The People

by Bernard Malamud

  That night the Indian chief returned to the vicinity of the soldiers’ camp with two braves, and in the pitch dark they found and buried Small Brain’s stiffened body.

  The next morning, after they had broken camp and were once more on the way to Canada, Jozip sought out Indian Head and said to him, “You were right and I was wrong. The whites did not honor the flag we carried. They shot at it the minute they saw it. I barely escaped with my life and our friend Small Brain is dead. I should not have made contact with the white men. They can’t be trusted.”

  “Why do you always talk with shit in your mouth,” said Indian Head.

  SIXTEEN

  The Last Battle

  ONE DAY IN September, the People, still moving northward, where the world was frozen white, beheld a body of galloping troops across a wide river. The Americans, a cavalcade of sixty horsemen, had discovered the Indians and were moving against them at a crossing point of the river. Jozip scanned the soldiers with a pair of binoculars that a cross-eyed brave had given him after the battle of Buffalo Hills.

  “What do you see?” Last Days asked.

  “I don’t think we will have to fight them,” Jozip said, pointing upstream. “They are trying to ford the river, but it is too high for an easy crossing. They will lose supplies and some of their horses. We will let them cross the river, but when they have come to this shore, we will be gone when they arrive. After that we will be invisible to them. They won’t know where we have gone, and by the time they discover our tracks, we will once more be on our way. My thought is that Canada can’t be more than twenty miles to the north. That is what the map says.”

  The braves who had surrounded their leaders to hear them talk about their next move heard little concerning future plans. Later, talking among themselves in the lodges and tepees, they praised their chief’s astuteness and his strength as a warrior. Usually he read a situation clearly, as it was, and not as he thought it might be. One of their sub-chiefs had led them into nasty scrapes; but this one, whom the tribe had adopted and made their leader, Jozip himself, thought of and carried out moves that had almost magical consequences, once, for instance, stealing two hundred government mules, all stupidly left untethered. That was a successful foray, inconvenient for the white soldiers, who were then forced to comb the fields for miles before rounding up a single mule braying on a hilltop.

  Who is doing this to me? Jozip thought, or am I doing it to myself? When I take chances I feel a big—almost too big—excitement, as though I had poured a two-quart pitcher of beer into a one-quart glass. I know the People are happy when we outwit the whites, although I have no idea what they will do or say if the white men should outwit me. The old chief who is dead reluctantly instructed me in matters of warfare. Jozip remembered in his first battle being aimed at by a soldier fifty feet away who was shot in the face by an Indian brave riding his pony behind Jozip.

  The braves asked Indian Head what he thought of Jozip as a warrior, and at first he refused to reply. “Have we nothing more to do than play games of fantasy? I will say that he seems to be a good leader, but I am not sure of him and will watch him as the skirmishes increase. So far I can say that he hasn’t made any big stupid mistakes that some other chiefs have foolishly made.”

  Then one brave spoke aloud to Indian Head: “Do you, by some chance, expect to replace him as our leader whose eyes sweep the ground in a glance as he leads us north?”

  Indian Head did not directly reply to his question.

  “Let us watch what he does as he goes through the forested mountains on our road to Canada. If he can go through them able to read the lines of his map, risking no foolishly extended battles, and holding us together and properly fed, then when we come out of the mountains and descend to the Canadian plains with our women and children safe, I will have no bad names to call him. Nor will I rail against his leadership, even though I know there are some among us who could lead better than he, without his nervousness and signs of frequent doubt.”

  Once Chief Jozip had responded to the appearance of a detachment of soldiers across a wide field by signaling the People to enter a wood. They quickly followed his orders, and soon a small band of troops trotted by, not knowing how close they had come to being ambushed. “But why didn’t we ambush them?” one Indian complained. “They hadn’t seen us enter the woodland, and we could have trapped them and slit open their throats before they could think what we were doing. Why didn’t we take advantage of the opportunity to wipe out of this world a few more of our enemies?”

