Winter is in and over us here in Gloucester, and I sit in my book-lined study that smells
of the wood from the bookcases and of the paper from the 19th century volumes of
Emerson and Thoreau, my old town histories, mildew of the pages. The room is imbued
with my sweat, the sweat of almost four years of work in fits and starts on stories, novels,
essays, letters to editors of newspapers. The drawers are filled with pages of words, and
the place smells of me and whatever labor or toil I've exacted from myself here.
So did Wayne's attic on Indian Island after a while, and the room at the
Anchorage Motel in Old Town, our bedroom on Gotts Island, and the reading rooms in
the libraries of all the places I've lived in or visited while working on this book. I suspect
I've left quite an olfactory spore behind me, however ephemeral.
And winter is in and over us, as it is on Indian Island. Nights are 35 degrees
below zero, if this winter is anything like the last, and a lot of people will be cold down
there: even in mid-September they were starting to button up all over. I miss my friends
on Indian Island. By my last visit I could start at the bridge and begin to walk up Center
Street, past church and rectory, past shops and houses, past the Lovarama Laundromat.
Robby Troy Francis would tag along after me, and Burnell would sweep in beside me on
his bike; Eva would nod and sometimes smile; Stanley Neptune and Kathy Paul would
flash by in the open silver-gray Ford with Connecticut plates, the dog Tracy in the back
seat. I'd say hi to Sammy and Jim, Bengun and Leo: Vickie and Ellen would wave at me
from the Project Mainstream office, while Ken and Jim would be bent over their latest
proposal or report.
People I knew would wave or say hello and the people I didn't would nod. Almost
everyone would acknowledge me as they don't fleeting tourists and out-of-staters who
stray onto the Island, one of whom I was when I drove onto the Island myself on that first
gray afternoon of May 7, 1971, trees still stripped and bare in places, as spring does come
late in the north.
It made me so happy, that walk, gave me the feeling — or was it an
illusion? — of belonging, if only briefly, to someone else's world. Like the day I
talked with Sister Celestine and she seemed a bit stiff and nervous at first and I was
sweating and I hoped she noticed it because I didn't want her to think I was putting her
through the third degree. We began to relax and talk finally and I was very much at home
in the school library — the place in the world I'm most at home in — and I
was thinking of how I'd just like to sit there all afternoon long and write my book there
(and I did, a few pages in my notebook). Then Sister and I got going on the people and
she told me how much she loved Senabeh and Mike Ranco and how much she thought of
Sipsis and Jim and about what she saw as the Penobscot's "problem of identity," and we
quipped about "Indian time" and how the people were attached to the land and the
seasons and got that faraway look in the eye, the restlessness in the bones, in autumn
— ah Kimskasoldin! — during the hunting season and how
wonderful it would be if you could use all that instinct in teaching.
That was mid-September and already the leaves were turning; we had had our first
decidedly chilly night. Wayne put the heat on, and Terri with eight-month-old Jason
sitting bolt upright in her lap and I and Wayne ate Terri's homemade peanut butter
cookies (which Terri made after I told her my wife baked every Saturday night and its
being Saturday night made me homesick) and flicked back and forth between
"Championship Wrestling" and Frankenstein's (Maine is spacey) country and western
talent extravaganza on TV. The leaves were turning and the next morning I left for
Gloucester taking with me as far as Route 495 in Massachusetts Timmy Love, one of the
first Penobscots I had met in May, and his girl Jo. When I met Timmy he was a drop-out
(a push-out, really) from Old Town High; and when I came back in September he had
returned to the Island with a proposal establishing a free school or street academy for
dropouts right on the Island, teaching everything from the native languages and culture to
auto mechanics. So in one sense my taking Tim and Jo away with me — he was
the Indian I talked to most on my first trip; he'd conducted me painstakingly over every
inch of the Island, telling me who lived in each house, and the name of each street and
place — brought one part of my experience full circle. Surely a circle of no large
circumference topologically, though I have learned to respect all circles, indeed to begin
to think in circles, as Indians do (and live in) and as Black Elk says the white man has no
respect for.
