JOHN SEES THE SADNESS in his mother’s eyes as he prepares to leave the reservation for college. She wears a simple dress, something she sewed herself late at night. Lately, she has not slept well because she constantly worries about her son. She had given birth to him when she was very young, fourteen years old, and had greeted his arrival with a combination of fear, love, and ignorance. Her own mother had died while giving birth to her, and her father had been killed in Korea. Raised by a series of cousins and near-relatives, an orphan, she was not sure she knew how to be somebody’s daughter, let alone somebody’s mother. When John was born, the result of a random powwow encounter, he might as well have been an alien. Brown-skinned and bloody, twisted with the shock of birth, John screamed. But was he screaming out of rage, hunger, terror, or something more? She held him to her chest and prayed. Please, she whispered to him, stop. Ever since his birth, she has expected those screams, even now as she stands on the porch and watches John pack the car with his last piece of luggage. He is leaving her, leaving for college, and she is terrified of the life that awaits him in the white world.
“Are you sure about the car?” he asks.
“Yes, yes,” she says. “I don’t need it. I can use the tribal van. Or I can walk if I need to go to town. It’s not far.”
“But what about winter?”
“I’ll walk faster,” she says, and they both laugh.
She looks at her son. He has grown into a handsome man, tall and strong. But more than that, he is smart and generous, good to children and the tribal elders. For ten years, she has driven the tribal lunch van, which delivers meals to the elders, and John has often helped her. That was the way they both learned to speak the tribal language.
“Etigsgren,” said the elders upon their arrival.
“Etigsgren,” said John, perfectly mimicking the elder’s guttural stops and singsong accent.
“Ua soor loe neay. Reliw yerr uo hove?” asked the elders.
John smiled and shook his head. He did not have a girlfriend. He spent most of his free time with the elders. He vacuumed their carpets. He chased down rogue spiders in their bathtubs. He never killed the spiders; the elders had taught him that was bad luck. But the elders didn’t want little monsters slinking around their houses either. So John would gently scoop the spiders into his hands and carry them outside. He could feel the spiders’ legs wildly kicking and tickling his palm. He had always felt guilty about taking the spiders from their familiar surroundings and abandoning them in the wilds of a reservation backyard. John was not sure what spiders had to fear, but he was sure it was out there somewhere, waiting and watching. While the elders watched from their kitchen windows, John would kneel in the grass, set his hand close to the ground, open his fingers, and let the spiders loose. In their panic, the spiders would blindly scramble away, somehow convinced that they had broken free of their prisons and needed to quickly hide. John studied the grass as the spiders climbed over leaves and twigs, small stones and broken glass, until they disappeared into the small shadows.
“Ua roob gey da yoo,” said the elders when he returned.
“Not so good,” said John, feeling guilty and privileged.
“Ah,” said the elders in halting English. “You’d feel better if you had a girlfriend, yes?”
John had been too busy with school, basketball, and his work for the children and elders to worry about girlfriends. John had always been good in mathematics and science and had become an excellent teacher. The little Indian girls were the quickest learners, and they were beautiful. Much taller than the boys and more mature, the girls publicly recognized the magic of mathematics and science, how they proved the existence of God.
John had read about a species of South American ants that raised aphids like cattle. He had described this to Indian boys, who made a conspicuous display of their feigned skepticism, and to Indian girls who believed it wholeheartedly.
“Listen,” John had said. “The aphids, these small insects that suck the juice from plants, well, they eat this one kind of plant that the ants cannot eat. The aphids eat it all up and clear it out of the way, you know? Then as the aphids digest this plant, some chemical process inside the stomach changes the plant into a sugar. The aphids secrete this sugar, which the ants harvest to feed to their larvae. Really. The ants keep the aphids in little stockyards inside their nests. Isn’t that great? The ants collect this plant, carry it back inside the nest, and feed the aphids in the little stockyards. Isn’t that amazing?”
The Indian girls would laugh and write long essays about ordinary magic, about their grandmothers, who could make stews out of anything. They would remember beautiful stews crafted from a single potato, a can of tomato soup, and deer jerky.
