Mars

DOSSIER: JAMES FOX WATERMAN

Jamie was nine years old the first time he was sent back to New Mexico to spend the summer with his grandfather Al. His mother did not like the idea, but she and her husband had a summer of foreign travel ahead of them, lectures and seminars that would take the two professors across the Pacific to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They had little desire to drag their nine-year-old with them, and no intention whatever of turning down the all-expenses-paid junket.

So for the first time since he had been in kindergarten Jamie returned to Santa Fe. He learned to fish and hunt and to love his grandfather Al, even though he actually spent most of his days in Al’s store on the plaza in Santa Fe. Al was a good grandfather but a better businessman. Anglo ladies cooed over the “little Indian boy” all summer long.

The very last week, while Jamie was already moping about his return to Berkeley, Al took him to one of the Navaho pueblos up in the mountains where he bought the pottery and carpets for which the Anglo tourists paid so dearly.

Most of Al’s business that day was conducted at the trading post, a combination bar and general store with uncarpeted creaking floorboards, worn old wooden counters, warped shelves half bare, and a big ceiling fan that hardly moved at all. A half dozen older men sat at the bar, silent and virtually motionless beneath their drooping broad-brimmed hats, while Al bargained patiently, interminably in Navaho with the pueblo’s head man. To Jamie the old men at the bar seemed as dusty and time ravaged as the room itself.

Bored with his grandfather’s endless low-pitched haggling in a language he did not understand, Jamie went outside and sat on the sagging wooden steps. The late afternoon sun felt hot as molten lava, coloring the whole land copper red.

A scrawny cat slinked past his feet, gray and silent. A pair of mangy, mean-eyed dogs lay panting in the dust on the other side of the street beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. Jamie could count their ribs.

Across the way, on the shaded porch that fronted an adobe house badly in need of patching, a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, was playing with a puppy, a joyful bundle of wriggling fur. Jamie thought about going over to her, but he did not know how to speak Navaho. The girl cuddled the puppy, petted it, crooning to it in her language.

She put the puppy down briefly, then picked it up by its tail. The pup yelped and snapped at her. She dropped the puppy and jumped to her feet. Then, breaking into English, she cried, “You bad boy! Bad! You always want make trouble, always fighting! I send you to principal. Get out of this classroom! Go to principal! I tell your mother on you!”

Even though he was only nine, Jamie immediately recognized that the girl was imitating an Anglo school teacher.

Her mother called from the cool darkness of the house, through its open door, and spoke sternly in Navaho to her. Jamie realized his grandfather was standing beside him now, laughing at the scene.

Scrambling to his feet, Jamie asked, “What’d she say, Al?”

“Aw, she just told her daughter not to hurt the puppy.” He laughed. “Then she told her not to make jokes about her teacher in front of a white man.”

“A white man?”

“You, son!”

“But I’m not a white man.”

“Guess you look like one to her,” said Al.

The following week Jamie was sent back to Berkeley, where his parents expressed great pleasure that their son had not turned into “a wild Indian.”