gentlemen, I want you to give him your attention.”

There was still laughter as I faced them, my mouth dry, my eyes throbbing. I began slowly, but

evidently my throat was tense, because they began shouting.

“Louder! Louder!”

“We of the younger generation extol the wisdom of that great leader and educator,” I shouted,

“who first spoke these flaming words of wisdom: ‘A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a

friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: “Water, water; we die of

thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel came back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The

captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of

fresh sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.’ And like him I say, and in his words, ‘To

those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the

importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I

would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are’!—cast it down in making friends in every manly way

of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded . . .”‘

I spoke automatically and with such fervor that I did not realize that the men were still talking and

laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me. I coughed, wanting

to stop and go to one of the tall brass, sand-filled spittoons to relieve myself, but a few of the men,

especially the superintendent, were listening and I was afraid. So I gulped it down, blood, saliva and all,

and continued. (What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in

the rightness of things!) I spoke even louder in spite of the pain. But still they talked and still they

laughed, as though deaf with cotton in dirty ears. So I spoke with greater emotional emphasis. I closed my

ears and swallowed blood until I was nauseated. The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before,

but I could not leave out a single word. All had to be said, each memorized nuance considered, rendered.

Nor was that all. Whenever I uttered a word of three or more syllables a group of voices would yell for me

to repeat it. I used the phrase “social responsibility” and they yelled:

“What’s the word you say, boy?”

“Social responsibility,” I said.

“What?”

“Social . . .”

“Louder.”

“. . . responsibility.”

“More!”

“Respon—”

“Repeat!”

“—sibility.”

The room filled with the uproar of laughter until, no doubt, distracted by having to gulp down my

blood, I made a mistake and yelled a phrase I had often seen denounced in newspaper editorials, heard

debated in private.

“Social . . .”

“What?” they yelled.

“. . . equality—.”

The laughter hung smokelike in the sudden stillness. I opened my eyes, puzzled. Sounds of

displeasure filled the room. The M.C. rushed forward. They shouted hostile phrases at me. But I did not

understand.

A small dry mustached man in the front row blared out, “Say that slowly, son!

“What, sir?”

“What you just said!”

“Social responsibility, sir,” I said.

“You weren’t being smart, were you boy?” he said, not unkindly.

“No, Sir!”

“You sure that about ‘equality’ was a mistake?”

“Oh, yes, Sir,” I said. “I was swallowing blood.”

“Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but

you’ve got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.”

I was afraid. I wanted to leave but I wanted also to speak and I was afraid they’d snatch me down.

“T’hank you, Sir,” I said, beginning where I had left off, and having them ignore me as before.

Yet when I finished there was a thunderous applause. I was surprised to see the superintendent

come forth with a package wrapped in white tissue paper, and, gesturing for quiet, address the men.

“Gentlemen, you see that I did not overpraise the boy. He makes a good speech and some day he’ll

lead his people in the proper paths. And I don’t have to tell you that this is important in these days and

times. This is a good, smart boy, and so to encourage him in the right direction, in the name of the Board

of Education I wish to present him a prize in the form of this . . .”

He paused, removing the tissue paper and revealing a gleaming calfskin briefcase.

“. . . in the form of this first-class article from Shad Whitmore’s shop.”

“Boy,” he said, addressing me, “take this prize and keep it well. Consider it a

badge of office. Prize it. Keep developing as you are and some day it will be filled with important papers

that will help shape the destiny of your people.”

I was so moved that I could hardly express my thanks. A rope of bloody saliva forming a shape

like an undiscovered continent drooled upon the leather and I wiped it quickly away. I felt an importance

that I had never dreamed.

“Open it and see what’s inside,” I was told.

My fingers a-tremble, I complied, smelling fresh leather and finding an official-looking document

inside. It was a scholarship to the state college for Negroes. My eyes filled with tears and I ran awkwardly

off the floor.

I was overjoyed; I did not even mind when I discovered the gold pieces I had scrambled for were

brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobile.

When I reached home everyone was excited. Next day the neighbors came to congratulate me. I

even felt safe from grandfather, whose deathbed curse usually spoiled my triumphs. I stood beneath his

photograph with my briefcase in hand and smiled triumphantly into his stolid black peasant’s face. It was

a face that fascinated me. The eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went.

That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no

matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my briefcase and read what was inside and I did,

finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal: and inside the envelope I found another and

another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. “Them’s years,” he said. “Now open that one.”

And I did and in it I found an engraved stamp containing a short message in letters of gold. “Read it,” my

grandfather said. “Out loud.”

“To Whom It May Concern,” I intoned. “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”

I awoke with the old man’s laughter ringing in my ears.

Young Goodman Brown ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head
back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as
the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with
the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown.

“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear,
“prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is
troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself sometimes. Pray tarry
with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.”

“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in the year, this one night
must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be
done ‘twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we
but three months married?”

“Then God bless youe!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you find all well whn you
come back.”

“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no
harm will come to thee.”

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the
meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him with a
melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons.

“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a wretch am I to leave her on such
an errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a
dream had warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; ‘t would kill her to think it.
Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her
to heaven.”

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more
haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees
of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed
immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a
solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the
thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen
multitude.

“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown to himself; and he
glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if the devil himself should be at my very
elbow!”

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld
the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at
Goodman Brown’s approach and walked onward side by side with him.

“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was striking as I came
through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes agone.”

“Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the
sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were
journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old,
apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance
to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken for
father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as
simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would
not have felt abashed at the governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court, were it possible
that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as
remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must
have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.

“Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace for the beginning of a
journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary.”

“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, “having kept covenant by
meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the
matter thou wot’st of.”

“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us walk on, nevertheless,
reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the
forest yet.”

“Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. “My father never
went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest
men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of
Brown that ever took this path and kept”

“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person, interpreting his pause. “Well said,
Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the
Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the
Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a
pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war.
They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and
returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake.”

“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never spoke of these matters;
or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New
England. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness.”

“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have a very general acquaintance
here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me;
the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too–But these are state secrets.”

“Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed
companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own
ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how
should I meet the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his voice would
make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.”

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now burst into a fit of irrepressible
mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in
sympathy.

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself, “Well, go on, Goodman
Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with laughing.”

“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, “there is my
wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I’d rather break my own.”

“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not
for twenty old women like the one hobbling before us that Faith should come to any harm.”

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown
recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and
was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.

“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at nightfall,” said he. “But
with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods until we have left this Christian
woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I
was going.”

“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the path.”

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his companion, who advanced
softly along the road until he had come within a staff’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile,
was making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
indistinct words–a prayer, doubtless–as she went. The traveller put forth his staff and touched
her withered neck with what seemed the serpent’s tail.

“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.

“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller, confronting her and leaning
on his writhing stick.

“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame. “Yea, truly is it, and in the
very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.
But–would your worship believe it?–my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I
suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed with the
juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf’s bane”

“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the shape of old Goodman
Brown.

“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling aloud. “So, as I was saying,
being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they
tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good
worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling.”

“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here
is my staff, if you will.”

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods
which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown
could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again,
beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited
for him as calmly as if nothing had happened.

“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there was a world of
meaning in this simple comment.

They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his companion to make good
speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring
up in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs,
which were wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers touched them they became strangely
withered and dried up as with a week’s sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace,
until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump
of a tree and refused to go any farther.

“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand.
What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to
heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”

“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance, composedly. “Sit here and rest
yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”

Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight as
if he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the roadside,
applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the

minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what
calm sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely
and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal
himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him
thither, though now so happily turned from it.

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly
as they drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of
the young man’s hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that particular
spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures brushed the small
boughs by the wayside, it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint
gleam from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown
alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside the branches and thrusting forth his head
as far as he durst without discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he
could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and
Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some ordination
or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.

“Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had rather miss an ordination
dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from
Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the
Indian powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us.
Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion.”

“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the minister. “Spur up, or we
shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground.”

The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on
through the forest, where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed.
Whither, then, could these holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young
Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint
and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting
whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars
brightening in it.

“With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” cried Goodman
Brown.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray,
a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The
blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping
swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and
doubtful sound of voices. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of
towns-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met
at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct
were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest,

whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the
sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of night There was one voice of a
young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some
favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and
sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the
forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through
the wilderness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his
breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices,
fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above
Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch
of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is
but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his
staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to
walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length,
leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides
mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds–the creaking of the
trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a
distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were
laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its
other horrors.

“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.

“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch,
come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You
may as well fear him as he fear you.”

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of
Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied
gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such
laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own
shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his
course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks
and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at
the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard
the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many
voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The
verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the

sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried
out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one
extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some
rude, natural resemblance either to an alter or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines,
their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage
that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully
illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light
arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and
again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.

“A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor,
appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others
which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded
pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there.
At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows,
a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who
trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the
obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of
Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and
waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with
these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy
virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all
mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good
shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among
their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native
forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.

“But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined
to words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more.
Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and still the
chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and with the final
peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the
howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and
according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines
threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke
wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth
and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it
spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.

“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the
congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked
in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him
to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of
despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat
one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized
his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female,
led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the
proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.

“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your race. Ye have found
thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!”

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen;
the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.

“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed
them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of
righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded
elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how
many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’
wealth; and how fair damsels–blush not, sweet ones–have dug little graves in the garden, and
bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye
shall scent out all the places–whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest–where crime
has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty
blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of
sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than
human power–than my power at its utmost–can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children,
look upon each other.”

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and
the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.

“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its
despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.
“Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now
are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome
again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of
wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water,
reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape

of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might
be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and
Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering
alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!

“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.”

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm
night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest. He
staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on
fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring
around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard
to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed,
on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon
Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open
window. “What God doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who
had brought her a pint of morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the
grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith,
with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she
skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman
Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-
meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a
sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of
that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed
strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his
hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant
deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading
lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking
suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the
family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife,
and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse,
followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides
neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was
gloom.

Literature Network » Nathaniel Hawthorne » Young Goodman Brown

http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/158/

“Mericans” (1991)

By Sandra Cisneros

We’re waiting for the awful grandmother who is inside dropping pesos into la ofrenda box before

the alter to La Divina Providencia. Lighting votive candles and genuflecting. Blessing herself

and kissing her thumb. Running a crystal rosary between her fingers. Mumbling, mumbling,

mumbling.

There are so many prayers and promises and thanks-be-to-God to be given in the name of the

husband and the sons and the only daughter who never attend mass. It doesn’t matter. Like La

Virgin de Guadalupe, the awful grandmother intercedes on their behalf. For the grandfather who

hasn’t believed in anything since the first PRI elections. For my father, el Periquin, so skinny he

needs his sleep. For Auntie Light-skin, who only a few hours before was breakfasting on brain

and goat tacos after dancing all night in the pink zone. For Uncle Fat-face, the blackest of the

black sheep – Always remember your Uncle Fat-face in your prayers. And Uncle Baby – You go

for me, Mamá – God listens to you.

The awful grandmother has been gone a long time. She disappeared behind the heavy leather

outer curtain and the dusty velvet inner. We must stay near the church entrance. We must not

wander over to the balloon and punch-ball vendors. We cannot spend our allowance on fried

cookies or Familia Burron comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything

look like a rainbow when you look through them. We cannot run off and have our picture taken

on the wooden ponies. We must not climb the steps up the hill behind the church and chase each

other through the cemetery. We have promised to stay right where the awful grandmother left us

until she returns.

