Yet, judged by the standards of modern, real-life private eyes, Mr. Spade would be a failure, says David Fechheimer, one of the best-known private detectives in San Francisco.
“Detective fiction, film, and television are all about mistakes,” he says. “A real detective’s work is almost entirely cerebral, not physical. If a detective does his job right, there’s nothing to see. There’s no action. It’s when he makes mistakes that there’s lots of action. Would you want to hire some guy who went out and got in fistfights and got thrown through windows and wrecked cars and shot people? It doesn’t work that way. A good day for me is a day when nobody knows I was working.”
Yet, Mr. Fechheimer says, Sam Spade is the reason he’s a private eye.
About thirty years ago, he was a graduate student at San Francisco State University, studying to become an English professor. He read The Maltese Falcon and got caught in its thrall.
“I called Pinkerton and asked if they needed someone who had no experience and a beard,” he says. “I called them because they were Hammett’s company. To my surprise, they said they needed somebody with a beard that day. I thought I would do it a couple of weeks as a goof. It looked like fun, being Sam Spade. Pinkerton put me undercover on the docks, and I was hooked. I never went back to school. I never finished my degree.”
Sam Spade may break all the rules of the private-eye business, but Mr. Fechheimer says he has always been sure that the tough guy’s creator was a very good detective.
“I never had any doubt about it,” he says. “I know Hammett was a good, reliable Pinkerton because the details are always right in his books. And he’s one hell of a writer.”
To Mr. Gores and other Hammett devotees, The Maltese Falcon epitomizes San Francisco.
“Every time it’s a foggy night,” he says, “I really expect to see Sydney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre come trotting down the street with a bundle under his arm.”
October 1994
Not many of us think of American Indians as urban people. Living in the suburbs, commuting to jobs and worrying about bills and taxes don’t fit the stereotypes that non-Indian writers and filmmakers have created. When I began interviewing people for this piece, some were nervous and reluctant, and I wondered why. They later told me they had been interviewed before, and that no matter what they said, it was the stereotypes that kept appearing in print.
I was relieved and proud when a number of Indians praised this story and told me they had sent copies to friends and relatives.
It also has been used at the Dallas Police Academy to help train officers to be more sensitive to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the city.
The City Tribe
The singer has sung a gourd dance song, honoring warriors. The elders have told him the song was made by Quanah Parker, the singer says. He doesn’t explain who Quanah Parker was. He doesn’t have to. The man to whom he’s speaking is Dennis Wahkinney, a great-great-grandson of Quanah.
“Years ago, when these songs were made,” Mr. Wahkinney says, “nobody knew they would someday be played over the airwaves in a metroplex of four million people.”
He sounds a little wistful. He doesn’t explain that Quanah was the last war chief of the Comanches, their leader in that terrible time when the U.S. cavalry slaughtered their horses in Palo Duro Canyon, destroying their economy and their way of life forever. Most Texans know that, and most Indians. On this Sunday afternoon, in the studio of radio station KNON-FM, 89.3 on the dial, it’s Quanah’s song that has survived and is important.
The program is Beyond Bows and Arrows. “The only American Indian radio program in the state of Texas,” Mr. Wahkinney calls it. It has been on the air every Sunday afternoon for ten years, and its popularity is growing. About eight months ago, KNON increased the show’s air time from one hour to two, and on this Sunday Mr. Wahkinney sounds especially happy. The community station’s fund drive has just ended, and Beyond Bows and Arrows listeners have pledged $3,350, more than triple the program’s $1,000 goal.
For what other station may an Indian call and request a song by the Eagle Claw Singers, or Bad Medicine, or the Black Lodge Singers, or Whitefish Bay? Where else may an Indian call and ask, “Would you play some Navajo music?” or “How about a song in Lakota?” Where else may Free Spirit call to ask the DJ to pass on her happy birthday wishes to Spirit Hawk and play a birthday song by Red Bull?
