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.
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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.
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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. Realize 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
Preface by Natachee Scott Momaday
AS TOLD TO JAY FULTZ
Fifty years ago Charles McNichols cast forth a sensitive young mixed-blood in Crazy Weather. South Boy he was called, because he was born downriver—on the Colorado, the lifeline for the Mojaves. South Boy reminds me a little of Haske, the boy in my book Owl in the Cedar Tree. Both of them feel the pull of two cultures, Indian and white. But Haske is securely and wholly Navaho, and South Boy is as much white as Mojave. Growing up is never easy; South Boy’s struggle is harder than most. Sometimes he thinks like a white man and sometimes like an Indian. Who is he? A complication is that he feels the first stirrings of sexuality, an ancient restlessness competing with a dawning sense of responsibility to others.
Crazy Weather is often compared to Huckleberry Finn because South Boy and his Indian friend, Havek, go on a great adventure and—like Huck and the black runaway slave, Jim—learn a heap about life and death. South Boy, too, resists the “civilizing” influence of a white schoolmarm. But what will become of him? Can he follow the customs of his Indian chum? Can the games of their childhood be transferred to an adult arena? Can he enter whole-heartedly into dream-singing and learn to read sign when it counts? Can he reconcile the hard-lined Heaven and Hell of his mother’s Presbyterianism with the shadowy eternity of the Mojaves? Can he learn to enjoy the moment, like an Indian, and not worry about the future, like a white man? Can he do a Great Thing and win an honored name without killing? Can he live simply and deeply and avoid facing the distressing alternatives that cause white people to turn gray?
Both South Boy and Havek go a long way toward manhood in the four days of Crazy Weather, when intense heat and thunder and lightning mirror the inner condition of adolescence. But for South Boy the journey is not straightforward, is hedged round with wistful pretense and dogging doubt. To learn what happens to him and how he comes out you must read this beautifully written novel. Take your time. Soak up the detail: the taste of sugar-sweet muscats on a hot day, the shifting light on the yellow desert, the coolness of river water the color of coffee with cream, the unearthly sound of a dreamer’s song.
My hope is that Crazy Weather will be read in and out of school with the freshness of youth and reflectiveness of years. It has much to teach. About reverence for life. About respect for others. About tolerance and the human necessity of seeing more than one point of view. About seeing clearly. It has much to teach about a remarkable people. Alice Marriott in her foreword to Herman Grey’s Tales from the Mohaves wrote, “The only book that sticks in the mind as giving a feeling of Mohave life, as well as the bare bones of fact, is Charles McNichols’ Crazy Weather.” It is a book, like Walden and Huckleberry Finn, that you will want to read again and again. And read along with other books about the south-western Indians that speak to young people, to all: Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy; Edwin Corle’s Fig Tree John; Jim Kjelgaard’s Wolf Brother; Frank Waters’s The Man Who Killed the Deer; and Florence Crannell Means’s Our Cup Is Broken, concerning a Hopi girl who feels caught between two worlds. Just as South Boy did.
CHAPTER I
CRAZY WEATHER
ON A MORNING in late August, in the fourteenth year and seventh month of his life, South Boy awoke and found himself between two beehives under the low fronds of a thrifty young fan palm. He lay still for nearly a minute