There are those walking to church on their knees. Some with fat rags tied around their legs and

others with pillows, one to kneel on, and one to flop ahead. There are women with black shawls

crossing and uncrossing themselves. There are armies of penitents carrying banners and flowered

arches while musicians play tinny trumpets and tinny drums.

La Virgen de Guadalupe is waiting inside behind a plate of thick glass. There’s also a gold

crucifix bent crooked as a mesquite tree when someone once threw a bomb. La Virgin de

Guadalupe on the main alter because she’s a big miracle, the crooked crucifix on a side alter

because that’s a little miracle.

But we’re outside in the sun. My big brother Junior hunkered against the wall with his eyes shut.

My little brother Keeks running around in circles.

Maybe and most probably my little brother is imagining he’s a flying feather dancer, like the

ones we saw swinging high up from a pole on the Virgin’s birthday. I want to be a flying feather

dancer too, but when he circles past me he shouts, “I’m a B-Fifty-two bomber, you’re a German,”

and shoots me with an invisible machine gun. I’d rather play flying feather dancers, but if I tell

my brother this, he might not play with me at all.

“Girl. We can’t play with a girl.” Girl. It’s my brothers’ favorite insult now instead of “sissy.”

“You girl,” they’ll yell at each other. “You throw the ball like a girl.”

I’ve already made up my mind to be a German when Keeks swoops past again, this time yelling,

“I’m Flash Gordon. You’re Ming the Merciless and the Mud People.” I don’t mind being Ming

the Merciless, but I don’t like being the Mud People. Something wants to come out of the corners

of my eyes, but I don’t let it. Crying is what girls do.

I leave Keeks running around in circles – “I’m the Lone Ranger, you’re Tonto.” I leave Junior

squatting on his ankles and go look for the awful grandmother.

Why do churches smell like the inside of an ear? Like incense and the dark and candles in blue

glass? And why does holy water smell of tears? The awful grandmother makes me kneel and fold

my hands. The ceiling is high and everyone’s prayers bumping up there like balloons.

If I stare at the eyes of the saints long enough, they move and wink at me, which makes me a sort

of saint too. When I get tired of winking saints, I count the awful grandmother’s mustache hairs

while she prays for Uncle Old, sick from the worm, and Auntie Cuca, suffering from a life of

troubles that left half her face crooked and the other half sad.

There must be a long, long list of relatives who haven’t gone to church. The awful grandmother

knits the names of the dead and the living into one long prayer fringed with the grandchildren

born in that barbaric country with its barbaric ways.

I put my weight on one knee, then the other, and when they both grow fat as a mattress of pins, I

slap them each awake. Micaela, you may wait outside with Alfredito and Enrique. The awful

grandmother says it all in Spanish, which I understand when I’m paying attention. “What?” I say,

though it’s neither proper nor polite. “What?” which the awful grandmother hears as “¿Güat?”

But she only gives me a look and shoves me toward the door.

After all that dust and dark, the light from the plaza makes me squinch my eyes like if I just

came out of the movies. My brother Keeks is drawing squiggly lines on the concrete with a

wedge of glass and the heel of his shoe. My brother Junior squatting against the entrance, talking

to a lady and a man.

They’re not from here. Ladies don’t come to church dressed in pants. And everybody knows men

aren’t supposed to wear shorts.

“¿Quieres chicle?” the lady asks in a spanish way too big for her mouth. “Gracias,” The lady

gives him a whole handful of gum for free, little cellophane cubes of Chiclets, cinnamon and

aqua and the white ones that don’t taste like anything but are good for pretend buck teeth.

“Por favor,” says the lady. “¿Un foto?” pointing to her camera.

“Sí.”

She’s so busy taking Junior’s picture, she doesn’t notice me and Keeks.

“Hey, Michelle, Keeks. You guys want gum?”

“But you speak English!”

“Yeah,” my brother says, “we’re Mericans.”

We’re Mericans, we’re Mericans, and inside the awful grandmother prays.

1

“This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona”
by Sherman Alexie
First published in Esquire In 199

4

Anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 1994
Adapted with other Alexie stories for the 1998 film Smoke Signals

Just after Victor lost his job at the BIA, he also found out
that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona. Victor

hadn’t seen his father in a few years, only talked to him on the

telephone once or twice, but there still was a genetic pain, which

was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone.

Victor didn’t have any money. Who does have money on a

reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople? His

father had a savings account waiting to be claimed, but Victor

needed to find a way to get to Phoenix. Victor’s mother was just as

poor as he was, and the rest of his family didn’t have any use at all

for him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.

“Listen,” Victor said. “My father just died. I need some

money to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.”

“Now, Victor,” the council said. “You know we’re having a

difficult time financially.”

“But I thought the council had special funds set aside for

stuff like this.”

“Now, Victor, we do have some money available for the

proper return of tribal members’ bodies. But I don’t think we have

enough to bring your father all the way back from Phoenix.”

“Well,” Victor said. “It ain’t going to cost all that much. He

had to be cremated. Things were kind of ugly. He died of a heart

attack in his trailer and nobody found him for a week. It was really

hot, too. You get the picture.”

“Now, Victor, we’re sorry for your loss and the

circumstances. But we can really only afford to give you one

hundred dollars.”

“That’s not even enough for a plane ticket.”

“Well, you might consider driving down to Phoenix.”

“I don’t have a car. Besides, I was going to drive my father’s

pickup back up here.”

“Now, Victor,” the council said. “We’re sure there is

somebody who could drive you to Phoenix. Or is there somebody

who could lend you the rest of the money?”

“You know there ain’t nobody around with that kind of

money.”