Between songs, Mr. Wahkinney and his wife, Cindy, read the Indian news, about the legal, medical, and social services available to Indians living in the area, about events at the Dallas Inter-Tribal Center and the American Indian Center in Grand Prairie and the doings of the American Indian Chamber of Commerce and some of the local Indian churches, about upcoming powwows in North Texas, Oklahoma, and more distant parts. And from time to time, visitors drop into the studio to perform live, like the singer of Quanah’s song, or just to chat with the Wahkinneys and their radio audience.
From 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, Beyond Bows and Arrows is one of the liveliest times on North Texas radio, and many Indians set aside those hours each week to relax and enjoy this small taste of their native culture, this invisible gathering of the tribes.
According to the 1990 census about sixty-five thousand Indians live in Texas. Of them, a few hundred live on the reservations of the Tiguas at El Paso, the Alabamas and the Coushattas at Livingston, and the Kickapoos at Eagle Pass. Others live in Houston and San Antonio or are scattered about the state. But forty thousand make their homes in North Texas, most of them within the reach of Mr. Wahkinney’s radio show.
“Rise and be recognized,” he urges them as he signs off, “and let us grow stronger and stronger together.”
But it isn’t easy, staying Indian in the metroplex.
Richard Lester and Pat Peterson, brother and sister, say they were the first Indians in Dallas. They laugh, because it isn’t strictly true. Many years ago, Comanches, Kiowas, Caddos, Kickapoos, and Tonkawas were wandering about this neck of the prairie, following the buffalo, harrying the white settlers, doing business with John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas, and other traders. Eventually, however, the federal government moved them all beyond the Red River. So when Dick and Rebecca Lester and their two children, a Choctaw family from Oklahoma, stepped off a train at Union Station in 1957, they may indeed have been the only Indians in town.
Pat was nine years old when they arrived, Richard was eleven. “There was a big hoopla,” Ms. Peterson recalls. “The newspapers sent photographers to take pictures of us. Then somebody from the Bureau of Indian Affairs took us to the West Dallas housing projects and showed us three or four apartments. They had a lot of furniture we could choose from, and they set up housekeeping for us.”
The Lesters’ arrival was part of a relocation program run by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in those days. Under the program, Indians living in the Oklahoma nations and the reservations in the Dakotas, New Mexico, Arizona, and other states were persuaded to sign contracts to leave their homes and relocate in Dallas and half a dozen other cities around the country. In return, the BIA agreed to find them housing, pay their way through vocational schools, and find them better jobs.
“In short, it was to urbanize the Indians,” says Bob Colombe, who was eighteen when he left the Rosebud reservation of the Sioux in South Dakota and came to Dallas to enroll in barber college. “The BIA gave you housing, a clothing allowance, and sent you to school to learn how to be an auto mechanic, a nurse, or whatever. But the plan didn’t go far enough. If a guy hadn’t been to town before, it was kind of difficult. The people who were running the program were inadequate. It was a typical government deal.”
The BIA neglected to tell the Indians that the housing they would be provided was in the projects. “We were just dumped there,” Mr. Lester says. “Once the BIA got you into the projects, they just went off and left you alone. The schools were segregated at that time. The Mexicans and whites went to Thomas Edison. We were the first Indians there. The
very first day I was in the housing project, I got in a fight. We were always getting into trouble because we were brown, but didn’t speak Spanish. But the tribes kept coming in. We had Cheyennes, other Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, Sioux, Eskimos. We had everybody. Pretty soon, the whole project was alive with Indians.”
Almost immediately, the Lesters and a few others began organizing Indian cultural groups. In 1958 they started the Thunderbird Indian Club at the Elmer Scott Community Center in the project where they lived and planned events to bring the Indian people together and keep their community intact. Dick Lester also organized the first multiracial football and baseball teams in the projects.
“The Elmer Scott project was Mexican, the George Loving project was white, and the Andrew Ward project was black,” Richard Lester says. “The teams my father started were the only racially integrated athletic teams in Dallas until the schools desegregated. We had a West Dallas league.”