  “In sparing them,” Jozip said, “we have earned some credit with the Great Spirit, who protects us in the same way we protected them, by letting their soldiers live as they went by these woods.”

  “Let us not fool around with words,” said Indian Head.

  Jozip replied that he had answered the brave as honestly as he could. He was then tempted to flee the Indians and their pursuers the first chance he got.

  Then a long thought crossed his mind how that might happen. Suppose Jozip had gone hunting alone one day, refusing to look at the pinched faces of the starving children who had less to eat than ever before. Jozip had waited most of the day with his rifle on his knees, watching for a deer to appear out of the woods. He would fire with his rifle on one knee and would knock the animal off its feet and with his knife slit its throat, saying a blessing. Then he would carry the bloody carcass on his shoulder to the Indians, who would have wondered why he had left the tribe so early in the morning without a word of explanation. They had not known what he intended to do, though they had tracked him and guessed his intentions, but weren’t sure until they saw his bloodstained hands and face. Jozip would then hand the heavy carcass to the braves who had wordlessly appeared. He would not tell them it had been his first desire to flee from his brothers, even though he could not bring himself to do so.

  One day behind the Indians, an American general and his troops caught up with them unexpectedly. Knowing that he outnumbered the People three to one, he had arranged his men on a rise that looked into the valley below. The general had brought his artillery, a four-inch howitzer and two Gatling guns, and began to spray shot at the dumbfounded Indians. Jozip realized at once that he must keep the army from going around a nearby ravine that would give the soldiers easy access to the Indian camp.

  As the braves pulled and pushed their women and children out of sight, a number of Indians fought their way up the side of the hill and toppled the cannon to the ground. Some of the braves spat at it, others dragged it with ropes along the ground until it sank in a mud hole; then with a cheer, they went on fighting as they had before. At the same moment Jozip and his band of Indians attacked. He did this with twenty-four men. Their sharpshooters were so effective that the whites at the side of the hill were compelled to go on the defensive. The People were able to hold their lines throughout the daylight hours. Now the white troops, needing water, were pinned down by the Indian sharpshooters, so the Indian camp in the valley was comparatively safe. The battle temporarily stopped and renewed itself in the morning.

  But the People were tired of fighting in the dark and wanted to end the engagement. They were not conditioned mentally and physically for long battles, but were accustomed to fight or leave as they chose. Jozip slept hurriedly for twenty minutes and woke to wonder where he was. The whites had about two hundred men. The Indians had fewer than a hundred on their line. They stepped away from the firing line a few at a time, and withdrew through the woods to last night’s camping ground without the soldiers knowing that the number of their foe was diminishing.

  Then Jozip regretfully informed the council of twelve that he could no longer stand the losses in battle of some of their best warriors, and the continuing pain of the People, so he had come before the brothers of the council with a request that the People surrender.

  “We have fought well,” he said, “but the Great Spirit has turned away his head to our needs. We cry for peace but his ears are deafened by the noi
se of men. The sounds we make are strange to him. The People must prepare for surrender. I speak with sorrow in my heart, with lamentation for those who have fought so well and never won, though our spirits are still indomitable.”

  None of the sub-chiefs argued against these words, but Indian Head showed contempt for them, and he mocked the warriors for keeping Jozip chief of the tribe.

  Jozip, resisting tears, thought of surrender as his last act of pacifism. Where will I live? he thought. I have nowhere to live.

  The next morning he rose and put on his best buckskin shirt and his buckskin trousers, and hung three strings of glass beads around his neck. He took his battle sword out of its case and went from one tepee to another asking the braves and their women to accompany him, so that all, in the future, would have proof of the words they spoke if ever the whites should question them. About fifty Indian men and women offered to walk with him to the campgrounds of the army.

  Jozip then handed his sword to a general, who greeted him respectfully and asked him to carry the sword to the colonel.

  “The colonel is no friend of our people,” Jozip said. He carried the sword to the colonel. “This is yours,” he said. “I have no need for it anymore.”