“Well, we’re sorry, Victor, but that’s the best we

can do.”

Victor accepted the Tribal Council’s offer. What else could

he do? So he signed the proper papers, picked up his check, and

walked over to the Trading Post to cash it.

While Victor stood in line, he watched Thomas Builds-the-

Fire standing near the magazine rack, talking to himself. Like he

always did. Thomas was a storyteller that nobody wanted to listen

to. That’s like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false

teeth.

Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire were the same age, had

grown up and played in the dirt together. Ever since Victor could

remember, it was Thomas who always had something to say.

Once, when they were seven years old, when Victor’s father

still lived with the family, Thomas closed his eyes and told Victor

this story: “Your father’s heart is weak. He is afraid of his own

family. He is afraid of you. Late at night he sits in the dark.

Watches the television until there’s nothing but that white noise.

Sometimes he feels like he wants to buy a motorcycle and ride

away. He wants to run and hide. He doesn’t want to be found.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire had known that Victor’s father was

going to leave, knew it before anyone. Now Victor stood in the

Trading Post with a one-hundred-dollar check in his hand,

wondering if Thomas knew that Victor’s father was dead, if he

knew what was going to happen next.

Just then Thomas looked at Victor, smiled, and walked over

to him.

“Victor, I’m sorry about your father,” Thomas said.

“How did you know about it?” Victor asked.

“I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in

the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.”

2

“Oh,” Victor said and looked around the Trading Post. All

the other Indians stared, surprised that Victor was even talking to

Thomas. Nobody talked to Thomas because he told the same damn

stories over and over again. Victor was embarrassed, but he thought

that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor felt a sudden need

for tradition.

“I can lend you the money you need,” Thomas said

suddenly. “But you have to take me with you.”

“I can’t take your money,” Victor said. “I mean, I haven’t

hardly talked to you in years. We’re not really friends anymore.”

“I didn’t say we were friends. I said you had to take me with
you.”
“Let me think about

it.”

Victor went home with his one hundred dollars and sat at

the kitchen table. He held his head in his hands and thought about

Thomas Builds-the-Fire, remembered little details, tears and scars,

the bicycle they shared for a summer, so many stories.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat on the bicycle, waited in
Victor’s yard. He was ten years old and skinny. His hair was dirty

because it was the Fourth of July.

“Victor,” Thomas yelled. “Hurry up. We’re going to miss the

fireworks.”

After a few minutes, Victor ran out of his house, jumped the

porch railing, and landed gracefully on the sidewalk.

“And the judges award him a 9.95, the highest score of the

summer,” Thomas said, clapped, laughed.

“That was perfect, cousin,” Victor said. “And it’s my. turn to

ride the bike.”

Thomas gave up the bike and they headed for the

fairgrounds. It was nearly dark and the fireworks were about to

start.

“You know,” Thomas said. “It’s strange how us Indians

celebrate the Fourth of July. It ain’t like it was our independence

everybody was fighting for.”

“You think about things too much,” Victor said. “It’s just

supposed to be fun. Maybe junior will be there.”

“Which Junior? Everybody on this reservation is named

junior.”

And they both laughed.

The fireworks were small, hardly more than a few bottle

rockets and a fountain. But it was enough for two Indian boys.

Years later, they would need much more.

Afterwards, sitting in the dark, fighting off mosquitoes,

Victor turned to Thomas Builds-the-Fire.

“Hey,” Victor said. “Tell me a story.”

Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: “There were

these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too

late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the

two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the

stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back

home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends

cheered and their parents’ eyes shone with pride. You were very

brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave.”

“Ya-hey,” Victor said. “That’s a good one. I wish I could be

a warrior.”

“Me, too,” Thomas said.

They went home together in the dark, Thomas on the bike

now, Victor on foot. They walked through shadows and light from

streetlamps.

“We’ve come a long ways,” Thomas said. “We have outdoor

lighting.”

“All I need is the stars,” Victor said. “And besides, you still

think about things too much.”

They separated then, each headed for home, both laughing

all the way.

Victor sat at his kitchen table. He counted his one hundred
dollars again and again. He knew he needed more to make it to

Phoenix and back. He knew he needed Thomas Builds-the-Fire. So

3

he put his money in his wallet and opened the front door to find

Thomas on the porch.

“Ya-hey, Victor,” Thomas said. “I knew you’d call me.”

Thomas walked into the living room and sat down on

Victor’s favorite chair.

“I’ve got some money saved up,” Thomas said. “It’s enough

to get us down there, but you have to get us back.”

“I’ve got this hundred dollars,” Victor said. “And my dad

had a savings account I’m going to claim.”

“How much in your dad’s account?”

“Enough. A few hundred.”

“Sounds good. When we leaving?”

* * *

When they were fifteen and had long since stopped being
friends, Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight. That is, Victor was

really drunk and beat Thomas up for no reason at all. All the other

Indian boys stood around and watched it happen. Junior was there

and so were Lester, Seymour, and a lot of others. The beating might

have gone on until Thomas was dead if Norma Many Horses hadn’t

come along and stopped it.

“Hey, you boys,” Norma yelled and jumped out of her car.

“Leave him alone.”

If it had been someone else, even another man, the Indian

boys would’ve just ignored the warnings. But Norma was a warrior.

She was powerful. She could have picked up any two of the boys

and smashed their skulls together. But worse than that, she would

have dragged them all over to some tipi and made them listen to

some elder tell a dusty old story.

The Indian boys scattered, and Norma walked over to

Thomas and picked him up.

“Hey, little man, are you okay?” she asked.

Thomas gave her a thumbs up.

“Why they always picking on you?”

Thomas shook his head, closed his eyes, but no stories came

to him, no words or music. He just wanted to go home, to lie in his

bed and let his dreams tell his stories for him.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor sat next to each other in
the airplane, coach section. A tiny white woman had the window

seat. She was busy twisting her body into pretzels. She was flexible.

