Ten Little Indians: Stories

by Sherman Alexie

Corliss knew only Harlan could answer that question for himself. She knew the name of her tribe, and the name of her archaic clan, and her public Indian name, and her secret Indian name, but everything else she knew about Indians was ambiguous and transitory.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him. “What’s your real name?”

  Harlan Atwater faced her. He smiled, turned away, and walked out of the store. She could follow him and ask for more. She could demand to know his real name. She could interrogate him for days and attempt to separate his truth from his lies and his exaggerations from his omissions. But she let him go. She understood she was supposed to let him go. And he was gone. But Corliss sat for hours in the bookstore. She didn’t care about time. She was tired and hungry, but she sat and waited. Indians are good at waiting, she thought, especially when we don’t know what we’re waiting for. But there comes a time when an Indian stops waiting, and when that time came for Corliss, she stood, took Harlan Atwater’s book to the poetry section, placed it with its front cover facing outward for all the world to see, and then she left the bookstore and began her small journey back home.

  Lawyer’s League

  MY FATHER IS AN African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies, and my mother is a petite Spokane Indian ballerina who majored in dance at U-Dub, so genetically speaking, I’m a graceful monster. But my father spent more time reading Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis than pumping iron in the weight room, and my mother played supernatural point guard for an all-Native women’s barnstorming basketball team, so culturally speaking, I’m a biracial revolutionary leftist magician with a twenty-foot jumper encoded in my DNA.

  I grew up in Seattle, played basketball at Ballard High School, and attended North Seattle Community College on a partial athletic scholarship. But I soon grew bored of school and small ball. I played backup power forward—averaging seven points and five rebounds a game—on a crappy team in the middle of a forty-seven-game losing streak, and I’d taken all of the college-prep courses in high school and had earned eighteen college credits through the Advanced Placement tests. I was underqualified for CC basketball and overqualified for CC academics. Don’t get me wrong. I think United States community colleges are the most successful models of socialism in the history of the world, but I was already an intellectual gladiator eager to do battle with the capitalistic lions. I quit the basketball team, transferred to the University of Washington, my folks’ alma mater, and earned a summa cum laude BA in political science while playing rat ball at the intramural gym five or six days a week. I still loved basketball and was a better hoopster than 99 percent of the dudes I faced, but I had better things to do and be.

  During college, I interned for Norm Rice, the first African American mayor of Seattle; after graduation, I went to work for Gary Locke, the first Chinese American governor in United States history. I am currently Locke’s executive liaison to Washington State’s twenty-nine Indian tribes, which are growing in political power due to casino revenues, and I also manage the Native Voices Now! voter-registration drive. Let me tell you, that is a tough gig. Do you know how difficult it is to get Indians to trust any politician? In the long history of treaty making and treaty breaking, there have been no significant differences between Democrats and Republicans. I hate to say it, but many Native American politicians are as corrupt and self-serving as any white D or R. So Indian voters don’t trust Indian politicians any more than the white variety.

  In that regard, Governor Locke is an original. No matter how much Indian tribes might agree or disagree with his policies, he can’t be judged on a long history of Chinese American oppression of Native Americans. Locke and his staff were smart enough to hire me, the superstar half-Indian boy, to do most of his tribal communication. That hasn’t been easy. Let me tell you a dirty secret: Quite a few of the state’s most powerful Indian men and women are functionally illiterate. There are tribal councilmen who cannot spell the word “sovereignty.” It’s true. The best and brightest Indian folks are not often tribal leaders. A genius Indian is a rare and powerful person, wanted by every college and corporation. A genius Indian is the homecoming king or queen of the private-sector prom. But let’s tell more of the truth, okay? The best and brightest white men and women don’t become our mayors and governors and presidents, either. Otherwise, Bill Gates would be in the Oval Office, and Martha Stewart would be secretary of state. Think about it. The current United States president graduated from Yale with a 77 percent average. If white folks can survive with a C-plus commander in chief, then Indian folks can survive with a GED tribal chief. But here’s a personal truth: I am tired of surviving the incompetent, the average, the mean and median. I want excellence. I want to be a good man and a great politician who makes promises and keeps them. I am one of the best and brightest Native Americans and one of the best and brightest African Americans, and I am ambitious, so I plan on becoming the first half-black half-Indian United States senator. After three or four terms in the Senate, I’ll go for the White House. That is my general life plan, but general life plans often go awry. After all, in third grade, John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald both wanted to be U.S. president, and look what happened to them. It’s the details of any life that are most important, right? Let me tell you about one dinner party and one basketball game.

  Last February, I received an invitation to a bipartisan lobbyist dinner at Campagne, a wonderful French restaurant down near Pike Place Market in Seattle. I was excited about the food I would be eating and the company I would be keeping. Most outsiders think of lobbyists as politicians in better suits, but that’s not the case at all. Lobbyists don’t work in public, so they don’t have to worry about public opinion. Lobbyists aren’t elected; they’re self-selected. They aren’t crusaders; they’re mercenaries. By and large, lobbyists are as wicked, revenge-minded, poetic, intelligent, candid, and hilarious as any stand-up comedian. Former politicians who become lobbyists might miss the power of public office, but they learn to love the power of anonymity.

