Read an Excerpt

Crazy Wheather by Charles McNichols
Introduction by Ursula K. LeGuin

I don’t know a novel like Charles L. McNichols’ Crazy Weather. I don’t think there could be one. It’s a book written out of a unique knowledge and life-experience in a place way off the beaten track.
Its singularity is both its virtue and its bane. The book that’s unlike any other has no ready-made niche in the shelves of the store, the library, or the mind of the literary critic. But such a book often has a unique place in the hearts of readers fortunate enough to find it.

#

An author writing about a group of people he doesn’t belong to runs two risks. One is of misunderstanding, misrepresentation -- getting it wrong. The other is of exploiting, expropriation -- doing wrong. Writers of a dominant group who assume the right to speak for members of a less powerful one take these risks in complacent ignorance of their existence. Such ignorance, however good the intentions, dooms the result.
Columbus brought to the New World the White man’s conviction of being by nature and God’s will controller, owner, and rightful exploiter of everything and everyone else. The Indians have been up against that enormous sense of entitlement ever since.
To speak for those who have been silenced is one thing; to co-opt their voice or drown it out with yours is another. This wrong was done for so long that maybe no amount of honest good will and good work can ever entirely clear the White novelist – or memoirist, or anthropologist -- writing about Indians of the suspicion of expropriation. Guilt is there in the whole history of Indian-White relations, unavoidable.
Guilt is useless unless by acknowledging it you can move away from it to a better place. Over the last century, thanks principally to tireless consciousness-raising by Indian writers and activists, we’ve been slowly heading towards that better place. White writers gradually realised that enthusiastic identification can be a gross transgression, that idealization can be as much an insult as demonization. By now, few undertake naively to write fiction from “the Indian point of view.”
Natachee Scott Momaday’s 1994 introduction to Crazy Weather is an act of the greatest and most gracious generosity, not only in her affectionate presentation of McNichols’ book, but in her approving mention of older fiction by White authors about Southwestern Indians. I discovered some fine novels I hadn’t known of by looking up those she mentions. I’d like to take the liberty of adding to her list the children’s book Waterless Mountain by Laura Adams Armer, with its tender picture of a young soul at home and at peace in the world of the Navajo.
But this book, Crazy Weather, is about a soul not at home and not at peace: South Boy, who on the verge of manhood is living in and between two worlds, without a clear way to go in either.

#

I haven’t been able to find out much about the author of Crazy Weather. He flew for the Navy in the first world war, was a journalist, wrote for the movies, but published only the one novel. He knew a great deal about the Mojave Indians and all their neighbors in that wild corner of the Southwest, but he was not Indian.
And his young hero isn’t either. South Boy hasn’t really found out yet who and what he is, and Momaday’s introduction speaks of him as a “mixed-blood,” but his parents are both White. In the novel we hear the voices of many kinds of people, Indians, Mexicans, Whites, we hear what they say and sing and shout and tell us, but we only know what one person thinks. Everything and everyone is seen through South Boy’s eyes.
He was nursed by an Indian foster-mother, and as his Mojave friend Havek says, “Milk becomes flesh and blood. In so much, then, you are a Proper Person. So as you dream, thus you are.” Living on a remote cattle ranch deep in Mojave country, South Boy has grown up with and among Indians, learned most of what he knows from Indians, and does a very large part of his thinking like an Indian. But he isn’t an Indian. He isn’t of mixed blood but of mixed culture, mind, heart. He has two souls. And at the age of fifteen, he sees that he’s going to have to choose one and leave the other, forever. Maybe coming of age is always a matter both of finding your own people and of going into exile.