“I have to ask,” Thomas said, and Victor closed his eyes in

embarrassment.

“Don’t,” Victor said.

“Excuse me, miss,” Thomas asked. “Are you a gymnast or

something?”

“There’s no something about it,” she said. “I was first

alternate on the 1980 Olympic team.”

“Really?” Thomas

asked.

“Really.”

“I mean, you used to be a world-class athlete?” Thomas

asked.

“My husband still thinks I am.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire smiled. She was a mental gymnast,

too. She pulled her leg straight up against her body so that she

could’ve kissed her kneecap.

“I wish I could do that,” Thomas said.

Victor was ready to jump out of the plane. Thomas, that

crazy Indian storyteller with ratty old braids and broken teeth, was

flirting with a beautiful Olympic gymnast. Nobody back home on

the reservation would ever believe it.

“Well,” the gymnast said. “It’s easy. Try it.”

Thomas grabbed at his leg and tried to pull it up into the

same position as the gymnast. He couldn’t even come close, which

made Victor and the gymnast laugh.

“Hey,” she asked. “You two are Indian, right?”

“Full-blood,” Victor said.

“Not me,” Thomas said. “I’m half magician on my mother’s

side and half clown on my father’s.”

They all laughed.

“What are your names?” she asked.

“Victor and Thomas.”

“Mine is Cathy. Pleased to meet you all.”

4

The three of them talked for the duration of the flight. Cathy

the gymnast complained about the government, how they screwed

the 1980 Olympic team by boycotting.

“Sounds like you all got a lot in common with Indians,”

Thomas said.

Nobody laughed.

After the plane landed in Phoenix and they had all found

their way to the terminal, Cathy the gymnast smiled and waved

good-bye.

“She was really nice,” Thomas said.

“Yeah, but everybody talks to everybody on airplanes,”

Victor said. “It’s too bad we can’t always be that way.”

“You always used to tell me I think too much,” Thomas

said. “Now it sounds like you do.”

“Maybe I caught it from you.”

“Yeah.”

Thomas and Victor rode in a taxi to the trailer where

Victor’s father died.

“Listen,” Victor said .as they stopped in front of the trailer.

“I never told you I was sorry for beating you up that time.”

“Oh, it was nothing. We were just kids and you were

drunk.”

“Yeah, but I’m still sorry.”

“That’s all

right.”

Victor paid for the taxi and the two of them stood in the hot

Phoenix summer. They could smell the trailer.

“This ain’t going to be nice,” Victor said. “You don’t have to

go in.”

“You’re going to need help.”

Victor walked to the front door and opened it. The stink

rolled out and made them both gag. Victor’s father had lain in that

trailer for a week in hundred-degree temperatures before anyone

found him. And the only reason anyone found him was because of

the smell. They needed dental records to identify him. That’s

exactly what the coroner said. They needed dental records.

“Oh, man,” Victor said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Well, then don’t.”

“But there might be something valuable in there.”

“I thought his money was in the bank.”

“It is. I was talking about pictures and letters and stuff like

that.”

“Oh,” Thomas said as he held his breath and followed

Victor into the trailer.

When Victor was twelve, he stepped into an underground
wasp nest. His foot was caught in the hole, and no matter how hard

he struggled, Victor couldn’t pull free. He might have died there,

stung a thousand times, if Thomas Builds-the-Fire had not come by.

“Run,” Thomas yelled and pulled Victor’s foot from the

hole. They ran then, hard as they ever had, faster than Billy Mills,

faster than Jim Thorpe, faster than the wasps could fly.

Victor and Thomas ran until they couldn’t breathe, ran until

it was cold and dark outside, ran until they were lost and it took

hours to find their way home. All the way back, Victor counted his

stings.

“Seven,” Victor said. “My lucky number.”

* * *

Victor didn’t find much to keep in the trailer. Only a photo
album and a stereo. Everything else had that smell stuck in it or was

useless anyway.

“I guess this is all,” Victor said. “It ain’t much.”

“Better than nothing,” Thomas said.
“Yeah, and I do have the pickup.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “It’s in good shape.”

“Dad was good about that stuff.”

“Yeah, I remember your dad.”

“Really?” Victor asked. “What do you remember?”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story:

“I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane,

to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I

knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license.

I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I

finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then

5

your dad came walking up. What the hell are you doing here? he
asked me. I said, Waiting for a vision. Then your father said, All
you’re going to get here is mugged. So he drove me over to
Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the

reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my

dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision.

Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care

of each other.”

Victor was quiet for a long time. He searched his mind for

memories of his father, found the good ones, found a few bad ones,

added it all up, and smiled.

“My father never told me about finding you in Spokane,”
Victor said.

“He said he wouldn’t tell anybody. Didn’t want me to get in

trouble. But he said I had to watch out for you as part of the deal.”

“Really?”

“Really. Your father said you would need the help. He was

right.”

“That’s why you came down here with me, isn’t it?” Victor

asked.

“I came because of your father.”

Victor and Thomas climbed into the pickup, drove over to

the bank, and claimed the three hundred dollars in the savings

account.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire could fly.
Once, he jumped off the roof of the tribal school and

flapped his arms like a crazy eagle. And he flew. For a second, he

hovered, suspended above all the other Indian boys who were too

smart or too scared to jump.

“He’s flying,” junior yelled, and Seymour was busy looking

for the trick wires or mirrors. But it was real. As real as the dirt

when Thomas lost altitude and crashed to the ground.

He broke his arm in two places.

“He broke his wing,” Victor chanted, and the other Indian

boys joined in, made it a tribal song.