  The colonel took the sword and kissed it. “I had my mind set on having it,” he said to the officers present, “and I thank the general for passing it along to me. Not everybody gets what he deserves and I sure am happy I got it.”

  He lifted the sword and kissed it again.

  Jozip felt slightly sick to his stomach.

  He told himself that he must in his sadness not cry. He turned to watch the windy snow rising from the ground and he thought of himself as homeless.

  The next day the Indian warriors, the People, were rounded up and given places on freight cars going to a reservation in Missouri that they had all heard of as a miserable place, although the good general had told them he would help to get them settled in a Northwest reservation they had once thought of asking the Great White Father in Washington to give them. Last Days said that he thought he would not live to see it happen. “We are being sent to a place of death and my thought is that I will die there. This is my only thought.”

  The moaning of the Indians began as the freight cars were moving along the tracks.

  Authors Notes

  “THE LONG TRAIN” was the title Bernard Malamud jotted down for Chapter 17, for which he wrote several pages of text in longhand, showing Jozip being kept in solitary confinement in one of the cars. Jozip feels remorse at his failure: “I was not a first-class fighter … My heart is not in this war business.” Indian Head turns up surreptitiously, expresses contempt for Chief Jozip, spits at him, and knocks him down. The final handwritten words: “General Miles, basically a reasonable man, seemed annoyed with any Indian he laid eyes on, and that included …” At this point the handwriting breaks off.

  In the notes for Chapters 18 through 21, Jozip has left the reservation and turned up in Chicago, where he joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (Jozip calls it a circus) as a White Indian. After leaving the show, he resumes work as a peddler, becomes a U.S. citizen, and enrolls in night school to study law in order to help the Indians fight persecution and injustice.

  The final chapter, “A Homage to One Blossom,” shows Jozip at night, dancing in the woods—“a Hasidic dance, of the recovered self … He dances for the happiness he felt in his heart on becoming a man.”

  There are several differing versions of the author’s notes, but his intention about the conclusion of The People is confirmed again in these jottings:

  Chapter 18. Back to the world. Jozip has shivering fits when he wakes up in the morning in Chicago. He is drawn to the Buffalo Bill poster for his wild west show. Jozip calls it circus.

  Chapter 19. Jozip wants to become a lawyer for the Indians. He teaches his teacher’s night class. More on the business of language and making himself understood. What shall I say to them? Tell them who you are and what you’ve done with your life. It took me thirty years to find out. Tell them what you found out. What you say may answer their own questions about their own lives.

  Chapter 20. The scene with One Blossom sitting with him on the wagon [a dream?]. He tries to hold her but all he has in his arms is air. He looks up at the heavens for her. Who speaks to the People?

  Chapter 21. Last scene: “Hasidic” dance of the recovered self. A rejoicing of life when the self seems annealed. Leave with an Indian talking.

  STORIES

  Armistice

  WHEN HE WAS A BOY, Morris Lieberman saw a burly Russian peasant seize a wagon wheel that was lying against the side of a blacksmith’s shop, swing it around, and hurl it at a fleeing Jewish sexton. The wheel caught the Jew in the back, crushing his spine. In speechless terror, he lay on the ground before his burning house, waiting to die.

  Thirty years later Morris, a widower who owned a small grocery and delicatessen store in a Scandinavian neighborhood in Brooklyn, could recall the scene of the pogrom with the twisting fright that he had felt at fifteen. He often experienced the same fear since the Nazis had come to power.

  The reports of their persecution of the Jews that he heard over the radio filled him with dread, but he never stopped listening to them. His fourteen-year-old son, Leonard, a thin, studious boy, saw how overwrought his father became and tried to shut off the radio, but the grocer would not allow him to. He listened, and at night did not sleep, because in listening he shared the woes inflicted upon his race.

  When the war began, Morris placed his hope for the salvation of the Jews in his trust of the French army. He lived close to his radio, listening to the bulletins and praying for a French victory in the conflict which he called “this righteous war.”