“Remember that?” the Indian girls would ask themselves and other girls, and they would all remember the stories, and would laugh at the memories. Then they would hand in their essays, shyly smile at John, and run outside to the basketball court. Meanwhile, the Indian boys would sulk in the back of the room. They would answer questions in rough monosyllables, all the while drawing amazing landscapes filled with impossible animals: the buffalo with intelligent blue eyes; the salmon with arms and delicate hands; the deer driving a pickup; the bear dribbling a basketball down the court. When John came around to check on the boys, they would hurriedly cover their drawings, both ashamed and proud of their artistic impulses.
“What do you have there?” John would ask.
“Nothing,” the Indian boys would whisper.
“You can’t go to recess until you show me,” John would say.
The Indian boys would stare out the classroom window and watch the Indian girls run up and down the basketball court.
“Here,” the Indian boys would say and reveal their drawings. “It ain’t no good.”
“It’s very good,” John would say, which always made the Indian boys shrug their shoulders. “Go to recess.”
The boys would run to join the girls on the basketball court. John loved the children’s laughter, the way those stoic, silent boys became so loud and excited, those bright, talkative girls so intense and competitive on a basketball court. Basketball was all math and science.
John had studied hard in high school. His grades and basketball had won him a scholarship from the state university and he now was heading off to college to be a pre-medicine major. He would be only a hundred miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand miles.
“I’ll come back every weekend,” he says to his mother as he slams the trunk shut.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “You need to make friends.”
John smiles at his mother. He would have come back every weekend if she had wanted that, but she has released him. John breathes deeply, fighting back tears. He has always wanted to go to college. He has dreamed of it, dreamed of walking through the hallways with serious purpose, his backpack filled with complicated books and reams of paper. Drinking coffee and arguing important points with other students. Finding the professor who would be a father figure, who would guide him carefully toward his future. An Indian man, or a black man, or maybe a Chinese man. Yes, a tall Chinese man with a passion for the Pittsburgh Pirates. College would transform John. He would become a doctor and return to the reservation to practice. It is all he has ever wanted. To help his tribe.
John had known he wanted to go to college when he was three years old. He had learned to read then, and reading taught him everything he needed to know about life outside the reservation. He picked up a book before he could read, when the words were still a mess of ink and implications, and somehow understood the purpose of a paragraph. The paragraph was a fence that held words. All the words inside a paragraph had a reason for being together. They shared a common history. John began to see the entire world in paragraphs. He knew the United States was a paragraph within the world. He knew his reservation was a paragraph within the United States. His house was a paragraph distinct from the houses to the west and north. Inside the house, his mother was a paragraph, completely separate from the paragraph of John. But he also knew that he shared genetics and common experiences with his mother, that they were paragraphs that belonged next to each other. John saw his tribe as a series of paragraphs that all had the same theme. They all belonged to the same tribe, shared the same blood. John could step into his classroom and see his features in his classmates. The wide face and brown skin, the high cheekbones and strong jawline, the large ears and long eyelashes. No matter their heights, they all had long bodies and short legs. Girls and boys, men and women, everyone had narrow hips and a flat ass.
John looks at his mother crying on the porch and sees himself in her features. She is a beautiful woman, somehow more beautiful as she cries. John does not quite understand why this is true. He cannot understand why he likes to see those tears on his mother’s face. It is proof of her love, certainly, but it touches something else inside of him so strongly that he takes a step backward.
“Don’t cry,” he says to his mother, but they both know she is going to cry for hours. John feels a single, hot tear roll down his face.
“You’re going to be somebody important,” she says.
John tries to smile. He goes to his mother and takes her in his arms. She is a small woman, but John can feel the strength in her arms and back when he hugs her.
“Don’t let them hurt you,” she whispers.
John holds his mother.
“They’re going to try to stop you,” she says. “They’re going to try to humiliate you. They’re going to call you names. They’ll want you to fail.”
“I’m going to be fine,” says John.
She looks up at her son, takes his face in her hands.
“Listen to me,” she says. “Don’t let them change you.”
John kisses his mother and turns away from her. He climbs into the car and starts it. He drops it into drive and pulls away from their small house. His mother stands still and quiet on the porch, watching him leave the reservation. She closes her eyes and listens to the sounds of the car fading into the distance. Then all is quiet.