The relocation program somehow worked for the Lesters and Mr. Colombe, but it failed for many others, and the government abandoned it about ten years ago. “The whole idea was for the Indians to assimilate, to get on their feet economically and socially, but they put us in a Catch-22 situation,” Ms. Peterson says. “When they placed you in the projects, your rent was based on your income. As your income increased, your rent increased. Many never reached the point where they could remove themselves from that situation and get out. So they gave up and went home.”
Even if the Indians completed the training they had come to the city for, the BIA’s promise of a good job was seldom fulfilled. “You’d go to the job placement office to try to get a job,” Ms. Peterson says, “and the job placement people would be reading the want ads in the newspaper. That’s where they found the jobs. You got no help.”
Mr. Colombe says half the Indians who went to barber college with him never got jobs in Dallas.
And many who stayed still maintain some ties with the places whence they came, even after so many years. Mr. Colombe used to spend every vacation on the Rosebud reservation, and still takes his son hunting there every year. Many families in Dallas and Fort Worth journey to Oklahoma almost every weekend to participate in powwows and visit family.
“A lot of people who live in Dallas, whether they be Navajo, Sioux, or whatever, they go home for sweat lodge ceremonies to revitalize spiritually,” says Ms. Peterson. “They call it ‘getting smoked.’ They go home, go through the ceremonies, and come back totally different people. It’s a cleansing. It’s a spiritual experience. You don’t get that here in Dallas. You have to go home.”
“But,” Mr. Lester says, “they’re faced with the economic necessity of coming back to Dallas, because the jobs are here.”
Mr. Lester, Mr. Colombe, and Ms. Peterson are sitting in the North Dallas office of the American Indian Art Council, which they helped establish. Mr. Colombe is its president, Ms. Peterson its vice president, and Mr. Lester its director. For the past three years their organization has run the American Indian Art Festival and Market, which attracts Indian artists, craftspeople, dancers, and musicians from all over the country and Canada. They exhibit and offer their works for sale in Artist Square, next door to the Meyerson Symphony Center.
Part of the reason for the event is to educate the non-Indian public about the beauty of the American Indian culture and destroy stereotypes. During the festival, visiting Indians appear before school classes and other groups to explain their heritage and their ways of life. The art show also gives Indian artists an opportunity to bring their works to the city and perhaps make a little money.
But to the show’s organizers, who over the years have become as urban as they are Indian, the festival also carries a personal meaning. “Our parents taught us to be proud of the fact that we’re Native Americans,” Ms. Peterson says. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t forget who we are. It’s important to me that I do whatever I need to do to maintain my Indianness and to feel fulfilled as an Indian and as a person. And I don’t want my children ever to forget who they are or what their culture is. But they were raised here in Dallas, and this is what they consider home. It’s going to be important for the second and third generations of Native American families that there be something established here that they can identify with. This is something I see the American Indian Art Council accomplishing over the long haul.”
Her brother nods agreement. Then he says, “I want to see the Choctaw tribe do well, and if there is anything I can do to assist them, I’ll do it. But I have no desire to live in Oklahoma. I’m thoroughly acclimatized to Dallas. You can’t help who you are.”
Henry Johnson, like Pat Peterson and Richard Lester, is Choctaw. His wife, Bernice, is Seminole and Chickasaw. About a century and a half ago, their people traveled the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, Mr. Johnson’s people from Mississippi, Mrs. Johnson’s from Florida. In 1963, Henry and Bernice and their six children traveled another trail from Ada, Oklahoma, to Dallas, looking for work. They were part of the relocation program that already had brought the Lester family and Bob Colombe to the city.
“We came here with a very young family, and we’ve raised all our children here in Texas,” Mrs. Johnson says. Four of the children, now grown, still live in Dallas. The two eldest sons have moved back to Oklahoma. Two foster children, younger than the others, still live with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Grand Prairie.