  I was seated at a table with five lawyers who might be described as two married white couples and a single white woman, and who most accurately could be described as two Republicans and three Democrats.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Richard. I work in Governor Locke’s office.”

  “Oh, come on, Richard,” said the first Republican husband. “Does anybody actually work in Governor Locke’s office?”

  “Hey, now,” I said. “I thought this was a bipartisan dinner.”

  “It is bipartisan,” said the second Republican husband. “I used to be with Senator Gorton. Nobody ever worked in his office.”

  Slade Gorton is a famous Indian fighter who wants to abolish all Indian tribes. I helped register ten thousand Indian first-time voters motivated by their hatred and fear of Gorton. Since he lost his reelection bid by a few thousand votes to a nebulous Democrat, I wonder if he lies in bed at night and does the math.

  “Ignore my husband,” said the Democrat wife. “He’s a right-wing maniac.”

  “And you, my lovely wife, are a knee-jerk liberal.”

  “You keep talking like that, and it’s going to be a long time before you stick your right wing in my knee jerk.”

  We laughed.

  “I guess this dinner is officially off the record,” I said.

  “Here’s to brutal honesty,” the single white woman said and raised her glass of red. As she drank, she looked at me. She regarded me. In three seconds, she examined me, asked herself questions about me, answered them, and defined me. She smiled. She thought good things.

  “And who are you brutally honest for?” I asked her.

  “Pro-choice, all day, all the way,” she said.

  Yet another pretty liberal from Seattle! Her black business suit probably converted into a rainproof tent. She wore eyeliner, lipstick, and three-inch pumps at dinner, but she likely wore stupid T-shirts (George can’t spell W!), blue jeans, and huge scuffed boots at the off
ice. She’d probably run twenty-three marathons and climbed Mount Rainier sixteen times, and had great calves and extraordinary upper-body strength, and most certainly had scored 1545 on her SATs and earned some highly challenging and profoundly useless degree from an Ivy League chop shop. She probably still had a cassette of the Smiths stuck in her car stereo: “Meat is murder! Meat is murder! Meat is murder!” I wanted her to fall in love with me.

  “I fight for the Second Amendment on weekdays,” said the Republican wife, “and the First Amendment on weekends.”

  “Boeing and Microsoft,” said her Republican husband.

  “Boise Cascade,” said the other Republican husband.

  “Sierra Club,” said his Democrat wife.

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?”

  “No, no,” he said. “We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make.”

  A well-rehearsed joke, but funny nonetheless.

  “You know,” the single white woman said, “I’ve never understood politically mixed marriages.”

  “Oh, Lord,” the Republican husband said. “Here we go again.”

  “No, I’ve never understood. Tell me about your marriage.”

  “It’s a good marriage,” the Democrat wife said. “We fight forty-nine percent of the time and hump-and-bump the other fifty-one.”

  Funny and crass! How much had she drunk before she came to dinner? How many alcoholic Democratic women can you fit into a lightbulb? I don’t know, go ask Teddy Kennedy.

  “No, really,” said the single white woman. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder how a hard-core Republican like Mary Matalin can be successfully married to a hard-core Democrat like James Carville?”

  “Oh, don’t bring those cannibals up,” said the husband. “We always have to talk about those headhunters.”

  “Aren’t you two cute?” said the wife. She mimicked the idiots she’d heard so often before: “‘You’re, like, the Mary Matalin and James Carville of Seattle! Come on, argue for us, argue for us!’”

  “Sometimes it feels more like theater than marriage,” said the husband.

  “Well, you guys made that choice when you married each other, right?” said the single white woman. “You were Democrat and Republican when you met, right?”

  “I didn’t mean our marriage was theater.”

  “All right, but what is your marriage? What does it mean?”

  She wasn’t going to let it go. She was a storm maker! I wanted her to rain down on me!

  “You know what I love about this restaurant,” said the other Republican husband, trying to change the subject. “I love that you can smoke. What good is French food without a cigarette?”

  “Oui, oui,” said his wife. “I’ve got an unfiltered Camel in one hand and a fork in the other.”

  “But is it the correct fork?” asked the Democrat wife.

  “Let’s see, I have my salad fork, first-course fork, second-course fork, dessert fork, and yes, here it is, I have my cancer fork.”

  They laughed, entertained by their collective wit.

  “Hey,” I said to the single white woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Teresa.”

  “I’m Richard,” I said and offered my hand.

  “I know,” she said and took my hand. “You already said that.”

  We held hands a moment longer than necessary. It was no longer a polite greeting; it had become a tactile series of questions. Are we gonna? Do you wanna? Will it be juicy and joyous? I wanted to impress her: I wanted to be a member of her tribe.

  “You know, I agree with Teresa,” I said to the others. “I’ve always suspected that in mixed marriages, one of the partners is lying about his or her politics.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” asked the Republican husband. He’d switched on his lobbyist voice, loud, clear, and resonant. I’d bet a million dollars he soaked in his bathtub at night and pretended he was a guest on Crossfire or Hannity & Colmes or Meet the Press. Hey, little Tucker, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a bow-tied talking head.

