The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

People did not really understand who they were until they had been tested, and then came the terrible surprise that they did not know who this new person was either.

Psalm 139. You have hedged me behind and before and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend unto heaven You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.

“The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”

“If the Texans would cease to crowd them,” he said. “If they would leave the red man alone. There is room out there for all.”

Samuel understood that the Society of Friends was troubled by the Texans because the Texans were so clear and straightforward in their speech. They did not seem to need to hide their intentions behind deceptive and gentle phrases. They came to take the land and they meant to keep it. They would take it from red men as they had taken land from the Shawnee and Cherokee in the Carolinas and before that the wild Irish in Ulster and before that whatever croft or patch of rocky land

they could hold against the lairds in the lowlands, and if they could not hold it they rode with the lairds against the neighbors to raid other neighbors’ cattle and had been doing so for centuries before the birth of Christ, who was the Prince of Peace, and they intended to keep on doing it, for as long as it took.

Starvation was the unkind parent of the horse Indians of the plains, and its memory never left them.

North Texas was a good place to be a black man; slave or free, they were all expected to carry arms. Every hand was needed to a gun or a plow or a branding iron and there were no records and what with the chaos of the war and incessant guerilla warfare with the Comanche and the Kiowa a person could pretty well do what he liked and he could be whatever he took a mind to as long as he had a strong back and a good aim.

God now seemed to be a cold force, a great wheeling being, the world’s axletree turning above his head in worlds upon worlds of light.

There was light all around them and all around their

war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”

For the first time he understood that the red men had myths and histories of their own going back to the beginning of human time. That these myths had nothing to do with Europeans. Nothing.

“We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.”

“They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”

Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not

amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”

Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will

and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.

she was not afraid of going hungry, or of starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.