Dan King
English 1D

May 22, 2002

Sherman Alexie
FallsApart Productions, Inc.
PMB 2294
10002 Aurora Ave. N., #36
Seattle, WA 98133-9334
http://www.fallsapart.com

Dear Mr. Alexie:

I have just finished reading your 1996 novel, Reservation Blues, and my initial impression is that I should ask your forgiveness. I don’t believe the apology would be the typical one you’d expect from whites reading your novel. I'm not repenting for the mistreatment of Indians. I’ve never mistreated Indians, and near as I can tell, none of my direct ancestors are responsible for misery to Indian cultures. Besides, I don’t believe children should be responsible for the sins of their fathers.

No, I'm asking your pardon for the way I'm interpreting the theme of your novel. Granted there are numerous themes:

• Indians remaining Indians
• The death of the reservation
• Indians being mistreated by forces outside of their control
• Temptations for artists
• Good versus evil
• Making deals to attain success

Are you wondering, "Why the apology?" While I was reading your book, I couldn't help thinking of famous Louisiana cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley. If you are not aware of the story of this trio, they are first cousins that grew up around Ferriday, Louisiana during the 30's and 40's, each gaining a high degree of success in their chosen endeavor.

Lewis was nicknamed The Killer. He was the ring-leader of the three cousins, convincing them that they needed to sneak across the railroad tracks to listen to boogie-woogie at Haney's Big House. Lewis has always had an endless conflict in his soul between his Pentecostal God (in the form of evangelism) and the Devil (in the form of rock n' roll.) Lewis gained fame first, signing with Sun Records to be the successor to Elvis Presley when Presley went in the service. He fell from grace after only two hit songs. While touring England it was discovered that he was in the company of his 13-year-old cousin, who also happened to be his wife. Lewis has continued to perform for all these years, despite the believe that he will some day go to hell for playing the Devil's music (and not for possibly killing a wife or two.)

Swaggert attained fame after cousin Jerry. Some claim he had just as much talent as Lewis and could have been as big a star if he had chosen rock n' roll. But he chose evangelical preaching and honed his skills driving around the South, going from revival to revival, in a car with his wife and infant son. As his talents grew so did his following, to where he became a televangelist and preached to millions. Ann Seaman, in her un-authorized biography on Swaggert says:

"Jimmy's preaching formula is to dredge up the misery and separation that his followers feel -- a misery he knows firsthand -- and then give them a way out. Manipulative, his critics call it, exploitative, and it is, but what he does is not wrong because of that. We aren't divine -- we are in a painful state of separation, and that is why we are mean, selfish, and foolish, and why we keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our spirits are distracted by desire like a dog by fleas, and every waking moment is taken up with our scratching. What Jimmy does is to give humans one of the many things they seek to get relief. His prayer meetings and shindigs are not bad for people. On the contrary, they are nourishing at their best, and no worse than any other entertainment at the worst."

Swaggart's ministry was taking in over $500,000 a day to his headquarters in Baton Rouge at its peak. In 1987 Swaggert was photographed exiting a hotel room with a New Orleans prostitute named Debra Murphree. Despite his confession and apology, the resulting scandal destroyed his ministry. He wasn't helped by Murphree's televised interview when she said, "[Swaggert] was kind of perverted. I wouldn't want him around my children." Swaggert continues to preach the word of God, but to a much smaller audience.

Gilley was the youngest and least famous of the cousins. As a child he was quieter and more liked than the other two. Gilley was good looking, muscular and had no trouble getting girls. He sang and played country and western music, a much more typical musical style for up-river Louisiana. Gilley was the first to leave Louisiana, moving to Texas and eventually opening up Gilley's Club in Pasadena, Texas (near Houston.) The movie Urban Cowboy was based on a story about Gilley's Club and filmed on location. Gilley's Club made being a cowboy urban-chic, and changed the business of country music. The club in now closed, but Gilley continues to be a country and western big shot, moving his operations from Texas to Branson, Missouri.

Did you notice any parallel's in the story's of the three cousins and the three protagonists in Reservation Blues?

Victor Joseph could slide right into the part of Lewis. Both hell raising, devil-music playing wild men. Anybody ever getting a chance to see Lewis live will get the same feeling as Victor playing the devil's guitar in Reservation Blues. It isn't of this world.

"[Victor] played the guitar like a crazy man, and chords and riffs and notes jumped out of that thing like fancydancers. If you looked close enough, you saw the music rising off the strings and frets" (41).

"Victor grew extra fingers that roared up and down the fingerboard. He bent strings at impossible angles and hit a note so pure that the guitar sparked. The sparks jumped from the guitar to a sapling and started a fire. It was a good thing that Chess and Checkers had extensive firefighting experience, and they hurriedly doused the flames, but Victor continued to toss sparks. His hair stood on end, his shirt pitted with burn holes, and his hands blistered" (78).

Could it have been Great Balls of Fire?

Even Victor sounds like Lewis outside the gates of Graceland when he said, "Ladies and Gentlemen! Elvis is dead. Long Live Me" (180)! Both Victor and Lewis have fears of success, and took action to avoid the success that there talent pre-ordained; Lewis taking his 13-year-old cousin/wife with him to tour England and Victor allowing his guitar to destroy the New York recording studio.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire could play the part of Swaggart. Builds-the-Fire spends years telling stories that nobody seems to listen to, much like Swaggart's years barnstorming the south in his car.

"Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated even a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hung like smoke and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet-talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian Women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked" (15).

It was only once he began to combine his stories with music that people began to listen to what he had to say. But both Thomas and Swaggart never felt comfortable in their popularity, all taking action to ensure they return to their roots. At the end of each of their stories you got the impression that they had all found some inner-peace, having dealt with their temptation and going full circle, returning to the early stages of their lives.

Junior Polatkin and Gilley start out as the least interesting characters of the story. Good jobs, better traveled, the more easy going of the protagonists, it is often their jobs to be the go-between of their more volatile cohorts. Junior at times is as mean and self-destructive as his pal Victor, but other times is just as spiritual as Thomas.

"Junior knew how to wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go to work. He knew how to drive the water truck, but he didn't know much beyond that, beyond that and the wanting. He wanted a bigger house, clothes, shoes, and something more" (18)

In the end you realize Junior's easy-going demeanor is only a face he puts on to hide the demons of his past, and it is he who is the most self-destructive. Gilley hasn't shown that he had any demons in common with Junior, but I'm left wondering if something will pop in Gilley from the burden of decades of being the middleman between the spiritual Swaggert and the hell-raiser Lewis.

When Robert Johnson's guitar first talked to Thomas, it said, "The music. Y'all need the music" (23). The piano at Haney's Big House could have been saying the same thing to the Louisiana cousins.

So my mea culpa is for taking your Indian tale, and turning it into a white-man's tale. Perhaps reading it with my Anglo eyes, I missed some other theme, some uniquely Indian theme. As much as I hate to say it, maybe I just don't get it. Perhaps my applying the three cousins to Reservation Blues is like an art critic watching ancient Japanese Noh theater and giving it a Shakespearean theme? It's a failure to understand stories from a culture separate from my own. Could I be applying European values to non-European events?

Then again, maybe I don't need atonement. I have only Anglo eyes to read your book. I'm sure you intended to sell your book to audiences other than Indian audiences, and you shouldn't be surprised when we relate your stories to our own experiences. I've never been an Indian, never visited an Indian reservation and never played in an Indian band. While you do a good job of filling in details of the Indian experiences and situations, it should come as no surprise when we might Anglocize some of your tales.

Sincerely,



Dan King
8635 Solera Dr.
San Jose, Ca. 95139
dking@danking.org