“He broke his wing, he broke his wing, he broke his wing,”

all the Indian boys chanted as they ran off, flapping their wings,

wishing they could fly, too. They hated Thomas for his courage, his

brief moment as a bird. Everybody has dreams about flying.

Thomas flew.

One of his dreams came true for just a second, just enough

to make it real.

Victor’s father, his ashes, fit in one wooden box with
enough left over to fill a cardboard box.

“He always was a big man,” Thomas said.

Victor carried part of his father and Thomas carried the rest

out to the pickup. They set him down carefully behind the seats, put

a cowboy hat on the wooden box and a Dodgers cap on the

cardboard box. That’s the way it was supposed to be.

“Ready to head back home,” Victor asked.

“It’s going to be a long drive.”

“Yeah, take a couple days, maybe.”

“We can take turns,” Thomas said.

“Okay,” Victor said, but they didn’t take turns. Victor drove

for sixteen hours straight north, made it halfway up Nevada toward

home before he finally pulled over.

“Hey, Thomas,” Victor said. “You got to drive for a while.”

“Okay.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire slid behind the wheel and started

off down the road. All through Nevada, Thomas and Victor had

been amazed at the lack of animal life, at the absence of water, of

movement.

“Where is everything?” Victor had asked more than once.

Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the first

animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared

jackrabbit.

“Look,” Victor yelled. “It’s alive.”

Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on

their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and

under the wheels of the pickup.

6

“Stop the goddamn car,” Victor yelled, and Thomas did

stop, backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.

“Oh, man, he’s dead,” Victor said as he looked at the

squashed animal.

“Really dead.”

“The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed

it.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it was suicide.”

Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the

emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.

“Yeah,” Victor said. “It had to be suicide.”

“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “You drive for a

thousand miles and there ain’t even any bugs smashed on the

windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in

Nevada.”

Yeah,” Victor said. “Maybe I should drive.”

“Maybe you should.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire walked through the corridors of
the tribal school by himself. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near

him because of all those stories. Story after story.

Thomas closed his eyes and this story came to him: “We are

all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one

determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change

the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the

stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died

fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My

mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside

her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have

no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me

before I even had the words to speak. I learned a thousand stories

before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I

can do.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his stories to all those who

would stop and listen. He kept telling them long after people had

stopped listening.

Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just as
the sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new day on earth, but

the same old shit on the reservation.

“Good morning,” Thomas said.

“Good morning.”

The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating breakfast,

reading the newspaper, just like everybody else does. Willene

LeBret was out in her garden wearing a bathrobe. She waved when

Thomas and Victor drove by.

“Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back

to her roses.

Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-

Fire’s HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust

from their bodies.

“I’m tired,” Victor said.

“Of everything,” Thomas added.

They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor

needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the

promise to pay it all back.

“Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make

any difference anyhow.”

“Probably not, enit?”

“Nope.”

Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy storyteller

who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine

trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas,

even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real

as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind the seats.

“I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to

treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends would

give you too much shit about it.”

Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the

tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared

with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas

something, anything.

7

“Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box

which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”

Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told

this story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and

toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a

salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It

will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow. He

will rise, Victor, he will rise.”

Victor smiled.

“I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,”

Victor said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a

salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something. Like

letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.

“Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up

his driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.

“Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got

to ask one favor.”

Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and

shouted back. “What do you want?”

“Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why

don’t you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.

“Just once?”

“Just once.”

Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was

good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted

from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward

home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind

him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.

Answer the following questions with complete sentences,

or even paragraphs where appropriate.

1. What events bring Thomas Builds-The-Fire and

Victor together?

2. How are these two characters alike? How are they

different?

3. What stories are told in the flashbacks to the boys’

childhood? Why does Alexie include them?

4. Why does Thomas Builds-The-Fire feel he must tell

his stories? What does he get from telling the

stories? Why won’t people listen to his stories

anymore?

BlueWinds Dancing
by Thomas S. Whitecloud

There is a moon out tonight. Moons and stars and cloud tipped with moonlight. And there is a fall wind blowing in my heart. Ever
since this evening, when against a fading sky I saw geese wedge southward. They were going home. . . . Now I try to study, but
against the pages I see them again, driving southward. Going home.

Across the valley there are heavy mountains holding up the sky, and beyond the mountains there is home. Home, and
peace, and the beat of drums, and blue winds dancing over snowfields. The Indian lodge will fill with my people, and our gods
will come and sit among them.

But home is beyond the mountains, and I am here. Here where fall hides in the valleys, and winter never comes down
from the mountains. Here where all the trees grow in rows; the palms stand stiffly by the roadsides and in the groves the orange
trees line in military rows, and endlessly bear fruit. Beautiful, yes; there is always beauty in order, in rows of growing things! But
it is the beauty of captivity. A pine fighting for existence on a windy knoll is much more beautiful.

In my Wisconsin, the leaves change before the snows come. In the air is the smell of wild rice and venison cooking; and
when the winds come whispering through the forests, they carry the smell of rotting leaves. In the evenings, the loon calls,
lonely; and birds sing their last songs before leaving. Bears dig roots and eat late fall berries, fattening for their long winter
sleep. Later, when the first snows fall, one awakens in the morning to find the world white and beautiful and clean. Then one
can look back over his trail and see the tracks following. In the woods there are tracks of deer and snowshoe rabbits, and long
streaks where partridges slide to alight. Chipmunks make tiny footprints on the limbs and one can hear squirrels busy in hollow
trees, sorting acorns. Soft lake waves wash the shores, and sunsets burst each evening over the lakes, and make them look as
if they were afire.

That land which is my home! Beautiful, calm–where there is no hurry to get anywhere, no driving to keep up in a race
that knows no ending and no goal. No classes where men talk and talk and then stop now and then to hear their own words
come back to them from the students. No constant peering into the maelstrom of one’s mind; no worries about grades and
honors; no hysterical preparing for life until that life is half over; no anxiety about one’s place in the thing they call Society.