  On the May day in 1940 when the Germans ripped open the French lines at Sedan, his long-growing anxiety became intolerable. Between waiting on customers, or when he was preparing salads in the kitchen at the rear of the store, he switched on the radio and heard, with increasing dismay, the flood of reports which never seemed to contain any good news. The Belgians surrendered. The British retreated at Dunkerque, and in mid-June, the Nazis, speeding toward Paris in their lorries, were passing large herds of conquered Frenchmen resting in the fields.

  Day after day, as the battle progressed, Morris sat on the edge of the cot in the kitchen listening to the additions to his sorrow, nodding his head the way the Jews do in mourning, then rousing himself to hope for the miracle that would save the French as it had saved the Jews in the wilderness. At three o’clock, he shut off the radio, because Leonard came home from school about then. The boy, seeing the harmful effect of the war on his father’s health, had begun to plead with him not to listen to so many news broadcasts, and Morris pacified him by pretending that he no longer thought of the war. Each afternoon Leonard remained behind the counter while his father slept on the cot. From the dream-filled, raw sleep of these afternoons, the grocer managed to derive enough strength to endure the long day and his own bitter thoughts.

  The salesmen from the wholesale grocery houses and the drivers who served Morris were amazed at the way he suffered. They told him that the war had nothing to do with America and that he was taking it too seriously. Some of the others made him the object of their ridicule outside the store. One of them, Gus Wagner, who delivered the delicatessen meats and provisions, was not afraid to laugh at Morris to his face.

  Gus was a heavy man, with a strong, full head and a fleshy face. Although born in America, and a member of the AEF in 1918, his imagination was fired by the Nazi conquests and he believed that they had the strength and power to conquer the world. He kept a scrapbook filled with clippings and pictures of the German army. He was deeply impressed by the Panzer divisions, and when he read accounts of battles in which they tore through the enemy’s lines, his mind glowed with excitement. He did not reveal his feelings directly because he considered his business first. As it was, he poked fun at the grocer for wanting the French to win.


  Each afternoon, with his basket of liverwursts and bolognas on his arm, Gus strode into the store and swung the basket onto the table in the kitchen. The grocer as usual was sitting on the cot, listening to the radio.

  “Hello, Morris,” Gus said, pretending surprise. “What does it say on the radio?” He sat down heavily and laughed.

  When things were going especially well for the Germans, Gus dropped his attitude of pretense and said openly, “You better get used to it, Morris. The Germans will wipe out the Frenchmen.”

  Morris disliked these remarks, but he said nothing. He allowed Gus to talk as he did because he had known the meat man for nine years. Once they had nearly been friends. After the death of Morris’s wife four years ago, Gus stayed longer than usual and joined Morris in a cup of coffee. Occasionally he repaired a hole in the screen door or fixed the plug for the electric slicing machine.

  Leonard had driven them apart. The boy disliked the meat man and always tried to avoid him. He was nauseated by Gus’s laughter, which he called a cackle, and he would not allow his father to do business with Gus in the kitchen when he was having his milk and crackers after school.

  Gus knew how the boy felt about him and he was deeply annoyed. He was angered too when the boy added up the figures on the meat bills and found errors. Gus was careless in arithmetic, which often caused trouble. Once Morris mentioned a five-dollar prize that Leonard had won in mathematics and Gus said, “You better watch out, Morris. He’s a skinny kid. If he studies too much, he’ll get consumption.”

  Morris was frightened. He felt that Gus was wishing harm upon Leonard. Their relations became cooler, and after that Gus spoke more freely about politics and the war, often expressing his contempt for the French.

  The Germans took Paris and pushed on toward the west and south. Morris, drained of his energy, prayed that the ordeal would soon be over. Then the Reynaud cabinet fell. Marshal Pétain addressed a request to the Germans for “peace with honor.” In the dark Compiègne forest, Hitler sat in Marshal Foch’s railroad car, listening to his terms being read to the French delegation.