ection>Crazy Weather
Crazy Weather
By Charles L McNichols
Selected and Introduced by
Ursula K. Le Guin
Preface by Natachee Scott Momaday As told to Jay Fultz
Published by Pharos Editions, an Imprint of Dark Coast Press
3645 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.
www.darkcoastpress.com www.pharoseditions.com
Crazy Weather text copyright © 1944 by Charles L McNichols Renewed 1971
Introduction by Natachee Scott Momaday Introduction copyright © 1994
First Pharos Editions Printing June 2014
Reprinted by Permission of The University of Nebraska Press
Introduction Copyright © 2014 BY URSULA K LE GUIN
ISBN-13: 9781940436067
Library of Congress Control Number:
All Rights Reserved
Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
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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 realized 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.
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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.
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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
