Free Where I Was From by Joan Didion Page B

relief in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon , the 1913 novel that has at its center the young woman Saxon Brown. At the time we meet Saxon she is orphaned, boarding with her hard-pressed socialist brother and his bad-tempered wife, and spending six hard days a week as a piecework ironer in an Oakland laundry. On their Saturday night off, Saxon and a friend from the laundry splurge on tickets to a Bricklayers’ picnic, where Saxon meets a similarly orphaned teamster, Billy Roberts, to whom she confides that she was named for “the first English, and you know the Americans came from the English. We’re Saxons, you an’ me, an’ Mary, an’ Bert, and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such.” If this seems a thin reed on which to hang one’s identity, it would not have seemed so to London, who, Kevin Starr noted in Americans and the California Dream , once protested an arrest for vagrancy by arguing to the court “that no old American whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution should be treated this way.” The moment in which the judge nonetheless sentenced him to thirty days is described by Starr as “one of the most traumatic” in London’s life.
    Assured by Billy Roberts that he too is a “real” American, that his mother’s family “crossed to Maine hundreds of years ago,” Saxon asks where his father was from. This extraordinary exchange ensues:
“Don’t know.” Billy shrugged his shoulders. “He didn’t know himself. Nobody ever knew, though he was American, all right, all right.”
“His name’s regular old American,” Saxon suggested. “There’s a big English general right now whose name is Roberts. I’ve read it in the papers.”
“But Roberts wasn’t my father’s name. He never knew what his name was. Roberts was the name of a gold-miner who adopted him. You see, it was this way. When they was Indian-fightin’ up there with the Modoc Indians, a lot of miners an’ settlers took a hand. Roberts was captain of one outfit, and once, after a fight, they took a lot of prisoners—squaws, an’ kids an’ babies. An’ one of the kids was my father. They figured he was about five years old. He didn’t know nothin’ but Indian.”
Saxon clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled: “He’d been captured on an Indian raid!”
“That’s the way they figured it,” Billy nodded. “They recollected a wagon-train of Oregon settlers that’d been killed by the Modocs four years before. Roberts adopted him, and that’s why I don’t know his real name. But you can bank on it, he crossed the plains just the same.”
“So did my father,” Saxon said proudly.
“An’ my mother, too,” Billy added, pride touching his own voice. “Anyway, she came pretty close to crossin’ the plains, because she was born in a wagon on the River Platte on the way out.”
“My mother, too,” said Saxon. “She was eight years old, an’ she walked most of the way after the oxen began to give out.”
Billy thrust out his hand.
“Put her there, kid,” he said. “We’re just like old friends, what with the same kind of folks behind us.”
With shining eyes, Saxon extended her hand to his, and gravely they shook.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she murmured. “We’re both old American stock.”
    To assume that London was employing irony here, that his intention was to underline the distance between Saxon and Billy’s actual situation and their illusions of superior lineage, would be to misread The Valley of the Moon. “Times have changed,” Saxon complains to Billy. “We crossed the plains and opened up this country, and now we’re losing even the chance to work for a living in it.” This strikes a chord in Billy, which resonates again when the two happen into a prosperous Portuguese settlement: “It looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land,” Billy says to Saxon. A further thought from Billy: “It was our folks