Them Bones: The Poison Serenade

Them Bones, 74-78, 89-90, 97-98:

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

First contact, again.

Madison’s separated Army companions finally meet some of the inhabitants of the era into which they have traveled. A party of Indians, drawn to the soldiers' camp by "Moonlight Serenade" (they call the newcomers "the Music People,") has come in to say a cautious hello. Warrant Officer Smith, who is keeping a diary of the time travelers’ experiences, tells us that “they don’t look like movie Indians.” They wear abundant tattoos, of animals and lightning bolts and more dangerous-looking images; some wear large ear spools, while a few have flattened heads, the result of head binding as infants (a common practice among some southeastern Indians). Smith and CIA officer Splevins determine that the visitors belong to a “proto-Muskogean” confederacy of villages, each led by a Sun Man, with a “Sun King” presiding over the whole. They farm, build large temple mounds, and have a small “death cult” within their larger Sun-oriented religion. In short, they strongly resemble Took-His-Time’s people. There are some subtle differences: these Native Americans have no contact with mysterious “Traders,” none speak Greek, and as far as we know none have met mammoths. Splevins believes that his company has traveled to the pre-Columbian past, but a different past than the one Leake fell into.

Finding themselves at least 400 years* further back in time than planned, the company’s officers decide to prepare a contingency plan, and task Smith and one Specialist Kilroy with the first draft. We remember that Waldrop served as a draftee in the U.S. Army, and acquired considerable familiarity with its foibles, its bureaucratization and tendency to pile dirty jobs on middle management. Kilroy has taken a lot of officerial chickenshit in his time, and he refuses to take the order very seriously, drinking and flirting with Smith while asking when, between “bunker guard and shitburning detail,” he’ll have time to work on the report. Smith expresses similar pessimism: 

"What are we supposed to do, kidnap Indian kids, brainwash ‘em, set up an operation that will elect Stevenson instead of Eisenhower in ‘52?"

Perhaps so.

Relations with the Mississippian Indians remain friendly for a few days, but when Smith writes her next journal entry she reports dire news: an epidemic has broken out in the nearest village. Three people have died from an illness characterized by fever and “running bloody noses,” and many others have fallen sick. The survivors have fled in haste, not even stopping for a proper burial. Smith notes that she and her companions received multiple vaccinations before leaving 2002, but someone might have brought an infection to which the indigenes lacked immunity. (The symptoms suggest influenza but could indicate a number of respiratory illnesses.) Nothing much happens in the Army camp for the next couple of weeks, but the silence is ghostly and apprehensive. What will come of the newcomers’ contagion none can really say, but we doubt it will lead to a good end.    

Coming next: the expedition to Pipe Hill.

* That is, no later than the 1530s, before De Soto’s entrada. Waldrop is pretty careful with his chronology.


(Image above is a 1735 drawing of the Creek chief Tomochichi and his son.)

Them Bones: Our Catfish Friend Shows Us the Way

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Howard Waldrop, Them Bones, 70-73, 92-96:

Back in 1929, we rejoin archaeologist Bessie and her colleagues on the verge (and, later, in the midst) of a terrible storm, the kind of downpour familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Deep South. Waldrop slowly builds up the atmospherics: high wind, darkening skies, flashes of lightning, promises from the site director to call the governor and keep the upstream floodgates open. Finally a great “gray slab of rain” bursts over the bayou and rolls into the campsite (72). Just before the storm breaks an apparition, a silent man in patched trousers and a tall hat, appears at the edge of camp. William, the chief workman, identifies the newcomer as Bob Basket. Mr. Basket is an Indian who has come to “take one last look” at the mounds. Perhaps he knows something about the coming storm that Bessie does not?

Later, as Bessie and William and the other workmen take shelter from the downpour, Bob Basket tells them about his people (the Choctaws, I presume) and their relationship with the mounds. Six generations ago a three-year-long rainstorm inundated his ancestors’ homeland killing crops and animals and threatening to drown them. They were saved by a giant, totemic catfish, who led Basket’s ancestors to the site of Bessie’s archaeological dig. There the refugees settled, and grew their crops, and lived until the waters receded.

Then things got weird. The mounds, the Indians’ crops, and their canoes all shrank to the size of toys. Basket’s ancestors gathered their shrunken possessions and headed back upriver to their old settlements, to start over. I have read this novel a half-dozen times, and I still can’t figure out the meaning of this development. Perhaps Waldrop is giving Basket’s ancestors a vision of a future in which their temporary home became a museum diorama? Few of us in the modern era have other ways of relating to the Mound-Builder generation.

At the end of Basket’s story, the rain stops. Bessie steps out of the tent into the muddy campground, surveys the dig, and sees a large, slightly depressed area adjoining the three main mounds. A light goes on in her head: “There was some kind of settlement here,” she says (96). No-one is listening, however: the workmen have dozed off and Bob Basket, as mysteriously as he appeared, has vanished.

The storyteller thus becomes one of this section’s disappointments: a cliched “vanishing Indian,” an apparition who moves silently in and out of scenes, tells a story to enlighten one of the main (white) characters, and disappears completely from the narrative. Basket’s implicit message to us is that the Indians of Mississippi belong to the past, which was far from the case in 1929 and far from true today - several Choctaw communities have stood in eastern Mississippi since the Removal era. Perhaps Waldrop didn’t come across this detail in his research; I suspect it wasn’t well known in the early 1980s. Still, it adds an unnecessary bit of melodrama to a story whose strength lies in its historical realism.*

Coming next: The Music People. 


*Even if that sometimes takes the form of magic realism.