I hear again the ring of axes in deep woods, the crunch of snow beneath my feet. I feel again the smooth velvet of ghost-
birch bark. I hear the rhythm of the drums. . . . I am tired. I am weary of trying to keep up this bluff of being civilized. Being
civilized means trying to do everything you don’t want to, never doing everything you want to. It means dancing to the strings of
custom and tradition; it means living in houses and never knowing or caring who is next door. These civilized white men want us
to be like them–always dissatisfied–getting a hill and wanting a mountain.

Then again, maybe I am not tired. Maybe I’m licked. Maybe I am just not smart enough to grasp these things that go to
make up civilization. Maybe I am just too lazy to think hard enough to keep up.

Still, I know my people have many things that civilization has taken from the whites. They know how to give; how to tear
one’s piece of meat in two and share it with one’s brother. They know how to sing–how to make each man his song and sing
them; for their music they do not need to listen to other man singing over a radio. They know how to make things with their
hands, how to shape beads into design and make a thing of beauty from a piece of birch bark.

But we are inferior. It is terrible to have to feel inferior; to have to read reports of intelligence tests, and learn that one’s
race is behind. It is terrible to sit in class and hear men tell you that your people worship sticks of wood–that your gods are all
false, that the Manitou forgot your people and did not write them a book.

I am tired. I want to walk again among the ghost-birches. I want to see the leaves turn in autumn, the smoke rise from
the lodgehouses, and to feel the blue winds, and to feel the blue winds. I want to hear the drums; I want to hear the drums and
feel the blue whispering winds.

There is a train wailing into the night. The trains go across the mountains. It would be easy to catch a freight. They will
say he has gone back to the blanket; I don’t care. The dance at Christmas. . . .

A bunch of bums warming at a tiny fire talk politics and women and joke about the Relief and the WPA and smoke
cigarettes. These men in caps and overcoats and dirty overalls living on the outskirts of civilization are free, but the pay the price
of being free in civilization. They are outcasts. I remember a sociology professor lecturing on adjustment to society; hobos and
prostitutes and criminals are individuals who never adjusted, he said. He could learn a lot if he came and listened to a bunch of
bums talk. He would learn that work and a woman and a place to hang his hat are all the ordinary man wants. These are all he
wants, but other men are not content to let him ant only these, He must be taught to want radios and automobiles and a new
suit every spring. Progress will stop if he did not want these things. I listen to hear if there is any talk of communism or socialism
in the hobo jungles. There is none. At best there is a sort of disgusted philosophy about life. They seem to think there should be
a better distribution of wealth, or more work, or something. But they are not rabid about it. The radicals live in the cities.

I find a fellow headed for Albuquerque, and talk road-talk with him. “It is hard to ride fruit carts. Bums break in. Better to
wait for a cattle car going back to the Middle West, and ride that.” We catch the next east-bound and walk the tops until we find
a cattle cart. Inside, we crouch near the forward wall, huddle, and try to sleep. I feel peaceful and content at last. I am going
home. The cattle cart rocks. I sleep.

Morning and the desert. Noon and the Salton Sea, lying more lifeless than a mirage under a somber sun in a pale sky.
Skeleton mountains rearing on the skyline, thrusting out of the desert floor, all rocks and shadow and edges. Desert. Good
country for an Indian reservation. . . .

Yuma and the muddy Colorado. Night again, and I wait shivering for the dawn.

Phoenix. Pima country. Mountains that look like cardboard sets on a forgotten stage. Tucson, Papago country. Giant
cacti that look like petrified hitchhikers along the highways. Apache country. At El Paso my road-buddy decides to go on to
Houston. I leave him, and head north to see mesa country. Las Cruces and the terrible Organ Mountains, jagged peaks that
instill fear and wondering. Albuquerque. Pueblos along the Rio Grande. On the boardwalk there are some Indian women in
colored sashes selling bits of pottery. The stone age offering its art to the twentieth century. They hold up a piece and fix the
tourist with black eyes until, embarrassed, he buys or turns away. I feel suddenly angry that my people should have to do such
thing for a living. . . .

Santa Fe trains are fast, and they keep them pretty clean of bums. I decide to hurry and ride passenger coaltenders.
Hide in the dark, judge the speed of the train as it leaves, and then dash out, and catch it. I hug the cold steel wall of the tender
ant think of the roaring fire in the engine ahead, and of the passengers back in the dining car reading their papers over hot
coffee. Beneath me there is a blur of rails. Death would come quick if my hands should freeze and fall. Up over the Sangre De
Cristo range, around cliffs and through canyons to Denver. Bitter cold there, and I must watch out for Denver Bob. He is a
railroad bull who has thrown bums from fast freights. I miss him. It is too cold, I suppose. On north to the Sioux Country.

Small towns lit for the coming Christmas. One the streets of one I see a beam-shouldered young farmer gazing into a
window filled with shining silver toasters. He is tall and wears a blue shit buttoned, with no tie. His young wife by his side looks
at him hopefully. He wants decorations for his place to hang his hat and please his woman. . . .

Northward again. Minnesota, and great white fields of snow; frozen lakes, and dawn running into dusk without noon.
Long forests wearing white. Bitter cold, and one night the northern lights. I am nearing home.

I reach Woodruff at midnight. Suddenly I am afraid, now that I am but twenty miles from home. Afraid of what my father
will say, afraid of being looked on as a stranger by my own people. I sit by a fire and think about myself and all other young
Indians. We just don’t seem to fit anywhere–certainly not among the whites, and not among the older people. I think again about
the learned sociology professor and his professing. So many things seem to be clear now that I am away from school and do
not have to worry about some man’s opinion of my ideas. It is easy to think while looking at dancing flames.

