‘Wandering Stars’ difficult sequel to Orange’s first novel
Sometimes the difficult reads are the best.
Six years ago I picked up Tommy Orange’s debut novel, “There There.” I got through about six pages before the sadness made me put it down. I picked it up a week or two later and made it through about 30 pages. Finally, on the third attempt, I got through the hard and beautiful book about a dozen or so loosely connected members of the American Indian community living in modern Oakland, Calif., where Orange was born and raised.
“There, There” is a book of pain; though it focused on a relatively small cast of characters, it manages to convey the sweep of brutal history, the absolute wrongness of the history of what Orange called “Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNDs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations
Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all.”
It is a major book, the sort of first novel that makes you nervous when approaching the author’s second book. A successful novel — a “noticed” first novel — presents the writer with a dilemma. Either you follow up with more of the same or you make a departure, and no matter which path you choose, you’re bound to disappoint readers who hold expectations for you. You’re either repeating yourself, or forgetting where you came from.
Orange’s “Wandering Stars” (Knopf, $29) negotiates this fraught territory nimbly by bringing back characters from his first book and reaching back to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. Jude Star, a young Cheyenne survivor of the massacre, goes mute from the trauma and — after wandering, starving, in the desert — turns himself over to U.S. troops. Jude is sent to a “prison-castle” — Fort Marion — in Florida under the direction of Richard Henry Pratt, a historical figure who would go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (which also figures in the novel).
Pratt was a former Army officer who’d fought for the Union during the Civil War and become famous for instituting a paradigm of compulsory immersion education on his Indian charges. Pratt famously believed that in order for Indians to assimilate into American society, it was necessary to obliterate all markers of their culture — for them to renounce their “blanket ways.” So they were forbidden to speak their native languages; their hair was cut; and they dressed in military uniforms. They read the Bible.
Jude dives deep into the Bible, fascinated by the way its stories rhyme with Cheyenne myths and legends. He’s confused by Pratt’s contradictory commands. He is to put aside his blanket ways except when paying customers come to gawk at “the vanishing race.” Then the Indians put on their feathers and beat their drums.
“We performed being Indian for the white people. Some of us danced and drummed and sang,” he says. “We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of performing authenticity. Like being was for sale, and we’d sold ours.”
These days, Pratt is mostly remembered for his mantra “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” But he was genuinely progressive in many ways — he believed in assimilation for Indians rather than segregation on reservations, and he considered them capable of full participation in American society.
“The newspapers had called Pratt an honest lunatic for what he’d done with the Indians, the fervor with which he went at reforming the Indians at Carlisle,” Orange writes. When Teddy Roosevelt includes Carlisle students in his inaugural parade, Pratt is disgusted by the hypocrisy, considering “how little support the Bull Moose had shown” for Pratt’s work:
“When asked why Roosevelt had invited the cowboys and the Indians, why he’d invited the famous rebel Indian Geronimo, who’d murdered so many Americans, Roosevelt was cited in the paper as saying simply, ‘I wanted to give the people a good show.’
“Pratt spat, sitting there on his porch … thinking about Roosevelt, and the parade … He spat about all that hadn’t happened, excruciatingly aware what would never happen, all that he’d fought so hard for; to make people see the worthiness of Indians, not the show, not for the show of it, as Roosevelt had orchestrated in his inauguration … What the spitting was really about was Pratt not being any different from Roosevelt. He didn’t want to know that he knew he was the same as Roosevelt, putting on a show to ultimately wield power for control, and though this fact existed in his head as a truth, it was kept as a kind of secret, which hurt to keep, which hurt to carry, like so many unspoken truths one privately knew one really didn’t want to know about oneself.”
Similarly, one of Pratt’s Carlisle students, Charles Star, son of Jude and a white mother who “left to do missionary work on the other side of the world, where those poor souls possibly hadn’t even heard the name Jesus spoken once yet,” keeps his past hidden from himself. A laudanum addict, Charles “has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose.”
“He suspects,” Orange writes, “there must be something worse beneath the worst of what happened to him at the school, the haircuts and the scrubbings and the marches, the beatings and starvation and confinement, the countless methods of shaming him for continuing to be Indian despite their tireless efforts at educating and Christianizing and civilizing him. Not every teacher. Not every schoolmaster. He was even teased and shamed by some of the other Indian children for being half white.”
I had no problem reading “Wandering Stars” though my wife Karen did. I offered her the review copy first, and she might have read a chapter before handing it back to me.
“It’s beautifully written, but just so sad,” she told me. I understood.
There is a moment in “Wandering Stars” where, in the late 1950s, a woman raised by a white couple has recently learned that her mother was, as her drunken adoptive father tells her, “a real Indian.”
“Your birth mother’s name was Opal Viola Bear Shield,” he says. “We still have a box of her stuff somewhere around here … .”
He tells the woman, who they named “Victoria” and call “Vicky,” that her mother was a Cheyenne from Oklahoma. He doesn’t know much else; he was never curious enough about the woman who worked for them to know more than that. He gives her the birth mother’s box but doesn’t — can’t — tell her she was named for an ancestor, Victor Bear Shield. She’s been cut off from her history.
She goes to the Oakland public library and reads all she can about Indians. There isn’t much. She dislikes Mark Twain. She dislikes the way Jack London writes about Indians. She asks a librarian “what novels are written by Indian people?” The librarian responds “she doesn’t think there are any.”
Generations later, an Indian boy asks “why there weren’t any Native American superheroes?” There were, but they have been occluded by an Americanism that cuts them off from their culture. These modern urban Indians perform their Indian-ness in much the same ways Pratt’s prisoner/wards did. They search the internet for clues to how to present authentically.
“I wanted to feel connected to being Native, and to being Cheyenne, but I didn’t quite know how,” one character says, and no one around him can help. They don’t know either.
While you probably wouldn’t call “Wandering Stars” (there is a punny quality to the title, which is the only thing about the novel I dislike) a sequel, it eventually picks up where “There, There” ended, in 2018, in the Oakland home of teenager Orvil Red Feather, who was shot and nearly killed at the end of “There, There” at a powwow held at the Oakland Coliseum.
Orvil has become addicted to painkillers.
“Years after getting high loses its novelty and feels closer to duty than enjoyment, he will sit on a toilet thinking about how to get rid of it,” Orange writes, “at first not even knowing what he means when he thinks it, just how do I get rid of this, while the dim light above him blinks from a bad bulb in the bathroom everyone keeps forgetting to fix. He will stare at a line of powder and soon leave his body with it, and whether it was a dream or a memory that first time won’t matter anymore because he will know the secret of flight again, and he won’t know, while he is there, whether it will be the last thing he will ever know, whether he will come back down, won’t know whether or not he wants to.”
“Wandering Stars” is an ambitious book, but not an especially long one (it’s 315 pages) and while “There, There” seemed to give us characters of immense depth and consequence, some here feel slight and negligible, smudges on the page. The sweep of the narrative is epic, but some of the characters are flashcards.
I think this is intentional and don’t mean it as a criticism, but it’s as though Orange is scribbling it all down just to get it out, just to say the names, to emphasize the universality of atrocity and the tragedy of forgetting, even if that forgetting is sometimes on purpose.
The last 100 pages or so are laceratingly desperate, shot through with pain. Difficult to read.
There are a few books by Indians in most libraries now. Some of them are indispensable. Two are by Tommy Orange.
Orange will appear at the Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave., Little Rock, at 6:30 p.m. on May 16 as part of the Central Arkansas Library System’s Big Read celebration, kicking off March 8 and concluding in May.