The contract that Mr. Johnson, a truck driver, signed with the Bureau of Indian Affairs promised him a better job in Dallas than he had in Ada. But the job the BIA found for him paid only one-third as much as he had made in Oklahoma. The BIA promised to find him a better one in a few weeks, but failed. So he went out and found one for himself. “I had to find a better job because I wanted to get my family away from that project,” he says.
Despite the hardships, the Johnsons never were tempted to give up and go home. “There were a lot of educational opportunities here that my children didn’t have in Oklahoma,” Mrs. Johnson says. “It seemed that there was a junior college or a vocational school everywhere you turned.”
Over the years, the Johnsons have participated in most of the American Indian activities in the Dallas area and have worked to find help for Indian families in need. Mrs. Johnson was one of the founders of the Dallas Inter-Tribal Center, which offers health and educational help to Indians. “So they would stay here, instead of go home to what they left behind,” she says.
Although their children grew up in the city, and all of them eventually married non-Indians, they’ve neither ignored nor forgotten their Indian heritage. “My parents told us about the Seminole whipping tree, and what the green corn dance stands for, and all those things,” Mrs. Johnson says. “And we tell them to our children and our non-Indian in-laws, because they need to know, too. And our grandchildren need to know.”
Mrs. Johnson makes silver jewelry and beadwork and sells them at powwows and Indian art shows around the country. Her husband makes the elaborate feather bustles and headdresses that powwow dancers wear.
It’s a craft he learned out of necessity. The Johnsons’ eldest son, now thirty-four years old, became a dancer at age eight. His expensive bustles kept falling apart after only a few dances, so Mr. Johnson made a study of them and found ways to make them stronger. Other dancers admired his work and asked him to make bustles and headdresses for them. So Mr. Johnson took feathers with him on his truck-driving runs and worked on them at night in the motels where he stayed. Since his retirement from truck driving, he gets orders from Indian dancers all over the United States and Canada, and even from Indians serving overseas in the armed forces. He has taught his sons to make their own dance dress.
The Johnsons have been the organizing force behind the Texas Red Nations Powwow, which for the past three years has attracted dancers and musicians to Dallas. Proceeds from the event are used to help Indian students in the Dallas Independent School District. The Johnsons also encourage DISD teachers to come and learn about the Indian culture, take
pictures to show to their classes, and arrange for Indian performers to come to their schools.
“I think interest in the Indian culture has increased in recent years,” Mrs. Johnson says. “Sometimes I think it’s becoming too popular. It’s kind of a fad. Here in Texas, there are a lot of want-to-bes and fake Indians who are doing a lot of inappropriate things that they think are Indian. And when the fad is over with and gone, the damage is done, and we have to be the bearers of what’s left.”
She’s especially critical of non-Indians who try to imitate Indian art or Indian religious ceremonies and desecrate such sacred objects as the smoking pipe and the eagle feather. “To do these things is just outrageous,” she says. “To us, it’s like a slap in the face. Only certain people may use the pipe. Only medicine men known to the tribe are allowed to perform certain rituals. And this is the way we teach our children. ‘This is not for you to do,’ we tell them. ‘If ever one day you have the honor of being selected, then you can do these things. But if you aren’t, then you honor the ones who are.’ ”
“When you sing an Indian song,” Mr. Johnson says, “you better know the language of what you’re singing. If you don’t know the language, and you don’t know what you’re singing, you don’t amount to nothing. You’re just a want-to-be. You’ve got to know who you are and where you’re from.”
Because of stereotypes that white people have created of the American Indian, sacred traditions and Indian dignity are violated almost every day without a thought or a care, Dennis Wahkinney says. He tells of a torrid, dry afternoon when he was listening to the radio and the disc jockey suggested that the city find an Indian to make it rain.
“Then some guy called in and told the disc jockey, ‘Offer them a fifth of whiskey and they’ll do it.’ And another guy called and said, ‘If you want a downpour, you have to offer more than just a fifth.’ ”
Generations and Other True Stories Page 11