#

My father, an anthropologist, liked and admired Crazy Weather. He said something I don’t remember his saying about any other novel about Indians: “I think McNichols got it right.” My father meant the understanding of Mojave life and thought and religion that comes to us through the words and behavior of the characters. Having lived some time in Mojave country and worked with people there recording the kind of dream-journey-myths that are retold in the novel, he had strong affection and respect for both the tellers and the tales.
His praise of the book spurred me to read it, a year or two after it first came out in 1944. I was fifteen or so. I liked it a lot, and understood parts of it. This being the case with most books I read at that age, it’s of no significance except to say that I never forgot the book, and, rereading it some seventy years later, liked it even better, and understood more of it.
There’s a lot to understand. This is not a simplistic pitting of Native wisdom against White blindness, or wise young innocence against stupid adult villainy. The author’s view of all the characters is ironic, compassionate, and complicated. And while the author is unfolding the coming-of-age story through a rapid and exciting series of events and characters, he’s also guiding us through a way of life and thought most of us know nothing of, profoundly different from any White cultural tradition, yet just as profoundly and immediately human.
I can’t say how much I admire the offhanded skill, the ease, with which McNichols takes us deep into a complex society and the complex minds and hearts of its people. His retelling of Mojave myth is light-handed, accurate, sympathetic, and irreverent. He is never disrespectful of Mojave ways, yet is as unsentimental as a coyote. And his humor is dry and understated, like an Indian’s. That’s probably one reason a good deal of the book was over my head in 1945.
These days, Crazy Weather might have been published as a “young adult” novel, a marketing category that tacitly excludes older adults, assuming that stories about teenagers are for teenagers. Like Huckleberry Finn? And Romeo and Juliet?. . . After all, every reader older than fifteen has been fifteen. We can be grateful to an author like McNichols who can bring to us the brilliant intensity of perception and the muddle-headed confusion -- the knowledge of dawning power with no idea how to use it -- the fearlessness and vulnerability -- the morbid lows and glorious highs and wrenching passions that a fifteen-year-old, spendthrift of life, can run through in a few days or hours.
South Boy’s dramatic rite of passage takes place in four days of terrible desert heat building to apocalyptic thunderstorm – a dangerous, beautiful, crazy journey in Crazy Weather.

#


The world of the story is a world coming, in some ways, to an end. To the timeless landscape and long-kept customs of the Southwest the Christian twentieth century is bringing rapid, cataclysmic change. South Boy and his friend Havek set off happily to do brave deeds in a war with the Piute, which turns out to be a disorganized hunt for one miserable psychopath. The glory days are over. “Thus we come to imitate coyotes when the days of our greatness are ended,” groans the great old warrior Yellow Road. “World’s end! World’s end!” shouts the Mormonhater, who may have been a White man once. Trapped in hurricane-force rain and wind on a crumbling cliff-trail, Mojave boys sing aloud, “throwing away their dreams,” and South Boy tries to fight his own fear of death with their belief -- but his mother’s hellfire teachings of damnation rise up and overwhelm him:

He had sinned – and long hair, the sign and symbol of the heathen world, was whipping his face. Over all the other noise he heard his own voice cry, “O God, I’ll cut my hair – I’ll cut my hair!” And the wind died, then, as though it had never been.

The clash of superstition with superstition at the moment of death, the collision of shame with glory, the great deed which is a ridiculous mistake, the mixed-up friendship and enmity of White and Indian or Indian and Indian, the sublime inextricably involved with the utterly absurd -- the whole story consists in a marvelous interweaving of such stark contrasts. It’s as dramatic as a Shakespeare tragedy, and as fiercely unromantic as the Iliad.
And its ending is as fortuitous, yet inevitable, as everything else that happens. During the strange, wild funeral for the old warrior, during the storm and in the aftermath of the storm, South Boy begins to see what he has to do. Doing it will take him where he has to go and make him what he has to be. It is a revelation, a way out of his confusion, a road to manhood. But to choose such a way into the future means to abandon all other ways. As he’s about to part with his friend Havek, he thinks:

Last year, at the Great Cry -- the annual celebration for the year’s distinguished dead -- they had sat together with the other boys, holding the feathered wands for the young-men-who-run. Next summer, when the celebration would be for the great Yellow Road, with singing and running and “preaching” and a drama of great deeds, Havek would be a young-man-who-runs. South Boy would be sitting on his horse among the white men, just watching.

The last pages of the story move quickly to a satisfactory conclusion, a happy ending. South Boy has made his choice, found his people. It was quite a while after finishing the book that I thought suddenly, But what is his name among his people?
We never know it.

#

Natachee Scott Momaday tells us to read Crazy Weather slowly, savoring it, and she’s right -- but it may be a hard thing to do the first time you read it. Once the two boys ride off into the fantastic landscape of myth and adventure, dream and danger, things happen fast, and the suspense grows fast. You have to ride and run with them into the storm and through it.
Then after a while, maybe, come back and read it again. Now you can do as the Grandmother says: take it slow. Realise the richness, think about the strangeness, and wonder how it is that so many mistakes, misunderstandings, follies, and griefs can add up to a story of such force and beauty.

###


Ursula K. Le Guin
October, 2013