Free Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez Page A

channel in shameless ways. This freedom alarmed me the first time I entered it, because I was not sure how to get “out” or back to myself, to straighten myself, as a puritan must.
    I only mean to suggest we live in a nation whose every other impulse is theatrical, but whose every other impulse is to insist upon “authenticity.”

    In his book Playing Indian, Philip J. DeLoria, a Native American academic, describes the long habit of white Americans to undress themselves as Indians, from Boy Scouts to Natty Bumpo, the Improved Society of Red Men, all the way back to the Boston Tea Party.
    It has been a satisfaction to American boys to play Indian. The impersonation is a license to wildness. Off with the shoes! Off with the shirt! Pee in the bushes; no one can see. Throw rocks at the magpies. No more teachers, no more books. Scalp the girls, make them cry.
    Westward expansion was dependent upon Indian ways and Indian guides; frontier bilingualism. Early white settlers in America had to learn Indian ways for survival. But the white man took his instruction in civilization as initiation into savagery. As western migration continued, the white man fully supplanted the Indian upon the landscape. By the nineteenth century, Europeans began to regard all Americans as savage, as having taken on the savagery of the landscape. For the most part, Americans were gratified by this designation.
    I have in my possession an old book with an illustration that probably dates from sometime between the wars. It is a cartoon in two panels, attributed to John T. McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune . In the first panel, an old man, sitting on a log, Whitmanesque—slouch hat, long white beard, pipe—is spinning a yarn for a little boy, perhaps his grandson. The two regard an autumn field. Shocks of corn recede into the distance. Colored autumn leaves on the tree against which they rest. They rest, having raked leaves—the old man holds a rake and there is a pile of burning leaves in the foreground. There is mist upon the distance of the field and the sun will shortly go down.
    In the second panel, we see what the old man has conjured for the boy. It is night. The sun has become a harvest moon. The burning leaves have become a campfire. The shocks of corn are teepees amongst which ghostly Indians dance a ghostly dance. The cartoon is titled “Injun Summer.”
    I describe this particular drawing only because it so exactly depicts Indians as having become figments of white imagination; depicts whites as keepers of the legend. One notices in American poetry, in Longfellow and in Whittier, how secret or divulged knowledge of the landscape passes from the Indian boy to the barefoot boy, the delightful new savage:
    . . . How the beavers built their lodges
Where the squirrels hid their acorns . . . (“Hiawatha”)
     
    How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell . . . (“Barefoot Boy”)
    Many Americans, black as well as white, claim Indian blood. The Indian was curiously free, within the white rule, to marry both the white and the black. “I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston.
    Half-breed, in American English, when it referred to Indian-white mixture did not describe an irredeemable contaminant state, but rather a streak of wildness— You bad half-breed girl! The Indian’s wildness could be tamed by dilution, by further breeding with Europe. Thomas Jefferson made a curious distinction between black and Indian. Jefferson wished for the integration of Indians into white society; felt that America would be ennobled by that consanguinity. Even while he bedded his slave, Jefferson expressed no similar public wish for a black-white society.
    Americans speak of wildness, too, as a taste in game—the flavor of grass and insects, the taste of landscape—but also as a fundamental and profound incapacity for trust or allegiance. In my