Now winter has the island in his grip, the old Ice God has loosed his cold breath on the
Panawapskik and Olson Isle on the margins of the river and in the earth of Oak Hill
burial ground, where in their ocher beds the ashes of the first people of the New World,
the Red Paint Indians, ancestors of Martin and Tim, Eve and Earleen, lie in cold dust.
Yes, winter, and I wonder if Bengun and Senabeh have enough to eat and a tight roof and
where Bengun is living now. I wonder who has dropped out of school and who has been
pushed out. I wonder who will go to Southeast Asia and die there and who will come
back and live again on the Island, and who will leave and never go back again.
Finally, as I bring to a close these scarcely complete and surely imperfect pages, I regret
all the things I have left out, all the people I might have spoken with had I been perhaps
more persistent, bolder; the lives I might have made clear for the reader, the homes I
might have described, the stories I might have retold. I keep saying to myself, "If I could
only begin all over again, have the year allotted me once more, I could put so many more
things in these pages."
But I'm through, I'm abandoning the book; the pages will be off soon to Boston. Mark's
photographs are already in production. You might think I would beg the reader's
indulgence, announce a companion volume — Glooskap's Children Revisited;
Further Conversations with Senabeh. No, I shan't write again about my friends
whose friendship and patience, whose understanding and hospitality I have doubtless
abused in these pages. All the things I could have done I won't do, but I hope they won't
remain undone. I hope the next book you read about my friends will be written by one or
several of them. I hope the younger people will persuade their grandparents, their parents,
and their aunts and uncles to tell all those stories which need to be told directly to Indians
and not to white men if only because the world has such need of them. I wish Norris
would write or tell his life story: I hope Suzy Dana will live a little longer and do more
than simply utter a vocabulary to a visiting ethnologist, even though that vocabulary's
loss will be a nation's loss. I hope that Tim will come back and be a teacher, and that the
virtue of Senabeh's medicine and his living presence on the Island will not be lost. I hope
Mike gets that degree, even though he and I both know he really doesn't need it. I hope
Wayne and Terri, Martin and Kathy can overcome the difficulties of an honorable but
regrettable poverty, and the deeper ones of inevitable marital crisis (as I have not been
able to); bringing up children, somehow, to live in a sick and demented culture, in a
world on the brink of destruction. I hope the babies born during the tragedy of Vietnam
will grow up to be Indians first because they will be better Americans for it. I hope,
finally, and with all my heart that someone on the Island, some one of Glooskap's
children, will find a way of mastering all that knowledge and wisdom buried for
thousands of years, which all humans need to know again if we are to survive, and which
for centuries they have tried to beat out of Indians only to destroy that wisdom and scatter
the bones which house all that great spirit.
They tell the story that just as he came mysteriously out of the East and the rising sun one
day and made their world, the trees and flowers and the animals and all his children,
Glooskap did, he left melting into the sunset in the West — but not before
promising to come back and help his children in their time of greatest need. He said he
would help them throw off their burdens, drive their oppressors from their lands, and
make them happy and prosperous again. Glooskap, according to some people, meant
"Liar," and he also had white skin. Yet, according to others, Glooskap, or Klos-kur-beh,
also means "The Man from Nothing," simply, He Who Came Out of the Void. He did
vanish into the West, but he left behind the Penobscot people, his own children who had
children of their own. So Glooskap remains in those children, and in them he has sewn
the seeds of their own liberation, for it is just possible that far from being
"overwhelmed" by those we have oppressed, we will be liberated by them as they
liberate themselves.
Yet Indians, at least those I have met and read about, are not optimists. No one who has
suffered so deeply and so interminably at the hands of others can ever be an optimist, at
least with respect to his own situation. Some years ago, an old Passamaquoddy woman
told Mrs. W. Wallace Brown of Calais how she had heard it would all turn out:
Me hear how some say world all burn some day, water all boil all fire; some
good ones be taken up in good heavens, but me dunno — me just hear that. Only
hear so. World all gone. Dunno how quick — mebbe long time; all be dead then,
mebbe; guess it will be long time.
