Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Atlantic Monthly Press, $21 hard
The legendary Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson didn’t die in 1938.
Instead,
after making his deal with the devil at the crossroads and recording
the 29
songs that would haunt the world forever, he faked his death. Robert
Johnson
wandered, wandered across time and the continent, searching for a way
out of
his pact with the devil. He tried to lose his guitar, but the guitar
always
found him. Eventually the spirit of an Indian mystic named Big Mom, who
lived
on a mountain top above the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington,
invaded
his dreams and beckoned to him. Big Mom had been the spiritual guide of
Janis
Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Benny Goodman, and countless others.
And that’s how Robert Johnson came to be walking down the road
recently when
Thomas Builds-the-fire, the Spokane reservation’s resident storyteller,
drives
by in his van and gives Johnson a lift. When Thomas lets Johnson off at
the
foot of the mountain, he realizes that Johnson has left his guitar in
his van.
Thomas starts an all-Indian rock & roll band called Coyote Springs.
Of
course the band dreams of fame and fortune. But the band is a vehicle
for other
dreams as well – dark and disturbing dreams of the past, tests of faith
and
will and the human spirit. And so begins the strange, uncommon
adventure that
serves as the central vehicle for Sherman Alexie’s Reservation
Blues, a
novel of uncommon lyrical vision and power.
Robert Johnson’s saga is
one of
the most haunting true myths of our time. It’s a legacy with rich
literary
potential, especially in the hands of a writer with Alexie’s background
and
tremendous talent. In Reservation Blues, Alexie, himself a
Spokane/Cour
d’Alene Indian, taps deep into the universal spirit embodied by the
blues,
creating a lyrical world in which the shadows of unforgettable
characters from
the past bleed across the ages, wandering through our daily lives and
nightmares – especially those of the Indian protagonists of this story.
Somewhere in this piece, it must be said that, historically speaking,
white
people have a lot to account for. Our forebears not only took the
continent
from the native peoples who inhabited it but attempted to erase their
cultural
identity. Like the blues tradition, the survival of Native American
people and
their traditions is a testament to the power of the human spirit not
only to
endure, but to find its voice in music, literature, and the other
intangible
things that give meaning to life.
But Reservation Blues isn’t about white guilt anymore than
it is really
about an Indian rock & roll band’s quest for stardom. It’s about
the search
for faith and the meaning behind things. It’s also about survival. The
dark
legacies of the past and the way that Alexie’s characters deal with
them in
their daily lives are the context of this novel. Alexie’s gift for
hallucinatory prose and his command of not only Indian legends and
imagery but
those of American pop culture make Reservation Blues a novel
that
pulsates with all the energy and magic of a herd of wild horses
galloping
across the plains.
One hundred and thirty four years before Robert Johnson walked
onto the
Spokane Reservation, the Indian horses screamed. At first, Big Mom
thought the
horses were singing a familiar song. She had taught all of her horses
to sing
many generations before, but she soon realized this was not a song of
her
teaching. The song sounded so pained and tortured that Big Mom could
never have
imagined it before the white men came, and never understood it later,
even at
the edge of the twenty-first century. … As she stepped out of her
front door,
Big Mom heard the first gunshot… Big Mom ran to the rise above the
clearing
where the horses gathered. There, she saw the future and the past, the
white
soldiers in blue uniforms with black rifles and pistols. She saw the
Indian
horses shot and fallen like tattered sheets…
Over the generations, Big Mom continued to receive her horses and
hold them in
her arms. They came in different forms and different names – like Janis
Joplin,
Marvin Gaye, Robert Johnson. And over the course of the story, we also
hear the
horses scream. Some of the band members have nightmares about the U.S.
Army
Generals Sheridan and Wright, two notorious leaders of the wars of
subjugation
in the 19th century. One day, a black limousine drives onto the Spokane
reservation. The two men riding in the limo are A&R representatives
from
Cavalry Records. They want to sign Coyote Springs to their label. Their
names
are Sheridan and Wright. The nightmares continue.
The narrative of Reservation Blues is a seamless tapestry of
past and
present, dreams and reality. The story is told through the shifting
viewpoints
of its characters, their inner thoughts, diaries, dreams, newspaper
articles,
interviews, police reports, flashbacks, and more. When the band
receives form
rejection letters from record companies, the experience is just another
generic
incident in a life of HUD houses and commodity food. They even call a
few
companies in Seattle, like Sub Pop. Sub Pop discovered Nirvana and a
lot of
other bands, but they never returned Thomas’ phone calls. They just
mailed form
rejections. Black letters on white paper, just like commodity cans.
U.S.D.A.
PORK. SORRY WE ARE UNABLE TO USE THIS. JUST ADD WATER. WE DON’T LISTEN
TO
UNSOLICITED DEMOS. POWDERED MILK. THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST. HEAT AND
SERVE.
Alexie’s gift for ironic detail adds humor as well as
unforgettable
images. Victor, the guitar player, still wears clothes from the disco
era. He
won a few thousand dollars in Reno back in 1979, just after he
graduated from
high school. He bought a closet full of silk shirts and polyester pants
and has
never had any money since then to buy anything new. He hasn’t gained
any weight
in 13 years, but the clothes are tattered and barely hold to his body.
His
wardrobe makes him an angry man. Alexie sets the mood for a scene with
a
songwriter’s gift for economy. As two drunken band members leave a
Manhattan
bar, “the bartender watched them leave, cleaned the glasses they had
drunk
from, and erased their presence from that part of the world.”
Reservation Blues is Alexie’s first novel. His past work,
which
includes a 1993 short story collection titled The Lone Ranger and
Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven, garnered tremendous praise and awards such as
the
PEN/Hemingway Best Book of Fiction. This novel should establish his
place as
one of America’s most gifted writers, period. n
This article appears in July 7 • 1995 and July 7 • 1995 (Cover).