  “I’m not calling anybody a liar, I’m just talking theory here,” I said. “Hypothesis. I’m not talking about your marriage in particular. I don’t know you folks at all. I’m talking about politically mixed marriages in general.”

  Jesus, what the hell was I doing? How impolitic could I be? But Teresa seemed to be enjoying it. I wondered how soon I would see her naked.

  “The thing is,” I said, “maybe both partners in those marriages are lying. When it counts most—at its most intimate, when two lovers are beneath the sheets—I figure Matalin and Carville are moderates who believe in truth, justice, and multiple orgasms.”

  “Well, hell, yes!” shouted the Democrat wife. “Now, that’s a subject we can all agree on!”

  Okay, I was clumsy and obvious in introducing sex as a topic of conversation. But Teresa already knew sex was on my mind, and I wanted her to wonder about the quality and quantity of the sex. I looked at her. I regarded her. She smiled, and only the poets know what bright shapes a bright container can contain.

  “We all want to be special,” I said. “We all want to be the last surviving member of our species. A right-wing woman like Matalin is the only woolly mammoth, and Carville is the most singular white donkey ever born in the state of Louisiana. So maybe Matalin and Carville wear public masks over private faces.”

  “Or maybe they’re like house cats,” Teresa said.

  “What?” I asked, puzzled by her analogy.

  “No, really,” she said. “We didn’t domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there’s eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling.”

  “So what are you?” I asked. “A cat or a dog?”

  “Depends on the situation,” she said.

  I stayed too long after dinner because she stayed too long after dinner. We wanted to be left alone together, but we didn’t want to leave together while everybody was watching. We stood at the bar and talked for a few hours about the usual things, but she was unusually smart and funny and tender. I thought about marriage. God, I felt like a sixteen-year-old girl eagerly reading Bride’s magazine. And then I saw our reflections in the mirror behind the bar. She was short, blond, blue-eyed, and white-skinned. I was tall, black-haired, brown-eyed, and brown-skinned, the love child of Crazy Horse and Josephine Baker, of Sacajawea and Julius Erving, of Zora Neale Hurston and Geronimo, of Pocahontas and Malcolm X. I thought about genetics. What kind of kids would Teresa and I produce? What would they look like? I wondered if a black Indian could stand at the victor’s podium and thank his white wife and half-white children for all of their support during the long and successful campaign. Sadly, I decided no candidate would deliver that speech during my lifetime, and probably not during my future children’s lifetime. A simple politico dinner had presented me with a profound moral dilemma. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to self-define. Were my eccentric needs as an individual more important than the country’s desperate need for excellent leadership? I knew I would never achieve my full potential as a public servant if I married a white woman. I would lose votes each time I kissed my wife in public, and I would lose thousands of votes if my wise and terrible opponents created campaign ads that featured public displays of affection between my white wife and me. Any such ads would verbally attack my liberal politics, but the visuals would silently condemn miscegenation. You might think I’m overreacting. But I’ve learned it’s never too early to make your first political mistake. Teresa might have been a wonderful life partner, but I knew my country needed me more than any future wife might.
Did I make the correct decision? Personally speaking, I was wrong. Politically speaking, I had no choice. But I didn’t cause Teresa any significant pain. I could have taken her home that night, slept with her, and abandoned her. But I am not that kind of man. I am not cruel.

  Instead I said good night to Teresa, and gave her my card, and promised to call her, but I never did. After that night, I often saw her at meetings, rallies, fund-raisers, and dinners, and we always exchanged pleasantries. The last time I saw her, she told me she had quit her job and was moving to Paris to experience a different part of the world. I warmly congratulated her and wished her well, but I felt abandoned by her. I had no right to feel that way. I barely knew the woman and had spent only a few close hours with her, but she’d become a religious symbol for me. She was my Lent, my forty days of fasting and penitence, and by denying myself her possibilities, I felt like a stronger and more faithful man.

  Two weeks after her farewell, I received an invitation to play basketball in a lawyer’s league.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” I said.

  “That’s okay. Most of us aren’t basketball players,” Steve said. He worked in the attorney general’s office. I didn’t know him very well and didn’t care for what I knew—he believed in the death penalty—but he fell half in love with me once he heard I’d played a little college ball. He fell completely for me after I drove past him during a pickup game and dunked on his head.

  “I don’t have time to commit to a league,” I said.

  “It’s not really a league,” Steve said. “It’s a bunch of guys who get together once a week. Wednesday night. Very informal. Come on. We need new blood.”

  I’d played a few lunchtime games with Steve and the other jocks who worked in the Capitol Building. I wasn’t too crazy about the competition. Most of them played basketball like Ted Bundy, hiding a pathologically violent core beneath a handsome white-collar exterior. They were either former basketball stars angry about their diminishing skills, or ex-wrestlers and ex-linebackers still trying to play their favorite sport.