Morning, I spend the day cleaning up, and buying some presents for my family with what is left of my money. Nothing
much, but a gift is a gift, if a man buys it with his last quarter. I wait until evening, then start up the track toward home.

Christmas Eve comes in on north wind. Snow clouds hang over the pines, and the night comes early. Walking along the
railroad bed, I feel the calm peace of snowbound forests on either side of me. I take my time; I am back in a world where time
does not mean that much now. I am alone; alone but not nearly so lonely as I was back at the campus at school. Those are
never lonely who love the snow and the pines; never lonely when pines are wearing white shawls and snow crunches coldly
underfoot. In the woods I know there are the tracks of deer and rabbit; I know that if I leave the trails and go into the woods I
shall find them. I walk along feeling glad because my legs are light and my feet seem to know that they are home. A deer comes
out of the woods ahead of me, and stands silhouetted on the rails. The North, I feel, has welcomed me home. I watch him and
am glad that I do not wish for a gun. He goes into the woods quietly, leaving only the design of his tracks in the snow. I walk
one. Now and then I pass a field, white under the night sky, with houses at the far end. Smoke comes from the chimneys of the
houses, and I try to tell what sort of wood each is burning by the smoke; some burn pine, others aspen, others tamarack. There
is one from which comes black coal smoke that rises lazily and drifts out over the tops of the trees. I like to watch houses and try
to imagine what might be happening in them.

Just as a light snow begins to fall I cross the reservation boundary; somehow it seems as though I have stepped into
another world. Deep woods in a white-and-black winter night. A faint trail leaving to the village.

The railroad on which I stand comes from a city sprawled by a lake–a city with a million people who walk around without
seeing one another; a city sucking the life from all the country around; a city with stores and police and intellectuals and
criminals and movies and apartment houses; a city with its politics and libraries and zoos.

Laughing, I go into the woods. As I cross a frozen lake I begin to hear the drums. Soft in the night the drums beat. It is
like the pulse beat of the world. The white line of the lake ends at a black forest, and above the trees the blue winds are
dancing.

I come to the outlaying houses of the village. Simple box houses, etched black in the night. From one or two windows
soft lamplight falls on the snow. Christmas here, too, but it does not mean much; not much in the way of parties and presents.
Joe Sky will get drunk. Alex Bodidash will buy his children red mittens and a new sled. Alex is a Carlisle man, and tries to keep
his home up to white men standards. White standards. Funny that my people should be ever falling farther behind. The more
they try to imitate whites the more tragic the result. Yet they want us to be imitation white men. About all we imitate well are their
vices.

The village is not a sight to instill pride, yet I am not ashamed; one can never be ashamed of his own people when he
knows they have dreams as beautiful as white snow on a tall pine.

Father and my brother and sister are seated around the table as I walk in. Father stares at me for a moment, then I am
in his arms, crying on his shoulder. I give them the presents I have brought, and my throat tightens as I watch my sister save
carefully bits of red string from the packages. I hide my feelings by wrestling with my brother when he strikes my shoulder in
token of affection. Father looks at me, and I know he has many questions, but he seems to know why I have come. He tells me
to go alone to the lodge, and he will follow.

I walk along the trail to the lodge, watching the northern lights forming in the heavens. White waving ribbons that seem
to pulsate with the rhythm of the drums. Clean snow creaks beneath my feet, and a soft wind sighs through the trees, winging to
me. Everything seems to say, “Be happy! You are home now–you are free. You are among friends–we are your friends; we, the
trees, and the snow, and the lights.” I follow the trail to the lodge. My feet are light, my heart seems to sing to the music, and I
hold my head high. Across white snow fields blue winds are dancing.

Before the lodge door I stop, afraid, I wonder if my people will remember me. I wonder–“Am I Indian, or am I white?” I
stand before the door a long time. I hear the ice groan on the lake, and remember the story of the old woman under the ice,
trying to get out, so she can punish come runaway lovers. I think to myself, “If I am white I will not believe that story; If I am

Indian, I will know that there is an old woman under the ice.” I listen for a while, and I know that there is an old woman under the
ice. I look again at the lights, and go in.

Inside the lodge there are many Indians. Some sit on benches around the walls, other dance in the center of the floor
around a drum. Nobody seems to notice me. It seems as though I were among a people I have never seen before. Heavy
women with long hair. Women with children on their knees–small children that watch with intent black eyes the movements of
the dancers, whose small faces are solemn and serene. The faces of the old people are serene, too, and their eyes are merry
and bright. I look at the old men. Straight, dressed in dark trousers and beaded velvet vests, wearing soft moccasins. Dark, lined
faces intent on the music. I wonder if I am at all like them. They dance on, lifting their feet to the rhythm of the drums swaying
lightly, looking upward. I look at their eyes, and am startled at the rapt attention to the rhythm of the music.

The dance stops. The men walk back to the walks, and talk in low tones or with their hands. There is little conversation,
yet everyone seems to be sharing some secret. A woman looks at a small boy wandering away, and he comes back to her.

Strange, I think and then remember. These people are not sharing words–they are sharing a mood. Everyone is happy. I
am so used to white people that it seems strange so many people could be together without someone talking. These Indians are
happy because they are together, and because the night is beautiful outside, and the music is beautiful. I try hard to forget
school and white people, and be one of these–my people. I try to forget everything but the night, and it is a part of me that I am
one with my people and we are all a part of something universal. I watch eyes, and see now that the old people are speaking to
me. They nod slightly, imperceptibly, and their eyes laugh into mine. I look around the room. All the eyes are friendly; they all
laugh. No one questions my being here. The drums begin to beat again, and I catch to invitation in the eyes of the old men. My
feet begin to lift to the rhythm, and I looked out beyond the walls into the night and see the lights. I am happy. It is beautiful. I am
home.